The undergraduate laboratory is located in the Lowe Undergraduate Education Center. Photo courtesy of UConn Photo.
The 12th Fall Frontiers Poster Exhibition was sponsored by the Office of Undergraduate Research and showcased 73 different undergraduate research projects, each exploring a different research topic. The exhibition, which took place on Wednesday, October 23rd from 5pm to 7pm, allowed students to share their discoveries and showcase the work they have put into their projects.
The event was attended by Dan Schwartz, vice president for academic operations at the University of Connecticut, who briefly opened the event with remarks.
“It’s teaching and it’s research,” Schwartz said of his experience as an undergraduate researcher. “For me, undergraduate research best encapsulates both of these elements. It’s like the perfect blend of research and teaching.”
“You have the opportunity to work with world-leading researchers who are at the top of their fields – world-renowned researchers,” he said. “And it’s also a great educational opportunity. There’s no better way to learn.”
As both Schwartz and other attendees noted, the students who participated in the event spent the summer researching their topics and compiling that information into posters that will be shown at the event. Student researchers stood by the project and were ready to expand on their findings as needed.
Projects also covered a wide range of majors and fields, including computer science, biology, political science, psychology, and various areas of engineering.
Seventh-semester biology student Crystal Zhu’s research focused on the classification of the fungal genus podosticina. In her project “Phylogenetically-based taxonomic revision of the lichen-forming fungus Podostictina,” Zhu used DNA barcoding and chromatography to identify the different types of Podostictina. We analyzed the composition and clarified the taxonomic names of different species of Podostictina.
“From a conversational perspective, if we don’t know what species are present in a particular area, we can take conservation action, but it may be in the wrong direction,” says the study. Mr. Zhu, who was talking about what he thought were the advantages of “Basically, research feeds into research…I would not have had as much data as I did without the work of others.”
Zhu’s project was part of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and was advised by Professor Bernard Goffinet.
Another student who performed at the event was Nicolas Rodriguez, who was a research assistant to Associate Professor of Theater Arts Jennifer Skapetis-Ticer. Rodriguez’s project, titled “Singing Into Accents: Intonation and Music,” focused on how musical terminology can be used to describe how different accents sound.
“This project is, in a sense, taking jargon from music and converting it into an accent, so that the actors and musicians can recreate that accent as best they can,” Rodriguez said. He used a program called Pratt to break down and analyze how different accents sound to the human ear.
“This is definitely a different field of research for me,” he says. “It was tedious at first. It took a little bit of work because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted. Understanding these accents and knowing how it translated into music was It was really interesting.”
Rodriguez spent about 90 hours working on the project, which took about two months to complete.
“It gives them the opportunity to collaborate with professors, but also to get into areas of research that aren’t specifically teaching or something like that. …It gives them a general purpose for research, at least for me. ” said Rodriguez when asked about the benefits of the study.
The Fall Frontiers event is part of UConn’s Month of Discovery, which includes four signature events aimed at getting students excited about research and innovation. Although the Fall Frontiers event was the last of these signature events, UConn’s Innovate Labs will continue to host events throughout October.
