St. Lawrence University

In assistance to Dr. Stephanie Wang’s work “Negotiating Hakkaness: Gender, Labor, and Identity Across Chinas, Taiwan, and Malaysia," I conducted research under her direction across cities in China and Taiwan examining Hakka identities, a Han Chinese subgroup whose communities have historically suffered from displacement and marginalization. Our research was driven by the intersections of gender and ethnic and cultural identity that Hakka women embody. We examined how Hakka women's identification has been reshaped through immigration, labor, and gender expectations.

This summer, I interned at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY as a museum assistant in the biology and geology departments. In this role, I organized the university's fossil collections, created a new labelling system for lab specimens, as well as designed and installed a display in the Johnson Hall of Science.  During these weeks, I had the opportunity to work with multiple professors and faculty members to understand their research and expand my proficiency in various skills. 

Over the summer, I was lucky enough to work with Professor Lisa Torrey building a machine learning model to identify growth of invasive water chestnut around St. Lawrence county using drone imagery. We worked alongside biology Professor Brad Baldwin, leader of the ongoing Water Chestnut Project (https://sites.stlawu.edu/brad-baldwin/water-chestnut-project/), which aims to study and fight the growth of this invasive species in the rivers and lakes surrounding SLU.

As the student manager of St. Lawrence's permaculture garden, I was responsible for daily maintenance of the garden (weeding, mulching, planting), managing weekly volunteers, creating interactive farmers' market displays, and planning, advertising, and running community events at the garden.

This summer, Martina conducted 30-40 weekly hours of research where she collected, quantified, and analyzed the amount of microplastics present in the Grasse River.

Any biological explanation of cognition must come to grips with the fact that she who offers the explanation lies among the living systems that are her objects of study, and because of this her explanation must include herself and an account of the processes by which she is able to give such explanations. Such is the basis for the biological phenomenology of Francisco Varela.