Last week’s Research Showcase saw presentations from original research performed by UHPers this year.
Eliza Goren‘s research stemmed from her research assistantship with Prof. Josef Przytycki from the Mathematics department. They spent the semester create a program based in knot theory. She helpfully explained knotting and unknotting through DNA transcription, drawing from an interest in DNA that begin with her Scientific Reasoning and Discovery class with Prof. Hammond!
Ben Helfand presented the findings of his senior thesis, researched through the Enosinian Scholars program. Advised by Prof. Nathan Brown, Ben researched the incorporation of human rights laws in constitution and domestic legal system of Tunisia after the Jasmine Revolution. He even travelled to Tunisia with the help of the SURE Award!
Eileen Emerson compared local and national TV and newspaper coverage of the 2015 Baltimore protests after death of Freddie Gray in police custody. Advised by Prof. Kim Gross, she wanted to find out which coverage was more racialized, sensationalized, legitimizing or delegitimizing through language and images. Eileen also is a SURE Award winner!
Pooja Shivaprasad worked on her senior thesis with Prof. Hossein Askari comparing the migration of refugees to oil rich and oil poor countries. Despite the frustrating lack of available data, Pooja found that oil rich countries take in fewer refugees, and that shared borders are more significant than shared language in refugee intake.
Eva Martin considered the UN’s treatment of human trafficking. Advised by Prof. Ingrid Creppell (Deputy Director of the UHP!), Eva developed an ambitious proposal for a dedicated UN Office on human trafficking, combining the resources of various offices on crime and human rights to greater effect.
Congratulations to our presenters for completing an incredible year of research!
Tag: Research
UHP Research Showcase
You are invited to celebrate the research of your peers at the University Honors Program Research Showcase!
Enjoy brief, casual talks and ask questions Thursday, April 28th from 2 to 4pm in the Club Room of the Honors Townhouse. Let your fellow UHP’ers know how proud we are of their dedication and willingness to take a risk in order to contribute and disseminate original work as active scholars!
And if you have research you’d like to present, let Catherine know by Monday, April 25th to be included in the program!
Congrats to our Sure Award Winners
Congratulations to winners of the UHP SURE Award for this semester! Students who win the Sigelman Undergraduate Research Enhancement Award use the funds to further their own research.
Victoria Luckenbaugh will be writing about the socioeconomic and political influence of Iranian immigrants to the US based on quantitative research from the Census and other sources as well as interviews with Iranian-Americans across the country. Torie has studied Persian here at GW and in Tajikistan and her work is being advised by Pardis Minuchehr, director of GW’s Persian program.
Eileen Emerson is working on a thesis with Kim Gross from SMPA on local and national media coverage in print and television during the protests in Baltimore following the death in custody of Freddie Gray. This grew from her interest as a freshmen from the rural South in policy communication in the media and inspired by coverage of racialized protests since the rise of the BlackLivesMatter movement.
Congratulations to our winners. We’ll be following up with them later in the year to check in on their research! If you are pursuing independent research and would be interested in applying for funding, watch out for the SURE Award announcements in the Newsflash next fall!
Win $500 with the Eckles Prize for Freshman Research Excellence
If you’re a freshman who likes free money, I highly encourage you to keep reading.
The Eckles Prize for Freshman Research is an annual prize recognizing students who produce a research project in their freshman year that demonstrates significant and meaningful use of library services and collections at the George Washington University.
First year students are encouraged to submit a research project of any length or format, along with an essay summarizing how they used library resources to complete the project. Students should submit the one project that reflects their best work of the year. Prizes will be awarded for the top 3 submissions:
- 1st Place: valued at $500
- 2nd Place: valued at $300
- 3rd Place: valued at $200
Deadline to Apply: The application deadline for the 2015-’16 academic year is Friday, May 20. Click here for more info.
Congratulations to our SURE Award Winners
Congratulations to winners of the UHP SURE Award for this semester! Students who win the Sigelman Undergraduate Research Enhancement Award use the funds to further their own research.
Yaron Ginsburg will use the UHP SURE Award to purchase written works related to Zionist thought and the Philosophy of Nietzsche. Yaron intends to explore the influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, authenticity, and morality on early Zionist thinkers and the Zionist endeavor.
Bejnamin Helfand will travel to Tunisia with the help of the UHP SURE Award, using the the recently ratified Tunisian Constitution as a case study to explore how international human rights instruments can be used to effectively protect and promote human rights.
Paul Scotti will be attending the Vision Sciences Society Conference in May using the UHP SURE Award. His winnings will also be used to reimburse participants in his research to investigate the degree to which object-based attentional guidance depends on the strength of object representation.
Congratulations to our winners. We’ll be following up with them later in the year to check in on their research! If you are pursuing independent research and would be interested in applying for funding, watch out for the Spring SURE Award announcements in the Newsflash.
Let’s Talk About Bosnia [SURE Stories]
The following blog post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Sarah Freeman-Woolpert.
This past winter, I traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to conduct interviews for my senior thesis on how divided ethno-national identity affects collective youth activism and civic engagement in Bosnia today. With funding from the Sigelman Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Award, I spent two weeks interviewing young activists and university students about methods of youth engagement with the country’s current socio-political problems, like a 60% recorded youth unemployment rate and the corrupt, ineffective political system divided along ethno-national lines.
Traveling during the holidays gave me an intimate lens into the lives of local people who hosted me during my stay. I was welcomed warmly into the homes of many families who treated me as a member of their family during their holiday celebrations. I spent New Year’s Eve in the divided city of Mostar, in an unheated house with an older couple. Together, we huddled under blankets and had a long, wonderful conversation despite not speaking more than a few words of each others’ language. A week later, I spent Orthodox Christmas with a family in East Sarajevo. We ate roast lamb for breakfast, then I lay around watching the Kardashians with the family’s two teenage daughters.
At the end of my trip, I had recorded 16 hours of interviews and gained a more nuanced understanding of the issues facing young people in Bosnia today, and the ways youth engage with these problems—or choose not to engage at all. But I also left with a deep appreciation for the local culture and customs, which has influenced my desire to return to the region after graduation. I plan to continue researching inter-ethnic youth relations in post-conflict societies to get at the heart of how conflicts perpetuate between generations, addressing the roots of disagreement to prevent these from transforming into future violent conflict.
To Democracy or Not to Democracy? [SURE Stories]
The following post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Jenny Hamilton.
Research doesn’t always go as planned.
That’s what I learned with the help of a UHP SURE Award, and it is a valuable lesson to be sure. My research explores the impact of popular definitions of democracy on democratic legitimacy – essentially, it investigates the idea that how people define democracy impacts whether they consider it to be the best form of government.
I applied for the SURE Award last fall to finance electronic crowd sourcing of a survey in the United States. Most of my data came from Afrobarometer, a survey conducted in thirty-three African countries. I wanted to create a matching dataset for the United States, so that I could have a consolidated democracy as a comparison case. After considerable research, I decided that electronic crowdsourcing was the way to go. The results would not be nationally representative, but they would be as close as you could get on a budget. Having secured the funding, I looked up coding to create the survey. I obtained permission from Afrobarometer to use items from their questionnaire and worked with GW’s Internal Review Board to ensure the project met ethical standards. After a beta round and a few modifications, I launched the survey and results poured in. Everything went (roughly) according to plan.
A few weeks later, I presented my thesis for peer review. During the session my friend said, “Jenny, I’m going to tell it to you straight. The United States does not belong in your paper.” I has a sinking feeling, but I knew she was right. Almost an entire continent reduced in comparison to a single country… it had seemed like a good idea, but now I wondered I had been thinking. A few weeks later, my friends celebrated when I told them I had excised the United States from my draft.
Even though it won’t be in my paper, I know that my data is not useless. Obtaining that data taught me how to deal with ethical review forms, how to apply for funding, how to construct a survey, and a little bit of coding. It made me a more capable researcher. I also know that the data still has an interesting story to tell, perhaps in another paper.
Despite your best laid plans, you never know where your research will lead you. But almost always, you will discover something new, even if it’s not what you intended.
When Did This Guy Die? A How-To Guide [SURE Stories]
The following post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Kathryn Coté.
As a biological anthropology major, I was interested in studying skeletal material as part of my senior thesis. Fortunately, the National Museum of Natural History has some of the largest skeletal collections in the world, and it’s only a few Metro stops away from campus! Receiving a SURE Award offset the cost of my many Metro trips to the collections and allowed me to conduct research in forensic anthropology at the Smithsonian (thus furthering my endless quest to become Temperance Brennan from Bones).
For my thesis, I chose to study a method that uses morphological changes in the acetabulum (the socket on the side of the pelvis that articulates with the femur) to estimate age-at-death in adult skeletal remains. The method was originally developed using a predominantly white male population, but research suggests that the acetabulum is highly population dependent as an age-at-death marker. I calculated the accuracy of the technique across populations and sexes using black and white individuals in the Smithsonian’s Terry Collection in order to determine whether the method was broadly applicable.
Surprisingly, the method was equally applicable across sexes and ancestries. Percent accuracy did not vary to a statistically significant degree between black females, black males, white females, and white males. This is most likely due to the broad age ranges that the method uses to classify unknown remains. However, with such broad age classifications and an average percent accuracy of 46.6%, the method remains insufficient for use in a medicolegal context, despite being equally applicable across groups.
Conducting independent research has been an extremely rewarding experience that has allowed me to organize every step of the research process. I was responsible for conducting a literature review, identifying a quantifiable gap in the literature, designing an experiment to address this gap, finding researchers who were willing to support my project, efficiently carrying out my experiment, and interpreting my results. This experience has allowed me to hone my research skills and I am extremely grateful to everyone at the UHP and NMNH that made this project possible.
A View from the Top (of a Landfill) [SURE Stories]
The following post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Julia Wagner.
When I set out to study urban sustainability for my senior honors thesis, I never thought that it would land me in a landfill in the middle of South America. But research, folks, can be exciting!
I was visiting the CEAMSE landfill outside of Buenos Aires to get a better understanding for the city’s sustainability planning in regards to their waste management. I wanted to understand the impetus behind the City’s new recycling program, which not only stands for waste reduction but social justice.
As I stood, looking over a mountain of trash, I reflected on how I got there. It started with a semester of study abroad in Buenos Aires, during which I fell in love with the city’s passion, volatility, and depth. The famous portenos, or Buenos Aires locals, take what they need, and keep innovating until they get it. One particular group, a sector of informal waste-pickers who organized to create their own cooperatively-run businesses really inspired me to return and dig deeper into this fascinating place and study the role of waste in the city. Finally, the SURE Award ensured that I had enough funds to travel back to South America and get the much needed ethnographic interviews to complete my research.
Garbage, it turns out, is a major urban problem all over the world. How cities decide to manage their waste has huge environmental, political, and social implications in their localities. Waste, as product of the items we consume, tells a lot about a people’s culture and values. Many of the materials that we throw away, like plastic, glass, and cardboard, can also be very useful when cycled back into the industrial process; thus, waste is also a valuable resource. In a world where extractive activities become more expensive, recycling has grown into a bustling industry.
It was out of economic necessity that many people started collecting spare recyclables in Buenos Aires. These waste-pickers, or cartoneros as they came to be known, would pick out useful materials from curbside dumpsters to sell back to industries for a profit. These people, their political organizations, and their democratically-run businesses served as the basis for my research. They are single-handedly changing the face of the recycling industry and the culture of recycling in Buenos Aires. Further, they have built a scenario for understanding how informal actors can bring change to city’s formal sustainability planning and green infrastructures.
I find it ironic that my #onlyatGW moment would be funded research in a South American landfill, but as I stood looking out over a mountain of garbage, I couldn’t have felt happier, or more empowered to continue researching the implications of urban waste management in the future.
Talk Fishy to Me [SURE Stories]
The following post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Simon Wentworth.
I have always had an interest in genetics, and when my Intro Biology professor freshman year mentioned he was going to be doing work sequencing and assembling the Genome and Transcriptome of the Fathead Minnow I decided to go up and talk to him about it. Little did I know right then that this would be the start of my research career. The next week Dr. Packer offered me a position taking care of the hundreds of fish he had under various treatment conditions. Shortly thereafter he asked me if I wanted to stay on longer term to head up the Transcriptome work for him. I immediately accepted and since then have spent the bulk of my time in the lab teaching myself the various software needed to assemble and annotate a complete transcriptome. Eventually I got access to Colonial One (GW’s supercomputer) and it was off to the races. I spent the remainder of my freshman year and the summer following working on establishing a high quality and stringently annotated transcriptome for a single reference organism of our fish. After working on my research for over a year it was finally ready to present, but the lab didn’t quite have the funds to send me to the conference.
Honors program to the rescue! I applied for and got the SURE Award which allowed me to fly to the American Physiological Society’s Grand Conference in Omics in San Diego to present my work, “Transcriptome profile of the gills of the fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas),” over three days. While I was there I not only got the opportunity to share the work I had been doing, but I was also able to see what others were doing and what was considered at the forefront of physiological omics. Surprisingly enough, the keynote was working with other related fish doing much of the same type of research as I was. In fact, it convinced us to take the work we have been doing further to begin to look at the genetic changes which occur that allow the Fathead Minnow to acclimatize to a variety of different clines of environmental conditions.
It was a wonderful experience to be able to present among so many others at large conference and I am extremely thankful for the support of the UHP that made it possible for me to present there.
