Donald K. Rose University Fellows Endowment

This summer I was granted the opportunity to complete a fellowship under the guidance of Dr. Adam Fox where we examined the effects of variable delays on impulsive choice in rats, using a delay discounting task. Delay discounting tasks involve repeated choices between a smaller sooner reward and a larger later reward. Consistent choice of the smaller, sooner alternative is an impulsive choice and associated with maladaptive behaviors that negatively affect health and psychological wellbeing. The opposite, consistent choice of a larger later reward, may be thought of as self-control.

Bats in the Northeastern US offer important ecosystem services such as eating their body weight in insects like mosquitos and crop pests. Unfortunately, bats are under threat from habitat loss, wind turbine strikes, and White Nose Syndrome. Due to their decline and importance, it is critical to monitor their diversity and abundance to inform their conservation. 

This summer, I had the chance to contribute to a long-term research project on American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) reproductive success in northern New York, supported by the St. Lawrence University Fellowship Program and my advisor, Dr. Susan Willson. I worked in the field with Mark Manske of Adirondack Raptors and students from Paul Smith’s College to help band more than 200 chicks in nest boxes across St. Lawrence and Franklin counties.

Emotional labor can influence multiple levels of our mental health, from depression and anxiety to quality of life and how individuals cope with stressors in life. This summer I studied the effects of mindfulness-based resilience training (MBRT) on the emotional labor of individuals in the general public. The type of mindfulness that I focused on involved self-regulation and learning to have a separation between an individual's self and their experiences (i.e., emotions during events).

During my fellowship, I developed a cross-platform physical therapy app to provide accessible, customizable solutions for athletes and individuals managing chronic injuries. I focused on learning Flutter and Dart to build the app, starting with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that included hard-coded routines, a simple user interface, and data handling capabilities. 

This past summer I completed my fellowship which worked with the NSF funded program SCORE. This experience was all thanks to my advisor, Dr. Ivan Ramler, and the Donald K. Rose University Fellows Endowment.

This summer I aimed to build an Enigma Machine; an encryption machine used by the German military to encrypt and decrypt secret messages during World War II. The machine was made to work mechanically when it was made for the first time in 1918. Our implementation uses an Arduino microcontroller to control the circuitry of the rotors as well as parts of the plugboard. Furthermore, the design has a user interface with a keyboard and a digital display that allows the user to change the settings of the machine.

This project analyzed data from two surveys that I completed in Spring 2021 and Spring 2022 concerning the water bottle filling stations on St. Lawrence University campus. Our goal was to determine students' perception of the filling stations through various questions concerning their role in preventing single-use plastic bottles, as well as the filling stations' cleanliness, maintenance, and water quality.

Our study attempts to add to the literature involving the hippocampus and temporal processing. We plan to achieve this by creating a causal experiment that examines the relationship between the hippocampus and interval timing. In this study, a double-blind stereotaxic surgery is performed on the hippocampi of two groups of Wistar rats: one in which the rats receive a sham injection and one in which they receive an excitatory neurotoxin. The rats are then subjected to a temporal attention task.