April 8, 2008
Diversity of CAS students showcased at conference
Allison Demartino discusses her project, “Playing with Your Literature,” with performing arts professor Karl Kippola. (Photo by Jeff Watts)
Stan is a pink troublemaker. He’s got a plan to corrupt two lion cubs named Alem and Eshe, and it involves an apple.
Sound familiar? It’s not the Bible. It’s John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in a version for children adapted and illustrated by senior Alison Demartino.
The literature major was among the AU students presenting their projects at the 18th annual Robyn Rafferty Mathias Student Research Conference. The graduate and undergraduate students delivered papers on topics as diverse as astrophysics, philosophy, and education, gave performances in the creative and performing arts, and displayed their findings in poster presentations.
Demartino’s colorful pages full of lions and Milton were displayed at the Katzen Arts Center a few feet from a presentation titled “Toxicity of Pesticides,” by a team of organic chemistry premed students. A bit farther away was a display of plastic skulls and retinae labeled Synthesis and Medical Applications of Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA). And in between the lions and the skulls, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama smiled from a display on information graphics and the primaries.
It wasn’t just a day to showcase student talent. It was a day to highlight the dramatic diversity of the students at the College of Arts and Sciences.
Demartino’s Milton-for-children project began as a way to do something different as a literature major. “We all read lots, and after a while, there’s only so much Dickens you can read, and so much theory. So why not children’s literature? It’s our first introduction to literature,” she says. “Why not introduce kids to great writers? When they get older, maybe they’ll understand it a little more, and like it.”
Rachel Schaengold is a senior graphic design major whose display, from her honor’s capstone project, showed ways of presenting information on political candidates. A visual presentation can help to condense complex information in a way that’s easily understandable, she said while standing in front of images of the candidates that depicted different ways of showing how many delegates they’ve won.
“It’s interesting being in the middle of all these science people,” she said, with a glance to the poster “Carbon Nanotube Usage in Human Tissue Scaffolding.” It makes her think, she says, about how her own field can help scientists present their information. Schaengold won the prize for Best Poster in the Arts and Humanities.
Among those on the science side were senior Burgundy Kimm and sophomores Juliana Fritz and Stephen Kos, all taking Organic Chemistry II. It’s an admittedly tough course, but working on their research project on chemicals in the food chain helped them, Kimm said, to understand it in an immediate way.
Since all have plans to go to medical school, “we wanted to do research pertinent to health issues,” Kimm said. “We decided to stick to food, because it pertains to everyone.”
The trio began with a literature review and worked to synthesize the information for presentation. The resulting display was filled with titles such as “xenoestrogens” and “generic organophosphate group,” complete with molecular diagrams.
“A lot of people haven’t heard of xenoestrogens,” said Fritz.
The students explained that it’s an estrogen mimicker that gets into the food chain in a variety of ways, including through pesticides and the coatings on food cans.
“It’s made of a lot of lipid molecules,” Kimm said.
“So it’s good for creating a barrier,” Kos continued.
It might also have an impact on human reproduction and other issues, although the jury is still out. At any rate, after all their research, the students don’t much care to consume it. Before they began their research, Kimm had a vague idea that organic was better, she said, but now she’s a lot more willing to spend an extra few dollars for organic food.
Creating the project is itself a way to learn, said biology professor Chris Tudge, CAS science and math coordinator. Some do presentations, as they would in a scholarly conference. Others condense the information to the form of a poster, just as professionals do.
“It helps them to synthesize a particular topic to the point where they can explain it to someone,” Tudge said. “There are some fundamental learning experiences: what’s relevant, what’s irrelevant.”
Visitors also learned about the variety of work being done at CAS.
Prizes were awarded for best research and best presentations by graduates and undergraduates in a variety of fields. Among the winners: Best Research in the Sciences by a Junior or Senior (physics senior Johanna Teske for “Circumstellar Disk Astrochemistry”), Best Research in the Arts and Humanities by a Freshman or Sophomore (Jake Silva, for “The 1978 World Cup in Argentina: Politics and Social Paradoxes”), and Best Quantitative Study in the Sciences by a Graduate Student (Natalie Hanson, biology, who posed the question: “Are Anadromous Alosa Herring Important Nutrient Vectors?”).
The science project “Synthesis and Medical Applications of Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA)” was among those presented at the CAS conference.
