URSP Student Katherine Marsh Uses the POMS and PSS Evaluation Methods

Under the Mentorship of Dr. James Metcalf, I am looking at the relationship between injuries and stress in student-athletes at George Mason University. By utilizing the POMS and PSS evaluation methods, I am looking to see if there is a difference in stress experienced by student-athletes who are injured and those who are not injured. 

I first became interested in my research topic as a freshman when I experienced an injury that kept me out of competition for the majority of the season. After speaking with some of my peers who have experienced similar situations, I began to realize that our day-to-day lives were affected dramatically by our injuries. No longer being able to participate in the sport we have dedicated so much time to, not being able to exercise at the same intensity as we have become accustomed to, and missing out on the social aspect of team bonding during practice and competition are just a few of the common themes we all seemed to notice having an impact on our daily lives. 

I then began to wonder if consequent these circumstances, our mental health, was being adversely affected. While countless hours are spent in the training room rehabbing injuries to get athletes back in competition, there are little to no resources provided by the athletic department to insure that the mental health of the athlete is cared for as much as the physical injury. 

While my project is still in the early stages of development, I hope to bring light to the issue of mental health in athletics, specifically, in student-athletes here at George Mason University. I would like to see more mental health resources made available to student-athletes, especially those who have endured an injury that has limited their participation in their sport. 

Eventually, I would like to see these resources as easily accessible and utilized as often as grabbing an ice bag after practice. 

URSP Student Stephanie Kortchak Analyzes Host-Based Kinase Inhibitors

My name is Stephanie Kortchak and I am a senior working on a biochemistry degree and a minor in biology. After being exposed to microbiology and vaccine development in elective classes, I grew interested in the biomedical technology development field. I started volunteering at a biomedical research laboratory for Dr. Aarthi Narayanan at the start of the Fall semester (2016). After graduation, I plan to gain more experience through work or internships before applying to biomedical graduate programs.

Currently, we are working on analyzing host-based kinase inhibitors and their effect on diverse viral agents, with the intent of developing inhibitors that can have more than one application. To support these studies, we work with Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEEV), Rift Valley Fever Virus (RVFV), and Zika Virus (ZIKV). We work with attenuated strains of VEEV and RVFV so that the research can be performed in a BSL2 laboratory in a safe manner. Our first candidate ZIKV inhibitors were NFkB inhibitors as these have demonstrated efficacy in the context of VEEV and RVFV.  However, our experiments revealed that the inhibitor candidates we were working with were not capable of inhibiting ZIKV. We have therefore expanded our net to include additional classes of inhibitors that have prior history of working with at least one of the three target viruses and are evaluating the broad spectrum applicability against all target agents. During the school year, I come in twice a week for lab meetings and providing technical support for various techniques such as plaque assays to determine infectious viral load or performing quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (q-RT-PCR) to figure out the amount of viral genetic material. Proper cell maintenance is another aspect that resonates throughout the project since each lab technique requires different types of confluent cells. At this point, we have supported our initial hypothesis that these inhibitors have a significant effect on VEEV infection at several nontoxic concentrations. We are in the process of extending this effort to RVFV and ZIKV now and anticipate to have supporting data in the next few weeks.

URSP Student Jesse Muzzy Uses a Mathematical Equation to Determine Potential Food Growth in D.C.

My interest in urban agriculture specifically began my Junior year of college when I worked in the hydroponic greenhouse on campus. I began learning about so many new technologies and innovative growing methods to grow food in urban areas and how urban agriculture addresses environmental and social issues related to food insecurity.

After graduation, I personally plan to learn more about growing food at the individual and community level using ecologically sustainable practices. Once my experience in growing is deepened, I plan to pursue urban agriculture either through non-profit work, commercial growing, or an entrepreneurial endeavor. 

For my URSP project, I meet with my mentor just about every week for 1-2 hours. Our meetings are extremely helpful because she keeps me on track and holds me accountable to deadlines, as well as helps me work through certain questions and issues that come up as I’m doing my research. Much of my time is spent reading articles, researching public records, and making notes so that I can easily keep track of sources and connections that I make between articles. From now until the rest of the semester, I will be working on my analyses and creating a research paper, as well as creating a poster to display my research and conclusions.

One thing I discovered this term was that I am capable of more than I originally thought. After a lot of brainstorming with my mentor, I came up with the idea of using a mathematical equation to figure out how much food could potentially be grown in Washington D.C. If you had asked me in January if I would be using math to answer my research question, I probably would have giggled and responded with the inherently casual response of “math is not my thing.” However, now I feel more guided, focused, and excited about my research and believe that I do have the tools and brains to figure something out that hasn’t been attempted before, and that just might have an impact on the future of urban agriculture.

URSP Student Katrina Colucci-Chang Recruits Students to Use Robotic Arms

My trajectory toward a Bioengineer began when I started dancing Ballet, Jazz and Modern Dance performing in recitals such as The Nutcracker, Giselle, Dracula, and Don Quixote. Dancers are in need of rehabilitation since they experience broken bones, ripped muscle or a sprain due to lack of rest, malnutrition, or incorrect body placement. I personally experienced this when I sprained my ankle and broke my toe. Because of this, I felt a need to help the rehabilitation community. Consequently, I partake in many outreach and community service activities that give back to the community, especially to minorities who desire to enter the STEM field.  Therefore, I developed my personal and professional goals: to inspire the future generation with the creative thinking and love of engineering towards the goal of inventing neural engineering systems for rehabilitation. To
accomplish this I must study the human interaction, human-stimuli and human connectivity. To accomplish my goal, I worked in the Department of Energy launching a Lunch and Learn Brown Bag Program and a mentoring program. Then I worked for two summers at NASA Langley with biomedical engineers and psychologists to understand and predict a pilot’s mental state such as surprised, distraction and focus in a plane simulator. To complete the trifecta, I joined the Sensorimotor Integration Lab, studying the neural connectivity by studying how humans adapt their visual and motor responses while performing a repetitive task using a robot. It is important to understand this phenomenon since neurons are the messengers in the body. If the message is not transported properly, it causes issues in human productivity and efficiency. In my project, I recruit students to use a robotic arm to hit a target. If they perform the movement correctly, they are rewarded with visual and auditory feedback response. Once they are masters in the movement, they will be given certain obstacles thus adapting their movement. These manipulations will allow us to determine the relative influence of proprioception and vision on the amount of generalization. With all this in mind, I have learned that research takes time commitment. Likewise, I enjoy the research field. Therefore, in my next journey I will be going to graduate school to enhance my knowledge on ergonomic and human factor engineering principle.

URSP Student Min Ji Kim Studies Stigmatization Against Mental Illnesses Between Koreans and Korean Americans

My name is Min Ji Kim and I am a Junior majoring in Global Affairs and Psychology. I am experimenting on the difference of stigmatization of mental illnesses between Koreans and Korean Americans with Professor Byunghwan Son. I got invested in my study because as a Korean-American, I had many personal encounters where my peers were struggling with mental illnesses without being able to tell their parents, or got shot down when they did tell their parents. Furthermore, I was concerned when I found that Korea was the second highest in suicide in OECD states. For that reason, I wanted to get statistics on how stigmatized the Koreans and Korean Americans are. My hope is that I will be able to follow up this experiment with other experiments targeted to reduce the stigmatization of mental illnesses so that individuals will be able to pursue the help that they need.

I am interested in pursuing a career in research and plan on continuing to graduate school in Psychology. The URSP is a great program for me because it gives me research experience that I need, as well as allowing me to pursue a question that I want an answer. This opportunity is a great way for me to practice research methods and gives me hands on experience that would be hard for me to get elsewhere. On a weekly basis, I evaluate my research methods as well as working on my final paper. Once the experiment gets approved by the IRB, I will be collecting data and performing data analysis to get my results. Personally, it has been a lot of translating and coming up with questionnaires for the experiment as well as writing up all the necessary documents.

The one thing that I have discovered in this term is that research involves a lot of preparation and being able to push through even when things get difficult. I think I will be able to better prepare myself for future experiments as well as building perseverance that is necessary in any experiment.