Pullman, Wash. — The Washington State University Emerita/Emeritus Society of retired faculty has presented awards to support the efforts of seven students engaged in mentored undergraduate research, scholarship, and creative activities.
“Each year, our organization takes the opportunity to encourage and fund the work of students university-wide who are seeking to answer questions, or reinforce knowledge, in their field,” said Larry Fox, society co-chair. This underscores the group’s mission to continuously advance the university, community, and the state by making awards to exceptional students engaged in scholarly pursuits.
The society offers two types of awards, and students submit applications for funding that are reviewed by committee members from the society.
Undergraduate research awards
There are recipients in five categories of the society’s Excellence in Undergraduate Research and Scholarship this year.
Behavioral, Social, and Economic Science category: Mariah Landon, a WSU Pullman neuroscience major mentored by Caroline Owens. Her research is titled, “Mixed-methods Analysis of TikTok Videos Posted by d/Deaf Creators.” It examines content posted by members of the “d/Deaf community” on TikTok. It indicates that social media platforms have exploded in popularity and so have studies on the impact social
media has on the general population. But its impact on marginalized communities, specifically the d/Deaf community, is lacking, she said. Deaf, she said, refers to the shared culture of the Deaf community whereas deaf (lower case “d”) refers to physical deafness. Her study is multifactorial and involves a literature review and then a quantitative and qualitative data analysis of TikTok videos. They were divided thematically and engagement rates in these themes were analyzed. Landon said, “The most popular themes were Advocacy and Awareness, Daily Life Experiences, and Humor and Entertainment, while the least popular is Deaf Culture and Identity. Engagement rates for each theme may be less a reflection of how the widespread population of d/Deaf users of TikTok utilize the platform, and more a reflection of the content produced by d/Deaf creators that audiences find most engaging.” She notes that this is a preliminary study that warrants expansion of sampling and a more complete analysis of content produced by d/Deaf creators on social media.
Physical Sciences and Mathematics category: Brandin Farris, a mathematics major from WSU Vancouver mentored by Bala Krishnamoorthy and Stephanie Porter, for his project titled, “A Method for Image Analysis on Roots with Fluoresced Nodules.”
The design and implementation of “an algorithmic framework to investigate red and green fluorescent nodules within a two-dimensional image of a root system” is the focus of the investigation. Fluorescence was used to highlight nodules as red, green, or both.
The algorithm has the additional capability to measure the distances of nodules along the root system. Nodules impact productivity; measuring their sizes and distribution can help find relations between the strains of rhizobia and plant health. Currently, some programs can segment nodules but there is no pipeline for categorizing, measuring, or calculating distances of segmented nodules. The new algorithms were implemented to segment and skeletonize the roots in the image, convert them into a graph (vertices and edges connecting them), and calculate the pairwise distances between nodules along the root system.
Current work focuses on developing algorithms to “untangle” the graph from the root system into a tree, and removing noise caused by roots crossing over each other in the image. All implementations are done in Java so that the framework can be made available to the public as plugins for “Image-J”, a widely used software suite for image analysis in life sciences.
Engineering and Applied Sciences category: Nicholas Kraabel, a WSU Pullman computer science and economic sciences major mentored by Kirti Rajagopalan, whose project is titled, “Advancing Hourly Temperature Disaggregation for Agroecosystems Modeling: L-S-T-M-based Approach.”
Properly simulating the agricultural environment requires accurate temporal and spatial temperature data. But available data often lacks complete spatial coverage and may not consist of hourly data. Current methods for disaggregating temperature data from daily to hourly intervals introduce significant errors, producing results unsuitable for many applications such as estimating apple sunburn risk. The research questions are, “Can advanced deep learning techniques improve the accuracy of daily to hourly temperature disaggregation?,” and “Do these improvements translate to enhanced performance in real-world modeling scenarios?”
To answer these questions, a specialized Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network model was developed and used with a dataset from the Washington State Agricultural Weather Station Network, encompassing over 1.1 million station-days across various stations and years. Utilizing this model, a substantial reduction in median absolute error was achieved by lowering it from 1.56°C with previous state-of-the-art models to just 0.62°C. This improvement led to a significant enhancement in the accuracy of sunburn risk assessment models, with an 11-fold reduction in the number of error days. The study underscores the potential of advanced machine learning techniques and data to enhance our ability to reliably use weather data for decision-making in agriculture.
Biological Sciences, or Biosciences, category: Annika Dawley, a WSU Pullman biology major mentored by Wes Dowd, whose project is titled, “The Role of Carotenoids in the Acute Thermal Tolerance of a Splashpool Copepod (Tigriopus californicus).”
This project focuses on determining the effects of ocean heat waves due to global warming on the physiology of marine organisms, in this case a splash-pool copepod. In a controlled, replicated laboratory experiment, the student determined the effect of four carotenoid levels—nutrients contained in algae that are part of the copepod’s diet—on their heat tolerance. Except for the highest level, the findings supported the hypothesis that higher carotenoid levels are correlated with higher heat stress tolerance. The student suggested two mechanisms that may be causing the copepods exposed to the highest carotenoid level to have less heat tolerance than the controls and proposed a future experiment to understand this relationship.
Arts, Humanities, and Creative Activities category: Jasper Willson, a WSU Pullman multimedia journalism major, whose project is titled, “Forest on Fire: A Documentary About the Changing Relationship of Fire in the Sequoia Ecosystems.” She is mentored by Lisa Waananen Jones.
Willson created a short-form video documentary on old growth Sequoias, their ecosystems, and their changing relationship to fire, including the impacts of climate change. She did all the work on this interdisciplinary project herself, including research, filming, storyboarding, video editing, audio recording and editing, and music soundtrack production. Focusing on Coastal Redwoods in Southern Oregon and Northern California, and Giant Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada range of California, her recorded interviews with experts serve as the foundation for the video’s demonstrations of the importance of fire for the survival of these ancient trees and the new dangers posed by climate change. The documentary is already being distributed. It demonstrates the medium’s effectiveness for communicating scientific knowledge to non-experts.
Arts and Humanities Grant recipients
The second type of Emeritus/Emerita Society award is the Undergraduate Research Grant in Arts and Humanities. This award provides one-thousand dollars ($1,000) in funding to support original undergraduate scholarship. Recipients are:
Valentina Iturbe Fuentes, a WSU Tri-Cities biology and psychology major, for her project titled “Women Science Writing in Argentina at the Turn of the 20th Century.” She will assist her mentor and history professor Sabrina González in research for a book chapter. The project focuses on the most important Argentine education journal of the period. She will create a catalog that documents the ratio of female-to-male educators writing in the journal, when women began participating in its pedagogical debates and innovations, and the positions on education and childhood informing their writing. Because the project will create the first catalog of this primary source, the result promises to become a valuable resource for future scholars working on the history of education in the region. In addition, it has publication potential with the National Teachers Library in Argentina. Her mentor praises the language and technical skills that Valentina brings to such digital archival research and envisions future collaborations including a presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference in fall 2024.
Akira Park, a WSU Pullman English major and McNair scholar who received an Emerita/Emeritus Society undergraduate research award last year for the design phase of this project. Her research project is titled “Studying the Inclusion of Asian-American Literature in English Classrooms” and it explores why educators are underprepared to teach Asian-American narratives in their classrooms, include relevant classroom texts in their curriculum, and examine the adequacy of their pedagogical approaches when serving students of color and dealing with issues of Asian-American identities.
In the second year of this research, her mentor and English-education professor Ashley Boyd praises the progress Akira has made and the quality of her research. With WSU Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, she has instituted a survey for teachers in the Pacific Northwest and completed an inventory of relevant texts from online databases as well as from local libraries.
Currently analyzing this collected data, Akira has worked to communicate her research findings to the academic trainers of teachers. Having already made two presentations at national conferences, she plans to distribute her survey more broadly, include interviews with practicing teachers, and present updates on her research at the National Council of Teachers of English conference this year.
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A video of the awards ceremony can be viewed at https://daesa.wsu.edu/awards-and-recognition/awards-ceremony/. The Emerita/Emeritus Society awards begin at about the 32-minute mark.
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By Bev Makhani