FWS Student Highlights: Pisal Yim

In the fall semester, I had the opportunity to start working with Dr. Art Poland on his research work of monitoring activities of the sun.  An important tool I had to use was Interactive Data Language or in short IDL.  Weekly tasks were assisting Dr. Poland either in debugging programs, editing programs or test programs using data retrieved from Hinode Satellite.  While working with Dr. Poland on his research, I recently discovered that the sun plays a crucial part in our everyday lives.  Besides providing sun light to nurture lives, solar flares and solar storms also cause problems like knocking out power grid.  There were some solar storms in the past but no catastrophic damage was dealt.  Luckily, everything about our planet seems so perfect either by chances or by design, we’ll never know.  With that perfection, there is earth magnetic field that keeps us safe from solar storms.  Nonetheless, it is still important to study the sun’s activities to predict its pattern and when the next solar storm will be. 

As an engineering student, it may not be directly related to my long-term goals but being able to see how scientists work definitely give me a sense of communication in the future if I ever need to work with them.  Moreover, the tool I used as a research assistant which is IDL is a powerful tool whether working as scientist or engineer in the future.  One of its strength is its ability to work well with arrays or matrices.  As of now, I am not quite sure where it would fit in my career path but I’ll never know how things turn out.  Therefore, it is always worthy to have as many tools as possible in the backpack for the grab. 

FWS Student Highlights: Sarah Jean Pineda

I am currently working with Criminology professor, Dr. Linda Merola, and one of her graduate students, Amanda, on a research project relating to privacy and police technology. We are interested in how these technologies have been portrayed in the media. In the beginning, we searched through various online databases for news articles that referenced police technologies such as body cameras and automatic license plate recognition. We then developed several different categories for our content analysis that focus on whether the articles reference the benefits of the technologies, the capabilities of the technologies and concerns that people  may have in relation to privacy and other legal rights.

On a weekly basis, I am given articles to code based on the categories mentioned above. I also try to keep up with the newest trends as well as updates on the various police technologies.  During my time on this project, I have discovered the implementation and use of more recent police technologies such as the Shotspotter, which detects and locates where a gunshot originated from and the Stingray phone tracker device. I have also learned more about the debate between privacy rights and public safety issues in relation to these technologies.  I feel that this project has helped cement my interest in criminal justice-based issues and research in general.  I do hope to attend graduate school after I graduate from Mason and I believe this research opportunity gives me the experience and skills that will help me stand out and eventually succeed in the future.

FWS Student Highlights: Safa Rana

I am currently working with Dr. Chen on a project regarding women workers rights. In this project, we view different aspects of women workers rights, such as maternity protection, equal pay, sexual harassment, and equal opportunity. As a research assistant, my responsibilities consist of finding academic scholarly journals, researching grants for the project, and coding articles via an online software survey. On a weekly basis, I distribute the work assigned, and allocate hours for each task depending on how long it takes to complete the task. When I am researching academic journals, it tends to take up more time since it involves additional steps, such as obtaining the articles through accessing databases, highlighting and writing summaries of each article and conveying it onto an Excel sheet.

As the weeks go on, the work load increases as well as the responsibilities towards the work. However, in return I have gained a great amount of knowledge and skill sets that I hope to apply in my college career and my future goals. By conducting research, I developed organization techniques, time management skills, and learned the importance of punctuality.  By improving my organization skills, I was able to convey the information to my research director in a concise and sufficient manner by allocating time for each task. The OSCAR undergraduate research assistant job allows students to work in professional settings, in which they shadow and participate in active research and gain set of skills that would prepare them for their future career path.

FWS Student Highlights: Nafisa Afrin

The primary goal of my research has been to look at alcohol laws of multiple states as well as counties to see how they vary. Dry states have more stringent alcohol policy than wet states, thus greatly affecting the overall health of that population. As the number of on premise alcohol outlet increases, so does the number of people acquiring STDs, teen pregnancy, fetal alcohol syndrome, road injuries and many more. Thus the health outcome has an enormous impact on that state’s as well as the nation’s healthcare policies and budget. My mentor, associate professor of the Global and Community Health department Dr. Matthew Rossheim, has published research article based on the findings of Texas’ alcohol policy and health outcome data which we are using as a prototype for other states. A lot of the time my project requires me to clean up the data we found on states’ ABC websites so that the data is more effective and relatable to our research. Before doing anything else, however, I have to choose a state and look for the times local option elections took place where a dry county voted to become wet and vice versa. Annual ABC reports regarding alcohol sale, licensing, and election results are great resources that I have to look for from time to time. ABC boards with insufficient funding have less resources available to the public, making our research more challenging. I have weekly meetings with my mentor where we go over newly acquired findings and the possibilities they present. As a junior who’s majoring in biology and want to be a Physician Assistant, this opportunity has provided me a great deal of insight into community health, making me more knowledgeable and responsible. The practicality of these research findings are making me more conscious and aware of United States’ health policy. Our goal is to compile and present irrefutable data to federal government in a hope that policymakers will use these data in order to improve the lives of people.

FWS Student Highlights: Rachel Stocker

I have been working on a forensic entomology project with Dr. Joris van der Ham, from the environmental sciences department, since last April, though the first few months were for credit rather than through OSCAR. Historically, the time between a death and the discovery of a body (post-mortem interval, or PMI) has been determined using insect larvae. We’ve been working to see if the adults, which are easier to identify, can be used instead.

In the beginning, we put out beaver and pig carcasses and collected the insects that fell or flew into the traps around them. (And boy, did that smell good.) We collected the insects from mid-April to the beginning of August. Now we are working on identifying the insects.

On a weekly basis, I generally spill insects out into a Petri dish and look for characteristics to tell me what those insects are. For example, four wings mean that the insect is a wasp or bee; two wings mean the insect is a fly; and a hard shell behind the head means that it is a beetle. Once that has been determined, we narrow it down to family, genus, or species using dichotomous keys. The insects go into vials marked with their names and then into jars marked with the date they were collected, the collection site, and the kind of trap they were found in.

Slowly but surely, the number of insects in my vial marked ‘???’ goes down as I learn more families. Last week, I found a beetle that I couldn’t identify, and I spent almost two hours trying to figure out what the family was - but that paid off, because in the week since, I’ve found seventeen of those little jerks scattered across the samples, and I don’t have to look up what they are.

The biggest difference between now and when we started identifying last summer is that we’re no longer collecting. We’ve also found keys that use pictures instead of illustrations, which makes us more accurate in our identifications, and have begun putting data into spreadsheets.

I got into this project because I was interested in forensic entomology and wanted to have some experience with it before going to grad school to be certified as a forensic entomologist. It’s been an amazing experience.