URSP Student Cole Price Studies the Experiences of Sexual Minorities in Social Fraternities

This semester I conducted a USRP project studying the experiences of sexual minorities in social fraternities, specifically how they navigate their identities and self-presentations in a traditionally heterosexual environment. As a junior majoring in Psychology with a concentration in Clinical Psychology, I have always been interested in the intersections between inequality, social environment and mental processes. I hope to continue my work shining light on underrepresented and under-researched populations, such as gay and bisexual men in fraternities, throughout my undergraduate and graduate careers. The majority of this past semester was spent recruiting subjects for the study and collecting data in the form of roughly hour-long interviews. Participants were found through word of mouth and advertisements I put up around campus, and after contact, we would set up a time to meet at Fenwick for a sit down. I learned a lot doing this kind of qualitative research, and I feel my interviewing skills have improved exponentially since my first interview. I also learned a lot from the men I talked to; their interests, goals, the bonds they share with their brothers, and their experiences as sexual minorities at George Mason University, just to start.

After completing around seven interviews, they were transcribed, and I began coding them, looking for examples of themes I have derived from literature related to the subject, as well as new patterns I have seen emerge in my conversations. This process has given me the opportunity to engage with previous works written on Greek life and the fraternity system, sexual orientation, and social psychology at a depth I never had the chance to before in my classes.

URSP Student John Perkins Researches the Further Characterizing Genomes of Bacteriophage Discovered at Mason

My name is John Perkins, and I am a Senior here at George Mason, finishing my second-to-last semester this Fall. In the Spring, I will be graduating with a BS in Biology with a concentration in Bioinformatics and a minor in Computational and Data Sciences. My OSCAR URSP project involves further understanding bacteriophages that we discovered in BIOL-401 in the Fall of 2018. Bacteriophages are viruses that exclusively infect bacteria, and even though there are an enormous number of them, they have been relatively understudied. I isolated one of these phages myself from a soil sample I had taken, purified it, and extracted its DNA. After its genome was sequenced, we found the genes in the DNA and tried to figure out what they each did. This “annotation” used several different types of computer techniques, so while we could make strong and supported hypotheses, there was an opportunity to confirm them by studying the phages experimentally and seeing if our annotations were correct. One of the things that interested me the most was an idiosyncratic feature of one type of phage gene.

During our annotation, I had developed a bioinformatic method that helped identify the likely site of an ORF shift within the Tail Assembly Chaperone (TAC) gene. These genes frequently contain an unusual feature called a Programmed Translational Frameshift (PTF) that makes them difficult to annotate. Using the python script, I wrote, we were able to determine where we thought the PTF was in the TAC gene. For my URSP project, I wanted to characterize the gene expression proteomic ally using a technique called Tandem Mass Spectrometry. This would confirm whether or not we made the right calls in our annotations, as well as in our TAC gene. This project interested me because of the combination of hands-on work in a lab as well as computational analysis. OSCAR also gave me a chance to continue the work I had started in the phage classes last year. I have a very real sense of ownership over this project; I discovered the phage, I wrote the software, and I did the work to further the annotation. Having a project like this under my belt will help me stand out in the future.

URSP Student Durwood Moore works on the Validation of Mouse Models through the Scoring of Fibrosis in Histological Sections and the Identification of Fibroblast Infiltration of Murine Alveolar Tissue using Immunocytochemistry

My name is Durwood Moore and I am a senior Biology student here at George Mason. In the Fall of 2018, I participated in the Biology Department’s Fall Research Semester, where I was able to work with Dr. Geraldine Grant, a phenomenal biology professor. Dr. Grant’s lab focuses on researching a lung disease known as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, or IPF.IPF is an interstitial lung disease characterized by the unregulated build-up of scar tissue and over-abundance of fibroblasts. During that semester, I gained valuable technical and analytical skills that I will carry with me through graduate school and into my future career as a medical researcher. As that semester came to a close, I decided that I wanted to continue researching IPF, so I volunteered in Dr. Grant’s lab in the Spring of 2019 and applied for OSCAR funding for the Fall of 2019. 

This semester, I am validating a mouse model that our lab has been developing, as well as investigating the role of cellular senescence in the progression of IPF. Through a variety of staining techniques, I was able to observe the changes to the mouse lung architecture. My semester started by troubleshooting the different techniques that I would be using. After making sure that the protocols were optimized, I would prepare the lungs samples, stain them, and then image the samples. Often, my day involved sitting in front of a microscope for hours on end and carefully searching each sample for evidence of fibrosis. One of the most exciting things that I learned to do this semester was to quantify the fluorescence of certain stains and normalize the data before comparing treatment groups. I hope to apply the technical and analytical skills that I have learned during my time here at George Mason to create new knowledge and to improve the lives of other people.

URSP Student Dina Michel Investigates the Anomalous Hall Effect to Find Materials Which Overcome Silicon’s Limitations in Order to Push Technology Forward

I am a senior in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and I participated in condensed matter physics research this semester thanks to my URSP funding. In my project, I investigated how the Anomalous Hall Effect (AHE) seen inCoNb3S6was affected when I doped the compound with 10% iron (Fe) in order to create Co0.9Fe0.1Nb3S6. I first got interested in this project when I saw a presentation that my now-mentor Dr. Nirmal Ghimire gave about the importance of researching quantum materials. The technologies that govern our everyday lives rely on silicon, which will soon reach its limit. The solution is to find materials which overcome silicon’s limitations in order to push technology forward–the applications of research in this field would eventually make quantum computers a reality!

I hope to pursue graduate studies in physics, so participating in this project has helped me to prepare for that next step in my academic career by allowing me to conduct an impactful and innovative research project as an undergraduate. On a weekly basis, I worked in the lab almost daily to synthesize crystals, prepare suitable samples for measurement, and measure their properties –in particular, the Hall effect. At the same time, I continued reading papers and books relevant to the subject of my research in order to build a solid foundation of knowledge of the topic. Over the course of the semester, I learned that conducting research is unpredictable–often we end up doing work that is different than what we had originally set out to do. I have also improved my time management and my ability to communicate scientific topics to a general audience –skills that I will find useful in any professional as well as academic setting in the future.

URSP Student Lucia Bautista Researches the Informal Employment of Syrian Refugees in Turkey’s Textile and Garment Industry

My name is Lucia Bautista, and I am a senior majoring in Global Affairs with a concentration in Global Inequalities &Responses. For my GLOA Honors project, I am researching Turkey’s lucrative textile and garment industry, where hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees labor under exploitative conditions as uncontracted employees. More specifically, I examine how Turkey’s government and private sector interact to shape working conditions and precarious livelihoods for vulnerable Syrian workers. What sparked this idea was a course I took while studying abroad last semester at Oxford University. My professor at the time, Dr. Emre Korkmaz, inspired my project idea through one of my assignments that concerned low wages and poor working conditions in informal economies. When I arrived back at Mason and began my project, I noticed that two prominent themes across the literature I was reading were the concepts ‘precarity’ and ‘state-capital nexus.’ I have chosen process tracing as my principal methodology, which, in essence, is a qualitative method that determines the strength of evidence for causal relationships through probability testing. Within a single-case design, process tracing explains how different variables caused an outcome and confronts rival hypotheses to legitimize its case. I am systematizing data from the Turkish Government, UNHCR, and the World Integrated Trade Solution (among a few others) and testing for precarious labor, a contested state belonging and shared state and capital pursuits. In doing so, I will propose linkages between the implementation, reinforcement, and intentionality of informal labor in the textile and garment industry.

Each week varies in terms of what I do, but reading and re-reading is a must. It is essential that I fully understand the pre-existing scholarship so that I can probably analyze the quantitative aspects of my project, validate the trends I am testing for, and pair each part with its complementary literature. For a few weeks in the middle of the semester, I shifted my focus also to include researching statistics from the past few decades. The statistics I have gathered have provided insight into the working permits Turkey has issued to Syrian refugees and the industrial impact of Turkey’s textile & garment sector. Now, in the final weeks of this semester, I am focusing on creating the line graphs and other infographics for my poster. I am excited to share the findings of my project, as I believe that they address numerous gaps in the discussion of the global garment industry and the comparative advantage that a vulnerable working class of people provides. This project has deepened my knowledge of the garment industry. As I continue to work towards becoming a labor rights lawyer, it has enabled me to develop better analysis skills.