Every summer, students from across the disciplines participate in research and other projects, often siloed from one another. The Libraries wanted to provide an opportunity for students to share their research and learn about the amazing work going on all over campus and the world. Take a look at students' submissions from 2022!
Swarthmore College Math Department (advisor: Michael Dougherty)
Noncrossing partitions are a common combinatorial object in which points are placed around a circle and put into groups. Our research has considered what properties are retained when the points are placed in a new configuration.
Elyse Decker '23, in southern Alaska, is conducting semi-structured interviews with experts in food sovereignty in Alaska Native communities to ascertain how state, national, and international laws impact Indigenous food sovereignty. The purpose of this research is to provide a better picture of the complex legal system surrounding food subsistence in Alaska and potential solutions that come directly from impacted communities. It is also incorporating theoretical approaches from International Relations including Constructivism to see how Indigenous norms can impact policymakers.
Malavika Eby ‘25 is engaged with research at the Magee-Womens Research Institute, in affiliation with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, as part of an ongoing Ph.D. dissertation project.
Eby’s team explores the help-seeking behavior among women with domestic violence (DV) experiences in an online health community (OHC) on Reddit. The questions and analyses pertain to what kinds of help were sought and received by women with DV experiences (emotional support, help to identify abuse, etc.) as well as what kinds of advice were given by OHC members, and its relevance to women's needs. Work also includes manually annotating resources - website links, books, and phone numbers shared by OHC members - and categorizing the help-seeking behavior in this vulnerable population.
Richard Garcia '24 is interning in Dr. Cullen Taniguchi's lab, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, focusing on pancreatic cancer and radiation. His project entails establishing specialized cell media for the growth and differentiation of gastrointestinal organoid cultures in vitro. These 3D cell cultures are able to organize in structures exhibiting the cell types found in human intestines, serving as a vector for drug and radiation treatment.
Tiffany Jiang '24 and Max Miller '23 are currently doing research under the guidance of Professor Olivero. Their research titled "Financial Access of Underserved Communities" is taking place on campus. Their research aims to understand the financial access of lower income households in the Greater Philadelphia area, and aims to perform a detailed statistical analysis of inequalities in access to credit in both formal and informal credit markets.
Zachary Kelly ‘25 is spending the summer on campus in the Phonology Lab at Pearson Hall.
Kelly’s working on a morphological transducer for, and a website on, an endangered indigenous language of North America. The tools, which are being developed in partnership with the community, will play a large role in keeping their language and a vital part of their culture alive after hundreds of years of them both being slowly destroyed.
Zixuan Liu '24 is on campus this summer, researching pulsars with Prof. Natalia Lewandowska under Swarthmore’s Physics & Astronomy Department. She is also working on the literature search for her independent research project on Laboratory Studies in the field of Science and technology studies (STS).
Pulsars are one type of neutron stars that result from the death of stars that are much more massive than our Sun. Liu is analyzing radio data from the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) of one specific pulsar called J1713+0747, which has highly precise timing through its high-speed rotations. J1713 is used to detect gravitational waves, and this research will assist Liu’s further research in Cosmology.
Thomas Makin ‘25 is assisting in scientific research at Purdue University.
Makin’s team is training mice with chronic neural electrode implants to respond to somatosensory and motor cortex ICMS (intracortical microstimulation) by participating in short behavioral trials within a custom-fabricated enclosure.
The initial trials couple a stim with an auditory tone, and the mice are trained to poke the right port if they feel a stim/hear a tone or the left port if they feel/hear nothing. The project then analyzes directly recorded neural data to find patterns associated with the process of learning from ICMS, with potential applications in neuroprosthetics and brain-computer interfaces. Learn more at https://github.com/Dadarlat-Lab/stim-reward
University of Pennsylvania - Yodh Lab - Mentor: Charlotte Slaughter
Liquid crystals are a state of matter that various substances have between liquid and solid. Their key property is that they are characterized by the nematic phase describing a clear directional order of the molecules but no positional order. My project analyzes droplets of 5CB (a type of liquid crystal) and how their configuration transforms under a magnetic field. With no applied magnetic field, the droplet is in the radial conformation with liquid crystals arranged from the center to the outer edges. A horizontal magnetic field causes the liquid crystal molecules to rearrange and our lab has observed up to the axial configuration where the liquid crystal chains are horizontal with a slight bend. These droplets have defects due to this change, a place within the liquid crystal sample where the molecules do not obtain a uniform direction to point in (Figure 1).
The droplets start out with a point defect in the radial configuration and then open up to a ring defect in the axial configuration (Figure 2).
My project focuses on using fluorescent lipids to visualize and understand the defect transition in response to a magnetic field. Topological defects were synthetically formed using both the planar rubbing procedure and the theta cell procedure (Figure 3). Fluorescence microscopy was used to observe and take images of how the defect lines change over magnetic field influence.
Olivia Marotte ‘24 is working remotely from Palo Alto, CA and Little Rock, AR with Rosine 2.0, a community-driven art project using collective practices to explore harm reduction and healing in Philadelphia.
Marotte’s research includes studying the internal challenges and operations of a socially-engaged art project, conducting community discussions, and exploring the impacts of such an ambitious endeavor.
Lauren Martindale '25 is conducting research at the University of Minnesota as part of the Life Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Program (LSSURP).
Lauren is researching the role of dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens in modulating neuroeconomic decision making using the Restaurant Row behavioral task and fiber photometry. Dopamine's function has been subject to debate with the two main camps arguing that it encodes either learning or motivation, but current theories suggest that it controls both of these functions and more by modulating resource allocation. Gaining further insight into the role of dopamine in decision making could lead to an increased understanding of mental illnesses characterized by aberrant decision making such as substance use disorders and the development of new treatments.
Zahara Martinez '23 is doing research in the Friend's Historical Library, cataloguing and uploading the forgotten names of people enslaved by the Quakers to the internet. Whitney Grinnage-Cassidy '24 and Zahara hope that the information shared will give black Americans more tools to find information about their enslaved ancestors for genealogy purposes. Given the history of slavery in the Americas, genealogy is a field that has historically excluded black Americans; our research hopes to rehumanize and lay to rest the people who had their lives stolen from them.
Shane Nachsen ‘25 is spending the summer in Maryland with the National Institute of Health’s National Cancer Institute.
The mission of the NCI, established in 1937, is to conduct and support cancer research with the goals of prevention, identification, elimination and biological control.
Nachsen’s work at NIH-NCI is on engineering CAR T Cells that will fight Neuroblastoma by transfecting multiple nanobodies into these cells, all of which have shown they can lead to the destruction of these tumor cells.
Maya Newman-Toker ‘25 is researching remotely with Swarthmore faculty Michael Wehar and Alyssa Zhang ‘24 for the Computer Science Department.
Newman-Toker’s work is formulating JavaScript algorithms for computer generated artwork, with the eventual goal of developing generative AI designs. Currently, AI artwork uses image data and descriptions from around the web to create new images from user-inputted keywords. Here, the team is hoping to find ways for a computer to create patterns from the ground up - with a dataset of algorithms instead of finished images.
For more information on the project, check out Newman-Toker’s blog post https://michaelwehar.wordpress.com/2022/07/10/algorithmically-generated-visual-designs-4-spiderwebs/
Ben Pauley ‘23 is on campus this summer, doing research in the Science Center under the Physics & Astronomy Department.
Pauley is studying a pulsar, a particular type of object left behind after a massive star dies - specifically the Crab Twin pulsar (PSR B0540-69) - using x-ray data from the NASA mission called NICER to learn more about how it spins and emits radiation.
Trisha Razdan ‘25 is working remotely from the Bay Area in support of research being conducted in the lab under Professor Eva-Marie Collins at Swarthmore.
Razdan is investigating signs of aging in asexually reproducing freshwater planarians by looking at 2 species of the worm, and determining whether visible genes correlated with aging are expressed in later generations of tails, compared to earlier generations. The work predominantly consists of working in R Studio and Galaxy to manage and sequence RNA data that’s been gathered from multiple generations of tails.
Eleanor Rodes '25 is researching across England, and attending/ presenting at a conference in Lisbon this summer. Eleanor has been working along leading scholars of English and Scottish traditional music, researching different types of printed ballads and songs in tradition, and helping with the creation of indices and archive catalogs. Eleanor has also been working with the East Anglian Traditional Music Trust to facilitate easier access to materials and music, and to put together an information booklet to accompany the Trust's Maypole, which is often hired by local schools.
Sylvia Xi ‘25 is working with Professor Joshua Goldwyn and Anna Jing ‘24 for the Swarthmore College Math Department.
Xi investigates cochlear implants, seeing how timing differences of sounds at the two ears affect an individual’s ability to localize and perceive sounds. Xi’s project models a two part process consisting of the auditory nerve and MSO neurons. The auditory nerve model is calculated using first order linear differential equations to model the stochastic probability of neuron spiking behavior. The MSO Model, the second part of the process, uses a nonlinear system of differential equations to take in outputs from the auditory nerve model to simulate MSO spiking behavior with varying interaural timing differences.
Alyssa Zhang ‘24 is working with Prof. Michael Wehar and Maya Newman-Toker '25 in the Swarthmore College Computer Science Department to write a series of Javascript algorithms that generate visual art and designs. We have created a private web interface to generate and save the images. Our next steps are to collect data from our image reviewers and create a data set that we analyze to try to quantify which images are considered “better art”.
Annabel is working on campus with Iyin Ogunyinka '23, Kina Nichols '23, and Ellen Wang Scripps College '25 (left to right in the first photo) in Professor Ann Renninger's lab to investigate how kids learn science. Using literature review, daily workshops observations, interviews, and surveys, the team works with the four Science for Kids (SFK) summer workshops to determine how elements of the learning environment support change in science interest and belonging in middle school Chester Children's Choir (CCC) members over a 5-week program. After collecting data, we will run analyses and synthesize our findings to provide helpful feedback so that the SFK program can even better support its future participants.
