Undergraduate Research Opportunity Center
N e w s l e t t e r |
July 20 2 0
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In The Summertime:
The Sequel
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We are excited to bring you the 7th Annual Monterey Bay Summer Research Symposium on August 7, 2020. This event celebrates summer research conducted across the Monterey Bay area by over fifty undergraduate students from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center representing ten different disciplines.
This year’s symposium will be held virtually. Students will present their research projects to symposium participants with a 10-minute video presentation along with an interactive Q&A. Be sure to visit our
website
for details!
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COVID Remains And So Does The Research!
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Last month, we got to learn about the great work Amelia and Jesus were doing surrounding the Covid-19 response across college campuses while Alicia and Saul continued their research at the Santa Lucia Conservancy.
CSUMB students participating in the UROC Scholars / McNair Scholars program participate in research seminar courses that trains them on brokering research experiences across the country. Though many REUs and summer programs were either cancelled or postponed because of the current health crisis, thankfully not all were. Here are what some of our undergraduate researchers are up to.
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This summer, Bryant Taylor earned the
MURAP (Moore Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program) fellowship
and is working under the guidance of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill professor, Dr. Ariana Vigil. This research centers on validating his body as a source of knowledge and resistance by performing a visual analysis over the photographs of anti-shelter-in-place protests for traces of white supremacy.
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The project centers on two theories: Imani Perry’s theory that “Race is something that happens, rather than something that is” and Kelly Oliver’s theory of false witnessing. In analyzing photographs of these protests, Bryant uses visual analysis methods. Through this, he focuses on how elements of the photographs (the people, colors and symbols, actions, etc) work separately and together to tell a story. From this analysis, he has noticed that anti-shelter-place protesters perform three different racialized elements: patriotism, the weaponization of language, and self-justified militarization, that together construct a false narrative oppression that both distracts from and reveals how white supremacy exists within their movement.
Bryant is a UROC McNair Scholar majoring in Humanities and Communication.
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Mariana Duarte was selected to work with the
Cyberinfrastructure Research 4 Social Change with Texas Advanced Computing Center
at the University of Texas at Austin under the mentorship of Dr. Kelly Gaither, Dave Semerano, and Justin Drake.
Her work consists of looking at mobility data from CA counties during the COVID-19 to construct a graph analysis by demonstrating any trends or changes in mobility during the pandemic. The questions she hopes to answer: Are people following policy? How have people's mobility in urban and rural areas changed before and during policy? Essential workers from low income areas are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and Mariana’s hope is to raise awareness for this issue to highlight the status inequities.
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This information may be used to predict low-income individuals’ mobility behavior during the current pandemic or future problems or natural disasters. The data was provided by the websites SafeGraph and X-Mode. She hopes that this research can influence policy by determining if people are following the shelter in place order.
Mariana is a UROC McNair Scholar majoring in Marine Science
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Laney Klunis is working within the diverse world of remote sensing at the
NASA’s Center For Applied Atmospheric Research and Education (CAARE)
at San Jose State University. Along with her mentor, Dr. Sherry Palacios, Assistant Professor at CSUMB, she will be exploring how phytoplankton biodiversity varies perpendicular to shore, across a nutrient gradient, from a coastal upwelling to a wind-stress curl upwelling region and how well can remotely sensed images portray this phytoplankton size class (PSC) distribution.
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As primary producers, phytoplankton community structure play a large role in the overall nutrient cycle with our oceans. Determining how PSC distributions shift in regard to weather anomalies (i.e. El Nino periods, the “blob” event, and strong frontal systems) may hint at potential shifts within higher trophic levels; given that different size classes support different trophic systems. With climate change becoming more and more of a focal point within the marine science world, her research will play a role in truly understanding what changes within the nutrient cycle may look like as temperatures in our oceans continue to increase. Laney is also using her research to compare the accuracy of remotely sensed data to the traditional method of collecting in situ data aboard a research vessel in hopes of confirming the detection of PSC from satellites.
Laney is a UROC Scholar majoring in Marine Science
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Melyssa and her team are looking at disaster preparedness and evacuation planning with considerations to new policies that have been created on social distancing guidelines due to extreme COVID-19 outbreaks in Florida that could make a community type more vulnerable, particularly low-income citizens in Hillsborough County, FL. Beginning with a Community Impact Assessment of the Tampa Bay area that mainly documented social and physical vulnerabilities of policies that might hinder hurricane evacuation and increase disaster risk, the team assesses how homeless communities are most at risk by monitoring health data relevant to Covid-19 and community data. The project is planning to engage local stakeholders through virtual interviews and/or surveys to understand approaches being used to adjust emergency management policies and to understand the role of social networks in preparedness planning particularly among homeless populations.
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She is serving as the point-policy person on any new laws that are being passed related to COVID-19 that could potentially put low-income individuals into a homeless situation. Melyssa is also doing independent research with Dr. Collins for the National Science Foundation on virtual learning experiences and writing a seperate literature review which at the end of the day focuses on REUs going online and the experiences from both students and mentors/PIs.
Melyssa is a UROC McNair Scholar majoring in Humanities and Communication.
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Emilia Lepe is currently working on her first research experience with the
NASA’s Center For Applied Atmospheric Research and Education (CAARE)
at San Jose State University
. She is part of the CSUMB center working under her research mentor Dr. Sherry Palacios. In collaboration with NASA CAARE, USGS, and the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project she is working on a project to help monitor the impact of restoration efforts of intertidal mudflats in the south San Francisco Bay. The microphytobenthos (biofilms) of these mudflats are an important energy source for fish, waterbirds and other consumers accounting for 50% of their diet. Specifically, Emilia is trying to use remote sensing algorithms to identify biodiversity within the biofilm. As a result, she is also finding the limitations of these algorithms. With this knowledge, she hopes to develop her own algorithms to expand current monitoring of biofilm biodiversity.
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Through the internship, she meets weekly via Zoom with all the other CAARE undergraduate interns, including Laney Klunis, and PhD candidates from multiple geosciences. They discuss career pathways and past research experience, the grad school process, while assisting one another with coding languages or modeling techniques. Though the field research was cancelled, most of the work is computational allowing her to continue this work.
Emilia is a UROC McNair Scholar majoring in Marine Science.
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For the past two years, Maggie Seida has been volunteering with Innoceana, a marine conservation organization that uses “innovation in the ocean” by engaging communities in technology-based science for the purpose of conservation and environmental monitoring. This summer, Maggie planned on using her newly developed research skills to take a more technology forward, conservation-oriented approach to research.
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Sans COVID-19, Maggie would have been working alongside the team in Tenerife to create a baseline survey of seagrass that would inform a large-scale restoration approach. Instead, by incorporating both past and current data (the team there is still diving), she is putting her ArcGISPro skills to use by creating maps that show seagrass population change over time. And while Maggie would have been using photogrammetry and underwater photography to create 3D models of corals in a marine national park in Costa Rica, she is instead analyzing the geospatial data of the coral colonies and learning about the best platform to include augmented reality as an educational tool in conservation tourism.
Maggie is a UROC Scholar majoring in Marine Science.
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Mariah Daniels was admitted into the
Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Science Center REU program
in Newport. Although she was initially selected to work in the Plankton Ecology lab broadly studying the ecology of marine fine, the closure of the university resulted in a transition to a remote summer program and subsequently her research project.
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Disappointment quickly turned to excitement when she discovered she would be working in the Big Fish lab under the guidance of Dr. Taylor Chapple studying the visual hunting strategies of Great White Sharks. Mariah’s role in the project focuses on analyzing video data from camera tags and prey decoys to study predatory behavior, determine apparent prey position during the pursuit of mobile prey, and angle of attack from moving and stationary prey. Dr. Chapple and the team will use this research to infer information about the movements, behavior, and physiology of white sharks.
Mariah is UROC McNair Scholar majoring in Marine Science.
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Since mid-March, my on-campus lab has not been graced by the typical sounds of experimental research into advanced battery chemistries: the hum of instrumentation fans, the clinking of glass vials, and, usually drowning those out, student Spotify playlists. Instead we've taken to analysis for odds and ends of data we collected over the last year and started a new sub-project into the theoretical side of one thing we usually measure experimentally: melting points that are lower than you'd expect them to be based on the chemicals you mix.
Becca Munster
, UROC McNair Scholar, stepped up to lead this new project and has shown tremendous independence and cleverness, especially given that predicting eutectic compositions and melting points is, let's say just a wee bit outside the scope of the research she's done before. This summer she's learned a new field, found literature that escaped me, and tested a theoretical framework developed for metal compositions to our work on organic mixtures for which we have our own experimental data in hand. The framework seems to need just enough modification that we aim to write and submit a manuscript describing her work by the end of the year.
I know from talking with other faculty that many students have risen to the challenges of 2020 in the same way as Becca. Thanks are due to all of you for your work and spirit.
Associate Professor
Biology and Chemistry
UROC McNair Scholar Mentor
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In a shift from international travel, fieldwork, and days on the ocean to shelter-in-place, this summer’s research experience took a turn for the virtual. Nevertheless, from the sofa, the kitchen table, the makeshift desk in the back corner of the living room, undergraduate researchers nationwide have persisted. They have rolled with the punches of a global pandemic and redefined the capabilities of a summer research experience.
While we wish our students could be taking advantage of whatever opportunities they missed out on, given the way they have adapted, we are confident they'll be better prepared. They will have a much more detailed understanding of their respective projects, their importance, and this will make them stronger assets in their fields. While experiences like fieldwork are important, the ability to succeed in a variety of conditions -- like a global pandemic -- is a life long skill that will set today's student researchers apart going forward. The work they have done form home is different from what they would have done in person, but in return, many have developed new skills in software, have become more self-directed and disciplined, and have contributed to their field with just a laptop. And that is pretty cool.
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We want to hear from you!
A few weeks ago, Heather Haeger, Education and Assessment Research Associate, moderated a graduate student panel for our Summer Researchers Program. Our students walked away with valuable tips on how to succeed based on their experiences, shared the challenges that they encountered and how they overcame them, but most importantly, how they managed all this while balancing life. The best part: the majority of the panelists were all CSUMB UROC Alumni meaning that they were able to connect with our students in a special way.
Did you get into the grad program you worked so hard to get into? Maybe you decided to join the workforce? Or perhaps you're married and have some future UROCkers on the way. Whatever it may be,
email
us and let us know what you've been up to since graduating from CSUMB.
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2020 Graduate Student Panel
(from left to right):
1st row: Heather Haeger (staff), Eric Barajas (staff), Parker Smith; 2nd row: Alexandria Cervantes, Paul Bump, Melissa Meredith; 3rd row: Daniel Olivares, Ari Perez, David Gonzalez
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There has been a lot happening in the world as of late, from the pandemic to the movement against racial injustice. Now, more than ever, it is important that we stay informed and be openminded. Here are some helpful articles on how to continue remaining safe and healthy as shelter-in-place orders slowly lift, and stories that advocate for a more inclusive academic environment.
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Folio Lab: Your Digital Portfolio
July 31 1pm-2pm
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Udall Scholarship
July 24 12pm-1pm
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Knight-Hennessey Scholars
Information Session Offered All Summer
(Only for Stanford University)
Website
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Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship
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Chat with us!
Want to get involved in research but don't know where to start? Set up a virtual consultation on the UROC website!
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