Daniel F. '65 & Ann H. Sullivan Endowment for Student/Faculty Research

Many lives have been impacted ever since the first-time novel corona virus was observed in Wuhan on December 2019. With 5,403,218 confirmed cases of patients who have contracted COVID-19 as of 8/16/2020 along with 170,052 deaths in the United States; it remains vital to understand prevention and advance general public health against COVID-19 as well as progress in finding potential treatments. (Johns Hopkins Resource, 2020) Similarly, on March 13th, 2020 St. Lawrence University transitioned from in-person to online learning in attempt to facilitate social distancing and self-isolation.

Spatial cognition in rats has long been a model system used to explore links between neural encoding of the environment and behavior. Remarkably, however, little is known about how animals and humans navigate in three-dimensional (3D) spaces. This summer I plan to investigate the role of the hippocampus in processing vertical space. The hippocampus is a brain structure well-known to be involved in learning and memory, especially spatial memory. However, it is not clear whether the hippocampus is used to process the vertical aspects of space.

My Modern Physics lab with Dr. Munir Pirbhai taught me a lot about spectroscopy, spectrometers, and their applications, how they work, and how to carry out experiments in an effective manner. Spectrometers are expensive devices but could be made for a very low cost, and I wanted to see if we could create an inexpensive spectrometer that can be used for the same applications as an expensive one. After taking computer science courses with Dr. Lisa Torrey and Dr. Choong-Soo Lee, I had a strong background in a few programming languages which was very helpful.

The air pollution is the most serious problem in China, and people from other countries only know that environmental problem, but don’t understand its trend and compositions. I wanted to find the trend of smog and using a statistical model to see the trend and correlation. What I enjoyed the most this summer were the daily meetings with Professor Ramler as we explored the new methods for graphing different kinds of data, which I never learned in class, and dealing with the questions I had.