微密圈

Remember in the first Harry Potter movie when the new Hogwarts students file to the front of the Great Hall and don a tattered sorting hat to determine what house they will live in? There was tension and excitement in the air as they took their turns in full view of their new school community.

Minus the hats, nearly 100 微密圈 students participating in this summer鈥檚 faculty-student research program went through a kind of sorting exercise on the program鈥檚 first day in late May.

In 微密圈鈥檚 鈥済reat鈥� dining hall, the students gathered at small tables to discuss their research topics. 鈥淟oud conversations, lots of questions, pretty intense and engaged,鈥� reports program director and government professor Bob Turner. Hoping to recreate a little Hogwarts magic, he then threw out categories and asked students to stand if they fit: humanities and social sciences, biology, chemistry; sophomores, juniors, seniors; studying frogs, fish, mice, children, things smaller than a penny. The gathering concluded with a bingo game in which the name of a student went in each square鈥擱NA extractions, Omeka Web-page publishing, and scores of others.

By morning鈥檚 end, just as Turner hoped, the students had a fuller appreciation for the totality of the research program鈥攁ll 85 students and 46 faculty members tackling 62 projects from 16 different disciplines. 

Among other things, they learned that their group is:

鈥� working with zebrafish, algae, fruit flies, brown mice, preschool kids, frog eggs, the Vienna Riding School, the Ho Chi Minh Securities Corporation, and Chaucer鈥檚 Canterbury Tales

鈥� tackling societal problems ranging from fetal alcohol syndrome, malaria, obesity, and neurodegenerative disease to PCBs, data encryption, computer processors, and the role of food in culture

鈥� using some of the latest tools and methods, like intraperitoneal injections, the Python and Mathematica programming languages, RNA incubation, the Regional Ocean Modeling system, 鈥渃ultural geography鈥� theories of movement, paleography and codicology, and 3D printing.

鈥� producing data for journal articles, books, conference presentations , Web pages, honors theses, and new courses

Also an important outcome, says Turner: 鈥淭he students learn research in a discipline, but they also learn how their peers do it in other disciplines. At the dinner table or in the residence halls, I imagine questions such as, 鈥榃hat鈥檚 it like to read Middle English all day long?鈥� 鈥榃hat are the legal aspects of computer languages?鈥� 鈥楬ow do you actually detect malaria?鈥� 鈥榃hat do you do all day, and what are your biggest challenges?鈥欌�� He鈥檚 convinced that 鈥渦nderstanding how students in other disciplines are approaching their research projects can open their mind to new ways of thinking about their own. Creative thought really does matter.鈥�

July 1鈥攖he midway point for many of the research teams鈥攚as another gathering to share progress so far. In small tables that broke up and mixed all the teams, participants talked over issues like: What are the challenges in gathering, measuring, and ensuring the validity of your data? Is it harder or easier than you expected? What are the potential sources for error in your analysis? Is there a creative component of your data collection or analysis?

The complete summer 鈥�13 project list:

鈥揝ynthetic Strategies and their Application in the Organic Chemistry Lab

鈥揚adre Martini's Closed and Enigmatic Canons, with Solutions by Luigi Cherubini: A Publication Project

鈥揗odeling Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder: Nervous System Defects

鈥揟he Implementation of Universal Pre-Kindergarten in Rural New York State: A Look Five Years Later 2008-2013

鈥揝tructural and functional characterization of polar expansion in plants

鈥揗embrane trafficking in plant cells; the super highway of growth processes

鈥揂n Exploration of Steganography and Steganalysis

鈥揟he Influence of Unattended Information on the Processing of Attended Information in Selective Attention Tasks: Mediating Effects of Emotion and Hemispheric Specialization

鈥揇evelopment of a Rapid, Inexpensive Biomedical Diagnostics for Malaria and Food Allergies

鈥揥ill Children Learn a Complex Task through Imitation of an Unknowledgeable Adult?

鈥揘umerical Simulation of Effects of Waves on the Upper Ocean

鈥揂re artificial and natural sweeteners created equally?

鈥揊aculty-Librarian Research: Partnerships and Alliances

鈥揟he impact of social class salience and meritocracy beliefs on experiences of students in higher education

鈥揈xtracellular contributions to alcohol and anesthetic modulation of ligand-gated ion channels

鈥揗echanistic studies of a putative anti-addiction drug in a prokaryotic model system

鈥揜ole of the hydrophobic gate in alcohol modulation of pentameric ligand-gated ion channels

鈥揥hite Horses and Red Ink: The Spanish Riding School of Vienna

鈥揑nvestigating mitochondrial dysfunction in mice and cell models of SCA1

鈥揈stablishing a degradation timecourse for cerebellar ATXN1 protein

鈥揅omparing Structures of Online Stores: The Case of Museums and For Profit Businesses

鈥揅reativity, Code and Big Data: Understanding Innovation in the Consumer Protection Context

鈥揟he role of the conjugated path in the optical response of molecules

鈥揌aptic Perception in Blind and Sighted Subjects

鈥揋reedy Resource Allocation in Simultaneous Multithreaded Processors

鈥揈ffects of Copper on a Fruit Fly Model for Alzheimer's Disease

鈥揂re Effects of Lead on Mouse Circadian Activity Rhythms Transgenerational?

鈥揑s Chronotype Correlated with Birth Time?

鈥揊aith in the Workplace: Religion and Secularism in the Employment Sectors of India, Sweden and the U.S.A.

鈥揅omida Latina: Spanning Cultures, Building Bridges

鈥揑s the Anti-Obesity Action of MnTBAP Related to a Brown Fat Phenotype in Obese Mice?

鈥揂sparaginyl-tRNA formation in Mycoplasma genitalium

鈥揟he Value of Institutional Privilege and Competitive Capacity in Vietnamese Stock Market