The Tanner Fellowship Award Fund

This summer, I had the honor of shadowing Dr. Isabel Llano and Dr. Alain Marty, Senior Research Scientists Emeritus, at the SAINTS-PERES Paris Institute for the Neurosciences. During my time there, I joined the Cerebellar Physiology team that aimed to unravel the role of the cerebellum in sensorimotor integration, from synaptic to systems levels. Specifically, the biophysics of synaptic transmission and how it is integrated by the cerebellar cortex microcircuit during sensorimotor integration in awake-behaving animals was the main focus of the study.

While last semester I spent a course learning how to design my own research project, this summer I started doing it. I spent 8 weeks living within a commune in rural Virginia and learned what it was like to live in an income-sharing community with 75 other members. While I spent some time in the garden, cooking community meals, and packing vegetable seed packets, I also spent time doing in-depth interviews, participatory observation, and ethnography.

With the funds I received from St. Lawrence this past summer, I was able to support myself as I completed an independent research project throughout the country of Jordan, while I resided in Amman. As a Multi-Language major, I have had the opportunity to learn some of the Arabic language at St.

"Neijuan (involution)" is a popular word in China today, and it is also a social phenomenon among the modern younger generation. The word "involution" was originally used in the field of anthropology, but now it has gradually become a frequently mentioned word in the daily life of Chinese society. In Chinese society, the younger generation is even called the "involution generation".

I was born and raised in the second most dangerous city in America, Detroit, Michigan. When you are from a city full of crime and poverty, hardships become endless. As a child growing up in these conditions your options are limited. You grow up to either engage in crime, spend your life in jail, continue the low income life you were born into, lose your life as a victim of crime, become a victim to crime by losing your life, or pursue other paths. Sometimes in places like Detroit, the other paths are what changes your life in many good ways that you don’t realize until you're older.

My project focused on examining the pre-existing manifestations of bias in the game development industry and as, a Black woman game developer increasing my skills in order to boost a socially aware counternarrative. It is essential for all people to see members of their community’s accurate and empathetic portrayals, especially within interactive media. During my project, I studied various aspects of game design including the use of 2d and 3d assets, in order to create three prototypes within Unity.

STEM majors are notoriously known for being difficult, but socioeconomic conditions generate barriers that make these even more challenging for marginalized populations, limiting access to the research community.  Personally, I didn’t realize how much I loved research until I completed a summer research assistantship at CU Boulder.  Without the luck of being in the right place at the right time, I would not have gotten that same opportunity and now, it is my mission to destigmatize research and make it more accessible to students like me.

In a course on-campus, I presented a project about the ways in which spatiality is designed to uglify behavior and/or bodyminds. In the course we studied “ugly laws,” which is a term that has “become the primary way to refer to [...] laws, which targeted the overlapping categories of the poor, the homeless, vagrants, and those with visible disabilities” (Schweik & Wilson 2015).