This post is written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Kara Dunford.
Television viewers across the country need little more than a remote to explore life inside our nation’s political arena, as writers for series such as The West Wing, Veep, and most recently, House of Cards present their own imagined political realities via scripted programming. Continue reading “Television, Pizza, and Political Beliefs [SURE Stories]”
Category: Research Stories
Coo-KIES, Conferences, and the SURE Award [SURE Stories]
Seattle – home of notable Starbucks, Nordstrom, and the awe-inspiring Costco – is also the home of my research début at the 2013 SRCD Biennial Meeting. The UHP/SURE award partially funded my travel expenses for this three-day conference with professionals in the field of child development research. With the help of two of my professors in the Speech and Hearing Science Department, Dr. Francys Subiaul and Dr. Cynthia Core, I submitted my Independent Study research as a poster presentation for the conference and was fortunate enough to be selected. Continue reading “Coo-KIES, Conferences, and the SURE Award [SURE Stories]”
Writing Hollywood [SURE Stories]
The following post is written by UHP student Jacob Garber, who received a UHP SURE award for research in Spring 2013. —
Hollywood TV is created behind the closed doors of the writers’ room. The writing staff brings life to comedies and dramas alike, yet the operation of these writers is largely unexplored. I am assisting Professor Phalen conduct an in-depth study of Hollywood writers, venturing into the writers’ room, exploring the relationship between the writer and the program, and tracing the history of TV writing from its roots in radio and stage performances. We hope to provide a holistic view of TV writers, from professional microculture to their larger role in the Hollywood system. Continue reading “Writing Hollywood [SURE Stories]”
Herbert is a senior in the UHP, who was recently published. The following post is written by him about what he did to get published:
I was selected to be a participant in the 2011 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program with the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center. I researched in the lab of Dr. P. Renee Yew. Specifically, we studied cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) and their inhibitors, both critical in the regulation of the cell cycle. We identified sites of phosphorylation on a particular CDK inhibitor (Xic2) found in the frog model Xenopus laevis. Phosphorylation at these sites serves to inhibit Xic2 degradation during interphase. We also elucidated a mechanism to show how Xic2 turnover occurs when DNA is first being replicated. Xic2 shares sequence homology with p21, a critical mammalian cell cycle regulator notably in response to DNA damage.
The paper was just published today on the website of Cell Division:
http://www.celldiv.com/content/8/1/5/abstract
Christianity and Homelessness [Research Stories]
–This post is written by UHP student Hunter Scott, who received a SURE Award for sociological research.
Over the summer, I interviewed ten men and one woman who considered themselves to be experiencing homelessness, and who also self-identified as Christian. I was interested in how the two usually separately studied experiences of extreme poverty and faith interacted. Limited previous work in the field of Sociology (my major) had shown that homeless individuals often kept a strong private faith, which they utilized as a tool of resilience and inspiration to overcome addictions, unemployment, and an education. However, those studies also showed that they avoided organized religion and congregations, fearing shame from the members of their churches due to their housing status. I hypothesized that a Christian faith would lead someone experiencing homelessness to develop a structural view of their own position in society. Then, they might naturally begin to utilize their faith to understand the inequalities and contradictions inherent in the housing, education, employment, and law enforcement systems we live with, and even draw inspiration to fight back through advocacy and fellowship. This I drew from the Black Liberation Theology of James H. Cone and the Latin American Liberation Theology of Gustavo Guitierrez. Continue reading “Christianity and Homelessness [Research Stories]”
