Hawkeye Undergraduate Research Association
Undergraduate Student Panel
This panel presented their research at our October 30th, 2013 meeting.
If you are interested in being featured on our website, email iowahura@gmail.com a brief summary of your work.
Rebecca Koerner is a junior studying Communication Sciences and Disorders and Spanish. Becca does research in how bilingualism affects the development of language. Specifically, she is working with Dr. Christine Shea to see how perception and production of sounds are affected by knowing two languages. The agenda for the study includes non-word repetition tasks; discrimination and identification of sounds tasks; as well as others. This study looks to provide deeper research in the area of bilingual language acquisition.
James Ottavi's project
James Ottavi's research is in the cognitive psychology category. The lab he works in does research on reward and working memory and implicit learning, and how the two interact with each other. Implicit learning is learning a task or subject without being aware that you are getting better at it. James tries to see how rewards affect the implicit learning process through a computer program and analysis of data.
Kelly Daniels' project
Kelly Daniels researchs maritime-related disputes between dyadic countries. Maritime issues include ownership of exclusive economic zones (EEZ), fishing rights, natural resource endowments, and other sea-related issues. The information she processes is added to the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) database used for current and future research. Her mentor is Professor Mitchell in the Departments of Political Science and International relations.
Matthew Bailey's project
Matt conducts research in two areas: journalism and public policy through the School of Journalism and the Philosophy Dept. Matt’s research in journalism focuses on the practice of illegal insider trading among financial news reporters. And his research in public policy focuses on the treatment and rehabilitation of substance abusers in the criminal justice system, including the role of mental health and drug courts in criminal adjudication. Both of his studies advocate for legislative reforms aimed at reducing criminal activity and promoting the public interest through key social policy.
Grant Young's project
Grant Young does research on mutations of the human LMNA gene which cause diseases such as muscular dystrophy and dilated cardiomyopathy with the Department of Biochemistry. This involves creating a model of these mutations in fruit flies for study. His research includes dissection of fly larval muscle for enzymatic analysis of certain enzymes as well as dissection of adult hearts for immunostaining.
Brandon Sleik's project
Brandon Sleik completes research focusing on the impact of Shakespearean literature on German culture, literature, and history. His project focuses on the brief history of Shakespeare in Germany, while highlighting primarily the Schlegel-Tieck translations which are considered the paradigm for all English-to-German translations of Shakespearean plays. Also discussed is the reasoning as to why Shakespeare is considered Germany's third greatest writer. This particular study is to be considered an introductory model to serve as a precursor to other studies of Shakespeare within Germanic culture.
Other student researchers who were on the panel included: Steven Dominguez ("Development of Magnetic Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles for Application in Drug Delivery" through the Chemistry Dept) Steven works on a research project that happens to do with drug delivery via nanoparticles. He synthesizes these particles to have an iron oxide (magnetic) core and to have an ordered porous shell. His goal this semester is to load a chemotherapeutic drug onto the nanoparticles and to test the release of the drug in a phosphate buffer. We believe these nanoparticles will be an effective drug delivery system.
Ben Donovan: Development of grating alignment fixtures for the Off-plane Grating Rocket Experiment. Department of Physics and Astronomy
