2022 Undergraduate Research Showcase Welcome and Lightning Talk Plenary
Intro
[Donna Llewellyn]: Good morning, everybody. It is wonderful to see everybody and get this program started.
Let me advance the slide. There we go, welcome! My name is Donna Llewellyn, I am the
executive director of the Boise State Institute for Inclusive and Transformative Scholarship,
IFITS – and I like to say IFITS, You Fits, We all Fits. IFITS is the home
of the Office of Undergraduate Research and so we are really excited to help facilitate today’s
Undergraduate Research Showcase. I have the honor of co-chairing the Undergraduate Research showcase 2022 planning committee with my colleague, Michal Temkin Martinez, and our whole committee welcomes you to this morning’s plenary presentation of lightning talks given by our undergraduate students.
So, first, I want to invite all of our listeners to listen with grace and generosity of spirit.
It has been an incredibly long two years of Zoom meetings, and I think that therefore you can all
understand that at some point, technology will not work the way that we want it to. Our students are Zooming in from all over either campus or home or wherever they could
find a quiet spot. So, we know that some of the sound might be glitchy, but that’s okay!
We are so proud of our students. We are recording this session and it
will be posted in a bit on our Office of Undergraduate Research website.
Before we get completely started, I want to honor the Boise Valley people — The
original inhabitants are from the Burns Paiute; Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs; the Fort
McDermitt Paiute; the Shoshone-Paiute, and the Shoshone-Bannock. It is upon their traditional and customary lands that some of us reside and call home and upon which our campus stands.
Also, as a reminder, there are feedback forms on the event Google site and we’ll have links
posted throughout in chat and in our slide deck. We really welcome your feedback, and undergrads, that is your ticket to win some really cool great prizes, including an iPad.
You have to be present at the closing session at 3 o’clock in order to be eligible, and you have to have completed one of those feedback forms. I need to express my gratitude to the organizing committee and to the team at IFITS for all the hard work that they put in in getting ready for today. I also want to thank all of our students – the lightning talk presenters who we are about to hear from, the poster presenters who we will hear from this afternoon. It’s been a hard year – I keep on hearing the word ‘tired’ whenever I talk to people – and yet, students, you
persevered and you learned new ways of connecting with mentors, and new ways of being a scholar.
And, my last thanks and heartfelt gratitude goes to all of the staff and faculty who
have supported our students – whether as research mentors, lightning talk coaches, or just allies on the side as they travel along their journeys. It’s been a hard year for you too, I hear the word ‘tired’ a lot from my colleagues as well, and yet you found the time and energy, and made the space to support our students. You made a difference in the lives of our students, and you helped them chart a new path forward. We cannot overstate how important your work is. We asked our students to write a few words of appreciation when they submitted their projects for the poster session, and a full listing of all of those statements is available on the Google site.
I want to share just a few, and I will tell you that it was hard to pick just a few, so that you can get a sense of what a difference a mentor makes.
“Dr. Olschanowsky saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. She introduced me
to research and provided me with the support I needed to thrive in my undergraduate career.
I will forever be grateful to have had her as my advisor!”
“For completing this wonderful journey, I would like to sincerely thank Professor Jonathon Reeck for always supporting me to follow my beliefs. I do appreciate him a lot for the experiences, instruction, and, most of all, his patience to listen and allow me to dig deeper into my interest field.”
“Dr. Trevor Caughlin has provided me with incredible mentorship throughout my final year at Boise State. He helped foster my innate curiosity about the natural world and facilitate my development into more confident ecological researcher. I had such a fantastic experience working with Dr. Babik. I really appreciated the consistent feedback I got from her that allowed me to grow during this process that was very new to me.”
“Lisa Beymer has been the best mentor I have ever had because she pushed me to be the best teacher researcher I can be, and she believed in me and my work. She stood by me every step of the way, I never felt alone, and she was always willing to help when I needed it.”
Everybody – thank you thank you thank you.
Okay – Some tips to get the most out of today. I’m going to ask you to try – Virtual conferences and showcases are really hard, there are so many distractions – I can’t tell you to turn off your computer because then you won’t be here. Bur really try to really attend the showcase and turn off other devices and close out of other windows and concentrate on the session you are attending. Fully participate – ask questions of the speakers – utilize the chat box. We’ll be collecting those and monitoring them and getting the questions to the speakers. Take notes, engage fully.
In this lightning talk session, we advise you to use the “speaker” view that way you can focus-in
on the person speaking, not on the rest of these little boxes, and on their slide.
After this session will be the Research Conversations session and if possible – those will be in small rooms – unmute and turn your camera on if you’re in a place that you can,
so that you are really engaged in a conversation. And this afternoon, in the poster sessions – remember, you need to be registered on Fourwaves
to attend that – and you should have information about that and we’ll help you through it. You can use the “contact presenter” button to send an email to the submitting student, you can post a comment or question right there on the site, and you can engage in the live poster session, where you get to go in and have a video conversation in small groups with each poster presenter.
As I mentioned earlier, all registered undergrads are automatically entered in a drawing for prizes. You need to complete the form to get the bigger prizes,
but just by being registered you’re also entered for coffee cards. Okay. I am going to now
turn it over to Michal and stop sharing so that she can share.
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH SHOWCASE Student Lightning Talks Plenary Session
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Alright, everybody. Can you see my screen okay? Wonderful, let me just move a few things out of the way, and we’re gonna get started this morning with our plenary event for the showcase, the student lightning talks.
These student lightning talks are, you know, our plenary event because we’ve asked every faculty member to nominate up to one student for this honor. These are advanced students in their research, most of them are juniors and seniors, and we wanted to showcase, really highlight, some of the amazing research that’s going on here and to make sure that everybody gets a chance to see it. Every faculty member was able to nominate up to one speaker, and we selected as a committee 15 of those speakers. We’re really excited to have you join us and to have you hear them this morning. You can, of course, also engage through social media by using the Hashtag #URS2022, and we hope to see lots of engagement on social media with this. Finally, let’s get started. So our first speaker today is Jessi Boyer from Interdisciplinary Professional Studies, and Jessi’s presentation is titled Generating Insights into Barriers to Enrollment with User Experience. Awesome.
[Jessi Boyer]: Thank you, Michal. I’m a 38-year-old single mom who decided to come back to school and finish my degree in 2020. This is my third attempt at college, so as you’re listening you can imagine how personal the stakes are for me, having experienced the risk and the sacrifice of returning to college as an adult. Like many facing this decision, I had to weigh continuing to build on my established – but limited – political career against the investment of time and money for a chance to access greater opportunities and make life better for me and my young daughter. This research was done as the capstone for my User Experience Research (or UX) Certificate, conducted in partnership with the Interdisciplinary Professional Studies program, formerly known as Multidisciplinary Studies. UX applies the tools of anthropologists to discover insightful and imaginative ways to improve on products, services, and processes. My goal in this research was to discover if I could use UX to make a meaningful contribution to increasing access to higher education. I leveraged tools like field observations at IPS faculty meetings, interviewing current and prospective students, and user journey mapping, or in this case, student journey mapping, to gather data and identify themes.
My findings revealed the kinds of extrinsic barriers you might already have imagined, like managing the cost of tuition with the loss of income, finding child care, and gaining buy-in
from stakeholders such as spouses. But you might be surprised to hear that intrinsic barriers were at least as important in decision making as the extrinsic ones, and sometimes more so.
For example, a high proportion of respondents reported feeling hesitant to return based on feelings of shame about not already having their degree and insecurity
about being the oldest person in their class – both connected to a need for belonging. So now that we understand some of the obstacles from the student (or prospective student)’s point of view, how can these insights be used to help increase the number of adults who make it to graduation day?
My recommendations to department leadership were aimed at informing two complementary marketing strategies.
The first (and easier) recommendation is to clearly communicate the value of what is being offered. This includes not only the return on investment,
but also the uncommonly student-centered culture at IPS, with reassurance that their complex and varied life circumstances will be met with empathy.
IPS course design already prioritizes important skills like building confidence to combat imposter syndrome and empowering students to take charge of their academic
and professional trajectories – so it’s simply a matter of accurately delivering that message.
Secondly, marketing materials need to address pain points by reducing confusion and mitigating shame.
This is the more difficult condition to fulfill, but understanding the user experience is the first step. Perhaps it’s as simple as having more age diversity in photo content.
After all, among the well-documented benefits of representation is the feeling of belonging.
The bottom line of this research is that if my recommendations directly or indirectly lead to one single person earning their degree who wouldn’t have otherwise, then it was a massive success.
I want to thank Dr. Kendall House for developing an excellent UX curriculum, and Alexis Kenyon for facilitating this research. Thank you.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thanks so much, Jesse.
Up Next, we have Floriana Chalia from computer science talking to us today about Multiplex
Networks with Grounded and Embodied Layers for Child Language Acquisition. Floriana? Thank you.
Do you remember how you learned your first language? Chances are that you don’t, because learning a language is something so innate to humans that most people don’t think
about it very much. Everyone learns at least one language and uses it every day to communicate with the rest of the world. Studies show the environment in which babies learn their first language is highly perceptual, meaning that they make connections between the words they already know and the ones that they are learning on different levels. For example, in the blue box there’s a visual level where a child can learn the word ‘zebra’ because they recognize that they are very similar to another animal whose name they are already familiar with, like ‘horse’. Or on a phonological level in the green box, a child might remember
the word ‘knee’ because it sounds similar to other words they already know, like ‘to see’.
So, we can say that interacting with the world using their senses is what stimulates children’s language learning. However, we know this happens when learning a second language too. In fact, my experience while learning English is was sparked my interest in this project: personally, I would often connect words on a phonetic level to remember them.Now, have you ever wondered how computers learn languages? How is it that we can talk to Siri or Alexa? Computers don’t have the ability to interact with the world the same way humans do
yet we are still able to communicate with them using our own human languages, like English, to ask them to perform tasks. Computers learn languages by having millions and millions of text examples shown to them. However, didn’t we say that the human’s language learning environment is perceptual? Language learning doesn’t involve just text, the same way people don’t learn a language by just hearing words. My research project aims to resolve this lack of multimodality when teaching a language to a computer. I have developed a way to incorporate a visual, and a sensorimotor level of word connections, by using established machine learning techniques to connect visual features to words, and we used a dataset that linked sensorimotor information to words, together with the textual, phonological and other important aspects of the world that words connect to. My experiments show that our model learns words roughly in the same order that children learn words. and found that having a visual representation significantly aids language learning in children of 2-3 years of age.
Though more research is needed, this work brings us a step closer to bridging the gap between how humans learn languages
and how we can teach computers to learn, represent, and use language in hope to one day
eliminate some of the barriers that we’ve all experienced while talking to our devices. Thank you.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thank you, Floriana. Up Next, we have Brie Ellison from Interdisciplinary Studies
Challenges & Opportunities in Human Subjects Research: Assessing Glyphosate Exposure in Pregnant Women Brie Ellison INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
with a talk titled Challenges and Opportunities in Human Subjects Research Assessing Glyphosate Exposure in Pregnant Women. Brie, take it away!
[BRIE ELLISON]: Good morning, everyone. Many of you are probably familiar with weed killers like Roundup, a common herbicides that my own parents used on their farm. Glyphosate is the main ingredient in products like Roundup, and its usage grows 1,200% worldwide in the last 2 decades. It’s great at destroying weeds, but what’s it doing to our health? A few
previous studies have suggested that glyphosate exposure during pregnancy may lead to preterm birth, but much more research is needed to understand if this is true,
and how exposure is occurring. We designed a robust study to follow 40 women throughout
pregnancy, collecting weekly and sometimes daily urine samples during a two-week dietary
intervention to compare glyphosate levels when eating organically versus conventionally.
We are currently awaiting results from the CDC regarding the glyphosate measurements.
In the meantime, I’d like to share discoveries about human subjects research and how we were successful despite many challenges. On of the challenges was the Covid 19 pandemic.
Recruitment and informed consent is a vital step in human subjects research, and it’s typically
done in person. Instead, we created Youtube videos to better connect with the participants.
We would park outside their house, drop the forms on the doorstep, send them links to the videos and phone them to go over the paper walk. Then, we would drop off the urine cup and pick it up when it was filled. All in real time. That allowed us to maintain social distancing, but keep it a more personal feel, which ended up being a key part of our success in participant retention, and participant retention was a major concern throughout our study. We had to keep the women engaged on a weekly and sometimes daily basis to get the kind
of in-depth data that’s missing from this area of research. On top of that, many of the women
were dealing with difficulties that impacted their availability. One of our participants
was homeless for the duration of the study. I once had to pick up a sample outside a Hobby Lobby. Many of them dealt with food at housing and security, irregular job schedules and children with disabilities. But despite these challenges, we collected 1,395 samples from 40 women over a nine-month period for 97% compliance rate. How do we do it? By building a personal connection with these women. In research, it’s easy to say that we give back to our participants retroactively through results, but through our study we were able to immediately impact the women and help their quality of life. We built personal connections, we texted them, updates and reminders, compensated them with gift cards, and provided each with $360 in groceries. We knew them by name, knew what they were dealing with, and worked with their unique situations as much as possible.
Throughout the study. We had many women express their gratitude for the help we provided them, as well as excitement for our research.
If you’d like to hear more about this important stepping stone in glyphosate research, please feel for you to check on my poster and ask me any questions.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thank you so much, Brie.
Up next we have Marissa Maldonado from Mathematics with a talk titled “The Healing Turtle and Currere”. I was put on the doorstep of spirituality as a young Native American girl, beginning to grasp the idea of gratitude and purpose.”
[MARISSA MALDONADO]: During a spiritual ceremony known as Sun Dance on the Wind River Reservation, I was given my native name at approximately 7 years old, it is pronounced … , which translates to Healing Turtle; hence the reference to the tipi in my slide. I naively thought it meant I would become a
nurse or a doctor, but it was much more than that. I was put on this earth to help others, to guide them on their path, and furthermore to take care of myself in order to do that. It made
sense for me to go into stem education. During my time as a mathematics and computer science major, I started to recognize that my peers within STEM were showing spite for their degree once they earned it. They felt like they hadn’t take much back with them. Along that timespan I discovered the word currere – which is the study between subject and self. This solidified my
philosophy of education because I felt I was able to crack the code on how to add more substance and foundation to what I was learning, and eventually I Realized that I wanted to evolve the student experience such that they would not feel they lost years to studying it. A cost of this is a lower connection between students and their perseverance of knowledge. Further referencing to my slide, the globe on the left represents my passion for mathematics and seeing structure in the world. Currere enabled me to believe in the connection between logic and spirituality. This is ironic because I am a mathematics major. Perhaps it sounds impossible to connect subjective feeling to mathematics, but I felt empowered to exist as Healing Turtle within that realm.
Logic lives in all problems, but if the proof is never pursued there never exist better outcome.
As I plant seeds of self-discovery for those who cross my path, they can then share their growth with others and the cycle
continues. This is the healing turtle. This pursuit is possible for any creative, mathematician, musician, and all of the silver lining between the arts and sciences. And how do
we create this? Allow course curriculums to push students in documenting their personal journey as
self and student to understand how that impacts their education, just as I did throughout publishing this article. In my slide, this is represented as the cyclical
process of structure and heritage co-existing beside one another. It is a privilege to become
a self-directed learner. We have given students the tools to study arithmetic, to analyze prose,
to become fluent in worldly matters, but now we must develop the tools to study self.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thank you so much, Marissa. Up Next we have Valorie Marie from biological science with drone imagery, enables fine-scale detection of sagebrush die back during a summer heat wave Valerie take it away.
[VALORIE MARIE]: Thank you. Sagebrush species are an essential part of the Western desert ecosystem. It has many influences on local recreation and employment. These shrubs help to prevent erosion, capture water, sustain wild animal populations, and more. Climate change imposes a large threat to these populations. Climate change imposes a large threat to these populations as we see a climbing number of
wildfires, less precipitation, and more high heat summer days. This project focuses on the
latter issue by comparing imagery taken at Castle Rocks State Park over the summer of 2021 when an unprecedented heatwave went over the area. We used drones to gather imagery
overhead in June and September. Then, I used software to stitch these images together into one large image with high resolution. Top 2 photos. By outlining individual shrubs, I was able to extract the green band of the color images and collect the Green Leaf Index inside that perimeter. Bottom 2 photos. Greenness directly corresponds to photosynthetic activity and well-being of a plant. The Green Leaf Index gives me a number for how much green there is, between 0 and 1. After comparing the two timesteps I found that 72% of the shrubs lost green and 28% gained green.
Of the shrubs that lost green, there was an average loss of 10.8%. Of the shrubs that gained green, there was an average gain of 5%. This location is one site out of four along an elevation gradient with several shrub species. The next step is to run the Green Leaf Index on all four Castle Rocks sites from June and September to get a wider range of data analysis over the 2021 heatwave. These methods allow us to identify resilient shrubs that have retained their greenness during this heatwave, and we can target those shrubs to collect seeds for restoration pursuits. The advantage of drone data is to have a map that spans hundreds or thousands of individual shrubs, which is more data than we could collect on the ground. This research brings vital information to the conversation of where and how to allocate tight budget funds on conservation of the sagebrush steppe that so
many of us depend on. It also shows the impact one hot and dry summer can have on this slow
growing plant. If you have any questions for me, my project number is 95 in group B. Thank you.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thanks so much, Valerie. Up next we have Cooper McGrath from biological sciences with “aBRCAdabra!
[COOPER McGRATH]: Cytokines Make DNA Repair Disappear in Breast Cancer”. Take it away, Cooper!
Thank you. Today I want to talk to you about the proteins known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, and hence my title aBRCAdabra. All of that in the sense of
breast cancer. When the BRCA proteins, seen in blue, are removed from a breast cancer cell,
the cancer cell becomes even more aggressive, seen as a brownish blob becoming an angry faced cell.
These aggressive breast cancer cells are more likely to metastasize or spread to other body parts, such as the lung, liver, and brain, all things that we can agree are
kind of important. This is the work of cytokines, seen as the bright pink blob.
We care about breast cancer because 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. That’s over 280,000 new cases each year in the United States alone. Unfortunately,
women with metastatic breast cancer have only a 27% chance of surviving for 5 years or longer.
Imagine a world where we could use magic to solve all that. We could wave our wands and say the magic word, aBRCAdabra, and all the cancer would disappear.
Breast cancer can be summoned from many different sources, such as the accumulation of mutations in the cell’s DNA. It is these mutations in DNA that make a cancer become more aggressive. BRCA1 and
BRCA2 are proteins that use powerful spells to protect against these mutations, these spells are
actually a process known as DNA Repair. When these proteins are not working properly, the cancer has
more mutations and becomes more aggressive. Cytokines are proteins secreted by the immune
system that tells the body to do many different things, such as causing inflammation. Prolonged
inflammation in cancer tissue is associated with poor outcomes for patients, and this is done by
making certain proteins disappear and others appear out of thin air. A pro-inflammatory
cytokine is a protein that causes inflammation. Our lab hypothesizes that certain proinflammatory
cytokines activate a signal within the cells that leads to the disappearance of the BRCA proteins.
And like we said in our previous example, since our BRCA proteins are no longer able to cast their spells, this would lead to a decrease in DNA repair, a more aggressive cancer
and a higher likelihood of metastasis. My research is important because it
suggests that developing therapeutics that block these pro-inflammatory cytokines will in turn lead to a less aggressive cancer, less metastases, and a better survival for patients.
Thank you, and if you have any questions come visit me at my poster. Have a magical day.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thanks for that, Cooper! Up next, we have Dustin Nguyen from Material Science and Engineering
Alternative Materials for Battery Electrodes
and the talk is titled “Alternative Materials for Battery Electrodes”. Dustin?
[DUSTIN NGUYEN]: Hello everyone. My name is Dustin Nguyen and my presentation is on alternative materials for battery electrodes.
I want to tell you all a story of what led me to pursue research. I’m an Army veteran and midway through my deployment in Afghanistan back in 2012
I decided that I wanted to leave the Army and go back to school. Now I didn’t know what I wanted to study, so in order to calm myself from the stress of deployment
and figuring out my future, I decided to binge watch Star Wars. I’m a huge Star Wars fan. While
watching all the lightsaber fights I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be cool to have a lightsaber?”
That’s when it hit me, I wanted to create a real life lightsaber. During the same time,
I was reading a book called Physics of the Impossible, where it has a chapter on lightsabers.
Around the end of the chapter, it covers the energy requirement for lightsabers. It said it would be the energy equivalent of a nuclear reactor inside an AA battery.
Now can you imagine it? A battery that powerful in your car. A car with that type of battery could travel around the U.S. multiple times on a single charge.
This is what inspired me to pursue battery research. To make this type of battery possible, we need new materials that can significantly increase
the amount of energy that can be stored inside a battery cell, which is called energy density.
Currently, the most popular battery used on the market is lithium-ion batteries. Their popularity is due to their high energy density and cycleability,
which is the number of times it can be charged and discharged. The problems that they currently face is that it takes a long time to fully charge
and its lifespan will decrease overtime. An electric car, depending on the make and model, can take several hours to fully charge.
This is not ideal for long distance driving. Additionally, If lithium-ion batteries are
charged too fast, it can decrease its lifespan and increase the potential buildup of dendrites.
Dendrites are columns of spent lithium forming on one of the electrodes in a battery.
The buildup of dendrites can cause a battery to short circuit and cause a thermal runaway. To give you an idea of what thermal runaway looks like in a battery,
the Samsung phones that spontaneously caught on fire several years ago is a perfect example.
Current lithium-ion batteries use graphite as one of the electrodes. The material I’m currently researching to replace graphite is anatase titanium dioxide nanoparticles.
What makes it appealing is that it has a high energy density, better long term cycling, and safer to use. I’m researching how water impacts
the electrochemical performance of my material as the synthesis is water driven.
My dream of developing a functional lightsaber may be unrealistic or fanciful, but to me it is
what drives me to research how to make the next super battery that can help power the world. Thank you for listening and my poster number is 126 in group B.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Wonderful! Thanks so much, Dustin. I hope you do get to make that light saber!
This would be a great time to remind everybody that you can put questions in the chat and we’ll
draw from those questions in the Q&A session right after this. And I’m excited to see so many of you here.
Alright. Up next we have Audrey Parker from Material Science and Engineering with a talk titled “Nanoscale Magnetic Mapping:
Mapping Magnetic Fields to Enable Future Technologies”. Audrey, take it away!
[AUDREY PARKER]: Magnetic forces govern every aspect of life as we know it. The earth’s magnetic north pole has been fundamental for human navigation. The healthcare industry has utilized magnetic fields to distinguish human diseases in magnetic resonance imaging, otherwise known as MRI’s. In fact, each of us is currently using magnetic forces to operate our cell phones and computers. Magnetic forces have yielded unique technology capable of a wealth of opportunities and by better understanding them we can continue to advance modern technology in remarkable ways. In fact, these magnetic forces which facilitate the formation of galaxies, also exist on a much much smaller scale. These magnetic nanoarrays seen here are only 200 nm long, to clarify that’s 500 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Despite their amazingly small size, they have enabled tremendous advancements in technology over the last decade. Recent studies have identified magnetic nanoarrays as functioning devices for logic, computation, encryption, and data storage. They will serve as the next generation of electronic devices called nanomagnonics which have the unique capability in maximizing data storage while operating under low-cost and low-power environments. While the functionality of these devices has been very promising, a key issue seen with these nanomagnets has been understanding the magnetic properties of individual interacting elements via high resolution imaging. This lattice of nanomagnets, or Eggo Waffle-like grid seen on the right, is completely invisible to the naked eye and even the most powerful forms of optical microscopy are not capable of distinguishing it’s features. Instead, an advanced imaging method called Atomic Force Microscopy,
otherwise known as AFM, has been used to meet the demand for high resolution images. During AFM
a probe whose tip is only a few atoms wide is brought down to the material surface and can
image the sample topography on an atomic scale. Now when we magnetize this probe, there are unique
interactions between the tip and sample surface which reveal the materials magnetic properties.
I think we can all think back to times we’ve played with magnets, opposites attract and likes repel. The imaging done here is no different! Brighter areas seen on the magnetic phase are
areas where the tip and sample are attracted, meaning they have opposite magnetic forces.
Darker areas show regions where the tip and sample repel, meaning they exhibit the same magnetic force. [AP1] These high resolution images have the
capability to streamline nanomagnetic research by precisely indicating where the magnetic fields on
the sample are located, and how they may change in the presence of an external magnetic field.
These techniques serve as an essential step for better understanding magnetic devices
and progressing their implementation into extraordinary technological advancements. Thank you.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thanks so much Audrey. Up next we have Margaret Quatraro from Nursing with a talk titled “Using Simulation & Communication to Challenge Weight Bias in Healthcare Simulation & Communication to Challenge Weight Bias in Healthcare”. Take it away.
[MARGARET QUATRARO]: Thank you. Good morning! I want to tell you a story about a woman named Carly. Carly hates going to the doctor. She hates getting on the scale, she hates the crinkle of the table paper under the weight of her bottom, she hates that the blood pressure cuff is always too small. Imagine how frustrating that would be. Carly told me once that she was recommended bariatric surgery when what she really needed was to have an ovarian cyst removed. Carly doesn’t know her BMI, but she knows that whenever a provider brings it up a long talk on diet and exercise will ensue. Carly knows that her doctor treats her differently because she is fat. The research validates Carly’s experiences of stigma. Healthcare providers have significant weight bias. This weight bias has a negative effect on health outcomes for people with obesity. This population delays seeking health care, continually switches providers, and has an overall mistrust of the medical community. This all equates to poor health outcomes. The CDC estimates that about 40% of adults in the U.S. are considered obese. If 40% of adults in the U.S. are experiencing weight bias from their HCPS, I would say that the medical community is failing. To challenge medical weight bias, first we examined explicit bias in first semester nursing students. Our survey included a pre and post test
using the Beliefs About Obese Persons scale, the Fatphobia scale and qualitative questions.
Students in the intervention group were taught the LEARN model of communication. This acronym stands for Listen Explain Acknowledge Recommend Negotiate.
This model focuses primarily on listening. LEARN was woven into first semester coursework. Near the end of the first semester students had a simulation with Carly, a high fidelity mannequin to assess the patient and report their findings and recommendations for treatment. This simulation was informed by the original interview with Carly, the real life person.
Afterward, students took the same questionnaires. The change in pre and post testing was
significant. Students had more weight neutral beliefs after meeting Carly. Qualitative shifts
showed that students realized that “treating everyone the same” was not applicable in this
simulation. In fact, students realized they needed to apply patient centered care. This
care includes making accommodations for different sized bodies, like getting the correct size blood pressure cuff, and also ditching the “diet and exercise” education recommendation model. Overall, the study made an immediate impact on how the students interacted with Carly.
We hope to re-evaluate the longevity of these impacts when they are in their senior semester.
My hope is that this research inspires you to challenge and change your own existing weight bias. Many resources are available. Much gratitude to Amy Pence Brown for her inspiring work. The interviewee, Carly and my research partners. Please check out our poster. It is number 88 in Group A.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thanks, Margaret. Up next, we have Collin Saffell from Anthropology with a talk titled Cattle to Slaughter: The Impact of Consumption
“Cattle to Slaughter: The Impact of Consumption”. Collin?
[COLLIN SAFFELL]:When looking at this image what do you see? I see an animal that is valued less than your cat or dog at home. Why are these two creatures so different? One is raised and killed as a part of the meat industry while the other enjoys a peaceful life. Not only are the former killed, but their life is horrible, being kept in inhumane conditions and treated as a factor of profit
more than a living, breathing creature. Not only do the industrial farms that rear these
animals neglect them, but they are also a leading cause of environmental impacts and carbon emissions plaguing our planet today. The large-scale production and personal
consumption of meat is a factor that is often overlooked and ignored by the average consumer when purchasing their dinner. Using cattle as a basis, as 82% of global production is through
beef, we can look further into ignored side of the industry. The production of 1kg of beef
creates as much impact as driving 160 miles in an American mid-sized car. Deforestation,
another cause for concern among climate change models is promoted through growing consumer demands for meat, forest and land is cleared to allow for more production, not only of animals
but also the crops used as feed. Global trends show that by 2030, consumption of meat will have
increased by as much as 72% of current levels. With these impacts on our planet known,
how can methods change to give these animals a full life, while still allowing us to eat meat without current, immoral processes?? Switching the methods of production
and educating consumers is the answer. Pastoral, or open grazing farms, allows us to produce less,
but overall healthier cattle. Grass-fed beef is a prized item among consumers, being seen as a more
“natural” better alternative than average cuts found in big box retailers, like grocery stores.
Animals raised on these types of farms live full lives, enjoying their time on the planet instead of being neglected and cruelly treated as product, they are better for both animal and human.
Consumers too, have a role to play in improving these trends, embracing more offal products, like liver and intestines would allow for similar levels of consumption,
while lowering environmental impact of produced waste by about 10%. Through these methods, animals are still killed, but it opens consumption of meat as an amoral,
not immoral practice. There is also an ecological benefit to the lands pastoral animals feed on,
as they are found to be more diverse, healthier, and act as a carbon sink. Absorbing methane
created from herds, lowering overall emissions from the meat industry. There is no reason while one type of creature should be treated as poorly as industrial herds
are, if we want to lessen climate change and our own guilt over the treatment of animals then we
must switch to a better model of production. Lands currently being used can be reformed into holistic farms and crop areas that produce feed have the potential to grow healthy lands
for more “natural” product. People do not have to stop eating meat to lessen climate change,
they need to treat the lives of those they take with respect and acknowledge their use as food, giving animals the best life possible before being consumed. This changes meat
eating and the raising of these animals from an immoral practice to an amoral one. Thank you.
Also, please make sure to check out my poster, I go a little more in depth into the research about
not only the environmental impact, but also cultural trends on meat eating around the world. So, thank you.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thank you for that perspective on this topic, Collin.
Up next, we have Sierra Sandison from Mechanical Engineering speaking to us today about “Alleviating the Effects of Imposter Phenomenon Amongst Engineering Students”. Sierra, take it away.
[SIERRA SANDISON]: Thank you so much. Can you see me? Not yet. We can see you. Okay. When I walk into an engineering classroom full of boys, it’s intimidating. I assume they grew up working on cars with their dad, or have been programming in their free time since they were 10.
At the height of feeling like I didn’t belong in engineering, I learned about impostor phenomenon, a term coined by Dr. Pauline Rose Clance. According to her definition, impostor phenomenon—better known in pop culture as imposter syndrome–is “a psychological experience of intellectual and professional fraudulence.” So-called impostors often feel like they have gotten to where they are due to luck, rather than their own abilities. Learning that there was a name for this made me wonder if my own feelings of self doubt weren’t necessarily telling me the truth about myself, and that maybe I wasn’t alone in feeling them.
For my research, I co-produced a 13-minute mini-documentary in which I interviewed my engineering peers and faculty about their experiences dealing with and overcoming self-doubt and impostor feelings. I interviewed Dr. Lighty, our dean, a white woman, and two PhD students, both black women. Even though I look up to these three, and they are clearly brilliant and successful and in my opinion have no reason to feel any self-doubt, I wasn’t surprised to hear that they had also felt uncomfortable in rooms where they were outnumbered and had stories that I could relate to. However, the last interview strangely had the greatest impact on me. It was with a white male veteran undergrad student. He had been in almost all my classes. In my head, he belonged more than anyone.
Hearing the impostor thoughts that haunted him while sitting in classrooms we had shared was unexpected, and enlightening.
So when it came to the actual research, I had the experimental group watch the mini-documentary before answering a survey that would measure their level of impostor phenomenon, while the control group would just directly be given the survey without being exposed to the intervention. My hypothesis, of course, was that once the engineering students realized that a lot of people shared their feelings of self doubt, they would report lower rates of impostor phenomenon.
When the data came back, we actually found the opposite: undergraduate students who watched the mini- documentary scored higher on the impostor phenomenon scale than those in the control group.
I was so confused. Producing the documentary had been almost therapeutic
for me. It had helped me separate facts from feelings and shown me that I wasn’t alone. And now, the data was showing that it had had the opposite effect on other students? I regret not collecting more qualitative data to figure out why, or if that’s even what was actually happening.
Did watching the documentary make students feel worse about themselves, or did it make them more aware of their feelings of impostor phenomenon and open to sharing them?
With the data I have, I honestly can’t say for sure. I have a lot of unanswered questions still, but my instinct is that further research would show that being open and vulnerable and willing to discuss our insecurities might make us uncomfortable, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, this discomfort is exactly what I believe leads to growth, healing, and an understanding that we are not alone. Thank you.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thanks so much, Sierra. Up next we have Kensie Stallings from Music
Musical Storytelling in the National Parks
with a talk titled “Musical Storytelling in the National Parks.” Kensie?
[KENSIE STALLINGS]: Hi Everyone, my name is Kensie Stallings. Over 297 million people from around the world visited National Park Lands in 2021, who here is part of this number? I know I definitely am. Many people visit these lands to experience adventure, curiosity, discovery, and inspiration. As a Park Ranger, it is my job to help provide and enhance these experiences through ranger programs. For my research project, I wanted to combine my passion and love for music and giving astronomy programs, and create a ranger program that uses both.
I researched why the night sky interests people, how musicology can enhance visitor experiences, excuse me, and how to combine these subjects into a ranger program. I collected topics of interest from visitors who attended previous presentations of my astronomy programs at Grand Canyon National Park. I also analyzed secondary source materials on the use of ecomusicology in concert, museum, and cultural contexts. And finally,
I performed a social media survey analysis on the question “Why do you look up at the night sky?”
With this research, I designed a ranger program about the seasonal night sky told through stories and music. My ranger program will consist of me sharing the folklore of the stars, talking about how we can travel back in time by looking into space, and sharing how the sight of stars can make us dream. I will also be playing the music of Jenni Brandon titled
“Starry Night for Bb-Clarinet” which consists of three movements, titled “The Starlight Night”,
“Bright Star!”, and “The Sight of Stars”. Each of these movements directly relates to the topics in my program and I will play this music to help visitors create personal connections to these themes about the night sky. The picture that you see on the screen is what it will look like for me to be presenting this program as the lead Astro Ranger at Craters of the Moon National Monument this summer. This ranger program will help provide experiences of curiosity and discovery of the folklore and science of the night sky as well as inspire visitors to listen more intently to the universe they live as they visit at Craters of the Moon.
If you would like to learn more about visiting Craters of the Moon National Monument or even are interested in coming to see my program, you can visit their website at nps.gov/crmo.
You’re also more than welcome to come listen to me talk more about my poster presentation.
My poster number is 19 in Group B. Thank you very much.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thank you, Kensie. Maybe you can put that link in the chat so people can visit it.
Sound Dependence on Discharge and Wave Configuration at Boise Whitewater Park
Up next, we have Taylor Tatum from Geoscience with a talk titled “Sound Dependence on Discharge and Wave configuration at Boise Whitewater Park. Taylor?
[TAYLOR TATUM]: Alright, Hi! Everyone. So when you first think of sound, what is the first thing you think of now?
What if I told you, or even spoiled by the the picture in front of you?
What if I told you that sound could be used to measure water? Infrasound is a sound that occurs at a frequency below human hearing that is becoming more commonly used within the earth sciences. It can be used for earthquakes, volcanoes, even avalanches, but in this study I use it to measure the relationship between sound and stream characteristics at a place some of you may be familiar with – Boise Whitewater Park. Using recorded data from 2016 and 2021, I used sound to look for changes in discharge which is the amount of water passing through at a given time, and wave configuration, which is the type of wave created by Whitewater Park that day for recreational purposes. There’s 2 different types of waves: green waves, which are used by surfers and wave whole waves, which are used by kayakers, and I’ll direct you back to this picture and the funny thing that I’d actually like to point out about this specific wave on the picture is that’s actually a surfer on a wave hole wave, which, as we mentioned now, is actually a kayak wave.
Now, I’m not either a surfer or a kayaker, so I can’t really tell you completely why or how, but I can’t explain why using sound to explain these waves is important. Sound is still a very new application, but there exists a potential that sound can be used as an alternative monitoring device to current measuring infrastructure. Of course, with the investigation of more of these relationships that could possibly exist. Current stream infrastructure made up of devices found in the river is used to measure annual flow rates, discharge, monitor flooding events, and look for specific hazard waves. And sound could be important because one, it’s more cost-effective, and is not invasive, since you’re putting things on the shore rather than within the river, and it’s less likely to get washed away by flooding as a result.
So, what did this project, in particular, find? We found that patterns in relationships between sound and stream characteristics aren’t visible below a certain flow. It’s easier to see large changes within the system rather than smaller changes, and that kayak waves are quieter than surf waves. Using the results as well as future work, we can not only further examine these relationships but also other relationships within the stream system. So, if you’re interested in learning more about the relationship between sound and water, I encourage you to visit my poster later today. I’m project number 58 in Group. B: Thank you, everyone.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thanks so much, Taylor. Up next we have Claire Vaage from the department of Environmental Sciences. Sorry about that. Up next, we have Claire Vaage from Environmental Studies, with a talk titled “Mapping the Oases of the High Desert.” Claire, take it away.
Thank you.
[CLAIRE VAAGE]: If you have gone for a hike, or even glanced up at the Boise Foothills, it is likely you noticed its dry and arid nature. An immense number of the parts and pieces that compose these high desert landscapes are dependent upon these silvers of green that reside amongst the brown.
Riparian habitats – or land that surrounds and is influenced by a body of water – greatly impact the functions of arid ecosystems and are highlighted in this bird’s eye view imagery.
Presently, there is not a practical or set method that captures the naturally varied extent of these riparian zones. In order to improve land management practices and implement necessary conservation strategies, we can capitalize on the increasing availability of LiDAR–which is a remote sensing method that shoots laser pulses from an airborne system to measure the variable distances to Earth.
My research is focused on determining a way to accurately predict the extent of these vital vegetative communities.
The Dry Creek Experimental Watershed, located off Bogus Basin road within the Boise Foothills, served as my study site.
To begin, I used LiDAR data collected from a helicopter and special analysis tools within mapping software to determine the flow of water across the landscape.
From there, I generated a random sample of points along the stream network. I relied on satellite imagery to mark the extent of vegetation when present or marked a singular point when not present. After compiling the points, and additional influential variables like elevation, I transferred the data to a coding software. Within the software, I built a model that compiles important predictive variables and allows for an accurate picture of the riparian vegetation to be created. The key purpose of developing the methods and model is to close the gap that exists between land managers and the landscape itself. My research will ultimately provide further understanding of the presence of riparian habitats within high desert ecosystems as well as a series of tools that will allow the implementation of improved land management practices.
Riparian habitats mimic the look and function of the veins in that they carry vital nutrients throughout the landscape. These zones also protect and provide for plants and animals, maintain the soil and water systems, and mitigate the effects of climate change. Not only do these oases of the desert serve an abundance of practical purposes, but they are a critical means to life in the sagebrush sea. I welcome you to visit my virtual booth in the group B poster session–thank you.
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thanks so much, Ms. Vaage. Up next, we have our very last presentation this morning with Rylie Wieseler with Global Studies with a talk titled “Hong Kong’s Democratic Movement: A “Country” in Turmoil”. Rylie, take it away.
[RYLIE WIESELER]: Thank you.
My first exposure to Hong Kong’s democratic movement was through a high school friend. She would tell me about her childhood growing up in Hong Kong and often emphasized that her and her family both were and were not Chinese. Back then, the nuances between ethnicity and nationality flew completely over my head so, the topic was pushed to the back of my mind, I never asked about it, and it was forgotten.
My second exposure to the conflict was a news article, more specifically an image of the Hong Kong police throwing tear gas canisters into a crowd of protesters. Unlike in high school, this image of Hong Kong stuck with me, resulting in a rabbit hole that has led me to where I am today: presenting to all of you.
Discontent in Hong Kong has been rising over the years and in 2019, violence levels within the territory peaked. This in mind, the purpose of my research was to answer the question of why this was happening and as an extension, what the US specifically could do about it.
My research approach was a qualitative crisis analysis. Essentially, I read…a lot and from there, synthesized together everything I had learned into a final paper that discussed the local, national, regional, and global dimensions of the conflict surrounding Hong Kong’s pro- democratic movement. Although COVID has drastically slowed the protests’ momentum, their desire for democracy has not disappeared, making the likelihood for future confrontation high and conflict resolution paramount for ensuring regional stability. But, what is the big picture message of my research? First and foremost, conflict is complex. Like a pile of tangled rope, if we only focus on undoing a single knot, we may fail to realize that we are creating more. In the same sense, conflict in our globalized world does not call for a single, perfect solution, but synthesizing solutions that target several drivers of conflict.
Secondly, it urges us to consider our relative position of power within the international community and the validity of foreign intervention in conflicts, like Hong Kong’s, that are asymmetrical in nature. Hong Kong is very small, and the findings of my research show that the former colony is intrinsically tied to Mainland China on several dimensions (politically, economically, and environmentally). The implications of this are that 1) a clean break from the Mainland is not as easy as achieving universal suffrage or being recognized by the UN as a sovereign nation and 2) foreign intervention is absolutely necessary if the protesters want to achieve any sort of favorable outcome in this conflict. They themselves seem to be very aware of this reality, exemplified by the airport sit-ins that characterized much of 2019. Notably, American flags were not an unusual sight.
Hong Kong is trying to get our attention. As an international superpower, it’s important that we listen. Although none of us are calling the shots on US foreign policy, public awareness is a crucial step in shifting any political climate. We don’t have to be experts by any means, but being informed is a good first step. And it can be as easy as asking what it means to both be and not be Chinese. If you’d like to know more, please stop by my poster. I am number 59 in group B. Thank you!
[MICHAL TEMKIN-MARTINEZ]: Thank you so much, Rylie! And thank you everybody for your wonderful presentations. I’m going to stop sharing my screen now. Can we get a round of applause for our speakers? We can applaud, since we’re in a visual medium, using sign language applause, which is this, or you can use your reaction button on your screen.
Thank you everybody. Thank you, that was awesome! Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome!