Bethany Usher loves the energy she feels when she attends the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.
“The whole place is electric for three days,” she said.
As director of the Students as Scholars initiative through George Mason University’s Office of Student Scholarship, Creative Activities and Research (OSCAR), Usher will accompany 67 George Mason students to the 30th annual conference, April 7-9, in Asheville, N.C.
“It’s the most prestigious undergraduate research conference in the country,” Usher said.
About 3,900 students covering multiple disciplines will present their research in front of peers and, most important, Usher said, graduate program recruiters. Students applied to the conference with abstracts of their research that were reviewed.
OSCAR, with support from the George Mason Foundation, is paying the way for Mason’s attendees, who will take a bus to the conference and stay four-to-a-room at a local hotel. A pizza party, also on Mason, is scheduled for one night of their stay.
“We’re particularly proud that we’re not an elite program,” Usher said of OSCAR, which facilitates student research with grants and assistantships. “We’re proud we’re able to give students across the university the ability to be part of research.”
Here are a just a few of them.
Erica Aileen Ty could never solve Rubik’s Cube. So when the Mason senior, majoring in dance and communications, thought back to her childhood in Southern California to inspire her choreography research project, she thought of that frustrating puzzle.
“I just thought it would be interesting to see if there are designated paths these dancers had to take, how much movement you could fit into going from Point A to Point B,” Ty said.
The result is “Fixation,” a production for nine dancers who make simple movements as they travel in precise pathways in small spaces, sometimes together, sometimes in groups of three as though they are the squares of the cube being manipulated. Eventually, the dancers begin to break free of the rigid patterns and their movements become more exaggerated.
“It relates to how as humans we find a path and we stick to it, and it’s an act of bravery to break out,” said Elizabeth Price, an associate professor in Mason’s School of Dance and Ty’s mentor. “It’s an abstract idea.”
And that is part of the difficulty with dance as research.
“With art it’s a little bit of a subjective field,” said Ty, who will show the film of her choreography at the conference. “What you don’t know is if someone is going to get the message I have created this piece that, hopefully, gets the audience experiencing something different. If I were to get anything out of it, it’s more adding something to the field of the arts.”
Bradford Webb believes there will be wide-ranging applications for his research on how feet absorb pressure while walking. Such information could be used to make better-fitting orthotics, the junior computer engineering major said. Athletes could alter their gaits to decrease injuries.
That hits home for Webb who, as a high school junior in Hampton, Va., stopped running cross-country because of flat feet.
“It got to the point [where] it was just too painful,” he said.
Webb resumed running as a senior with the help of orthotics.
He plans to monitor 10 to 12 people in his study. Sensors in shoes will record pressure at various points on feet during a 50-yard walk. The data will transfer by wire to a laptop Webb will carry as he walks with his subjects. He then will analyze the aggregate values.
Because he has only one sensor, subjects will have to walk multiple times with the sensor on different points of their feet. Time-consuming, but worth the effort, Webb said.
So far he only has tested it himself.
“A lot of people think if they just wear something more comfortable their foot pain will go away,” Webb said. “Maybe there is a better tool that can be more precise when you do these measurements.”
What accounts for the rise of insurgent candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential campaign? Media outlets have struggled to answer that.
Chris Messier, a research associate at George Mason’s Center for the Study of Neuroeconomics, believes it has something to do with where voters get their information, specifically through what he called the heterogeneous information networks of Internet media, which simply reinforce what someone wants to read or here.
“A lot of the information being tossed around in blogs, in Twitter feeds or on Facebook is not integrated into what has traditionally been seen as political information,” he said. “Different parties can access information through these sources and remain localized within these networks.”
“It’s pretty compelling,” said Kevin McCabe, director of the center. “What Chris is doing is asking, what happens when information becomes more accessible?”
It is a difficult topic to study, Messier said. How words, phrases or ideological trends spread across social media can be gleaned through text analysis. A deeper dive into the analytics will come in the fall when Messier begins a PhD program in economics and gains expertise in data mining and writing software to analyze that data.
Perhaps then, Messier said, he can know if we have a well-informed electorate or one that is simply reinforcing biases with cheap information.
“Because people don’t trust traditional media outlets or traditional government statistics, they find it easier to check their inbox to see what someone forwarded them,” Messier said. “There is this struggle in the media to understand why this is happening, and so far they’re falling short.”
The narrow leaf cow wheat plant is so small and nondescript, even Mason senior Maryam Sedaghatpour, one of its most ardent admirers, admits it is easy to miss.
“You can easily walk over it and not even notice,” she said.
But the environmental science major has spent more than a year studying this semi-parasitic plant that, as she said, “can tell the bigger story about climate change.”
That’s because the narrow leaf cow wheat plant—also known as Melampyrum lineare—grows best in cooler temperatures, which explains its distribution in temperate North American forests, including those in Virginia. But as temperatures have warmed, the plant has moved to higher ground and cooler environments, Sedaghatpour said.
In that sense it is an indicator of climate change, especially in its southern Appalachian mountain habitat.
“It has conservation implications,” said Sedaghatpour, who also has done fieldwork on the little green plant in western Canada. “As the climate continues to warm and it moves up the mountain, eventually there’s not going to be anywhere else for it to go.” And the plant, she warned, might not survive.
“Her work is interesting. It’s never been done before for this species,” said Mason plant biology professor Andrea Weeks, who works with Sedaghatpour on her research. “The practical consequence is we will understand more about conservation genetics.”
That is definitely something to notice.
Nathan Leys admitted he was “insanely, socially awkward” as a kid in Des Moines, Iowa.
It is difficult to imagine, listening to the Mason junior, a government and international politics major, eloquently explain his research, which explores whether a spike in contributions from the defense industry has influenced how congressional legislators vote.
In other words, Leys said, “Do businesses donate to certain legislators because the legislators are already in their favor, or are the legislators in their favor because of the money?”
To answer his question, Leys developed an index of favorability toward the defense industry for U.S. House representatives in office from 2001 to 2015. He also used the DW-Nominate Scale to adjust for legislative ideology. The scale, developed by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal in the early 1980s, accounts for a legislator’s entire congressional voting record. Leys also adjusted for a congressional district’s economic dependence on defense spending.
Another control was the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which held, basically, that independent campaign expenditures, including those by corporations, do not automatically indicate corruption or create the appearance of corruption.
After adjusting for other factors, including any representative’s pre-existing favorability toward the defense industry, Leys found legislators who generally voted in favor of defense appropriations received the bulk of the industry’s campaign contributions.
Still, proving causality was difficult. But for Leys, this seemed clear: “I think you can make a really interesting argument that if independent expenditures don’t cause corruption, it’s that we’re defining corruption incorrectly.”