Every summer, Swarthmore 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 our students' submissions from 2023!
Bella Wiebelt-Smith ‘26 is a rising junior doing research at the University of Notre Dame.
Wiebelt-Smith is studying a protein involved in a rare neurodevelopmental disorder called Kabuki Syndrome. “I am creating lentiviruses to infect neurons so they produce a lot of the protein. Then we stain the infected cells with antibodies that help us to see where the protein is and what its functional impacts are on the cell.”
Photos: (1) Wiebaldt-Smith working at the bench in the lab (2) Stained neurons through a confocal microscope
Jalyn Miller and Howard Wang, both class of ‘26, are here on campus this summer doing research in Singer 124/125.
The duo are working in collaboration with Professor Joseph Towles to study how various muscles control thumb movement in situ, with application to designing reconstructive surgical procedures that restore the ability to use one’s hand after neurological injury.
“We constructed a device that secures the specimen for testing and initiated the construction work of a motor system. These devices in conjunction with three cameras will capture 3-D movement. Our goal is to study thumb movement, contributing to the broader research on modeling hand function, which in turn can assist individuals in regaining mobility after hand injuries.”
Photos: Setup for the Motion Tracking System
Zoe Sperduto, class of 2026, is doing nanoscience and optics research at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center Nanofabrication Lab in New York City, thanks to a grant from the CIL.
“I am working for a start-up company based out of the lab called Vyir Tech that is developing a new model low-cost, high-quality optical infrared camera. Currently, I am researching UV nanoimprint and engineering a set-up that can be done relatively cheaply in the lab to imprint diffraction gratings onto thin films.”
Photos: (1) Sperduto in the lab (2) Research in action (3) Sperduto and colleagues
Maia Chandler, class of 2025, is in New York City, conducting research in the Entomology department of the American Museum of Natural History with Drs. Lacie Newton and Jessica Ware.
“I’m working on Nannothemis bella Uhler 1857, the smallest dragonfly in North America. Although more common in the northern part of their range, N. bella is of conservation concern in the southern populations. We constructed species distribution models (SDMs) to define factors in habitat suitability and determine how projected future habitat may change; additionally, we sequenced the mitochondrial COI gene from 34 museum samples to evaluate population structure.”
Photos: (1) Chandler doing fieldwork (2) one of the N. bella museum specimens (3) DNA extracts
My research is affiliated with ongoing dissertation work at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. This summer, my PI, Noelle Elizabeth Spencer, and I concluded three studies that explored policy efforts/gaps in the menstrual equity and period poverty movements in the US and UK. Our first study was presented as an oral talk at the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research (SMCR) 2023 conference this July, and I have designed an infographic for it below.
Mina Mandic, class of 2025, is at Caltech in the David Anderson Lab
The purpose of my project is to explore the neural circuits underlying various aggressive behaviors. Drosophila (flies) display “wing threat” behavior - a complex, multi-motor aggressive behavior, composed of at least four different actions: wing elevation, pump, turn, and charge. I aim at identifying the role that specific neurons play in controlling these behaviors.
Images:
1) A graph that shows the frequency of wing threat behavior when the neuron of interest is activated using light (the red region means the light is on)
2) A confocal image of a ventral nerve cord that has been stained to help visualize the neuron of interest
3) A snapshot of a behavior experiment where the fly is showing "wing elevation" - a form of wing threat behavior.
University of Lincoln-Nebraska
I am researching Sustainable Civil Engineering at UNL, specifically investigating the effect of temperature on a corn silage bioleaching system in order to efficiently recycle lithium-ion batteries. The corn silage reactors were placed under either mesophilic (35°C) or thermophilic conditions (55°C), and black mass (which is spent lithium-ion battery material) was added at day 16 of the experiment. The mesophilic temperature ended up producing better results (higher leaching efficiency), which has interesting implications for the chemical and biological processes involved in reductive bioleaching!
I've been working at Underhill Library this summer. I've catalogued old concert programs from Swarthmore for the archives, dating as far back as 1948! I've also shifted the entire collection around, searched for missing books and reclassified and relabeled many items.
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
We aim to use continuous flow chemistry to synthesise a mixture that can undergo frontal ring-opening metathesis polymerisation (FROMP). Our goal is to prepare a mixture that produces a material with good thermomechanical properties and possesses a pleasant odour.
Aidan Corpus is a rising sophomore doing research in McCabe Library’s Lib Lab as the Digital Scholarship Intern under Dr. Licastro to establish the Immersive Realities Initiative.
I have been testing different Extended Reality programs for pedagogical and research purposes, collecting and cataloging applications for professors to utilize in their courses, working to coordinate scholastic programs, and developing outreach methods and program support demos. I also have ongoing research exploring different methods in creating a 3D virtual reality tour of Swarthmore’s campus with 360 degree cameras.
Our goal is to develop the digital infrastructure needed to support the use of Extended Reality at Swarthmore and to make it accessible to all students and faculty.
Check out this McCabe Library Virtual Tour.
Images:
1) Presenting research at the Tri-Co Digital Scholarship Summer Interns Meet-Up
2) 3D Modeling of Swarthmore's Campus
3) Creating digital infrastructure for courses and tours
Slate Hyacinthe '24 spent the summer in a growing village development project in Senegal.
“Under the international organization JiwNit - "Seeding Humanity" in Wolol - I lived and volunteered in Kamyaak Village, where I sought to better understand sustainable agriculture and alternative development paradigms in the Senegalese context.”
Photos: Slides of Hyacinthe’s work.
Alyssa Wheeler, class of 2023, is in Iowa this summer conducting research in the Physics Department at Coe College.
“Two of the phase transformations commonly observed in glass are structural relaxation and crystallization. In this work, we propose that these phenomena can be followed by observing changes in the glass electrical properties. To test this hypothesis, the electrical properties of lithium triborate glasses under different heat-treatments was observed using Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS). So far, preliminary results have corroborated our hypothesis.”
Photos: (1, 2) Shots from the lab, (3) poster for the project
This summer I worked with two postdoctoral fellows at Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. I worked under the Department of Global Health, in the Ecology and Emergence of Arthropod-borne Pathogens unit headed by Dr. Sarah Bonnet. I worked closely with one of the post-docs - Eva Krupa - on a tick-borne pathogens project. The purpose of our project was to provide recommendations and risk maps for the public about the risk of tick bites and pathogen spp. transmission in green spaces of Ile de France. Specifically, my individual project aimed at exploring and improving the strategies of pathogens detection in either single or pooled nymphes using RNA extractions, cDNA, PCR, and gel electrophoresis techniques. Additionally, I cataloged previous pathogens detection data of ticks from the Spring and Autumn of 2022 to determine disease burdens in urban areas of Ile de France.
Photos: photo1: Lab members helping to collect ticks outdoors in some forest of Ile de France; photo 2: Prince weighing agarose to make agarose gel electrophoresis for pathogen detection; photo 3: morphological views of tick species - Ixodes ricinus (adult and nymphes) - under an electron microscope.
