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

Research has found that risk preferences differ between men and women, with women tending to be more risk averse. For many individual’s, participation in athletics plays an important role in their social development, thus we might expect athletics participation to impact social outcomes including for example risk preferences. I evaluated the possibility that athletics participation correlates with risk preferences and consider how this impact may differ by gender.

This summer, I worked on a project titled “Exploring mathematical models of the transmission of COVID-19 and the efficacy of different management strategies” with my mentor, professor Rebecca Terry. My goal is to understand how coronavirus spreads within a population and explore how different factors affect transmission. Based on this exploration, I aim to consider how different management strategies may affect the spread of coronavirus through the population and compare the efficacy of different management strategies, such as quarantine and mask wearing.

In Senegal, as elsewhere, hip hop has been a key avenue of popular criticism and political action. While the genre has often been dominated by male voices, female performers have also been active participants in the Senegalese hip hop scene. Female hip hop artists are also gaining recognition as beat makers, rappers, and graffiti artists. Women are utilizing hip hop to make a space for female artists while also advocating for women’s rights and other social and political concerns.

For centuries, slave narratives and black history, specifically those of African Americans, have been researched and taught at all academic levels. The stories of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass stand out as markers of American Liberation and black agency. Although the movements sparked by these revolutionaries are exemplary, they are a double-edged sword. Douglass and Tubman are luminaries of the black experience. However, they are considered anomalies in the larger mainstream narrative, two of the few slaves who dared to fight for their freedom.

The education system in the US is quite flawed. It can work against students, teachers, and even parents, rather than working with them to create more opportunities, greater equality, and broaden knowledge. Many of these flaws are instilled into the system through the norms of education and the norms of teaching. Given the power of norms, we feel powerless to change a system that is not working for too many students. But this system must change.

This paper is about how primarily focusing on wilderness categorization may be a bad thing for environmentalism. Essentially, the paper links the history of capitalism, to the history of wilderness and explores how arguments for wilderness preservation seem to actually contradict many environmentalist goals. If you choose to read the document provided realize that it is a working draft. I'm using this paper as the basis of a grad school writing sample and it will go through major revisions in the coming months. Still, I hope you find it interesting.

The 2017 ranch invasions in Laikipia County, Kenya, are linked to a colonial legacy of land alienation that emphasizes land use for elite purposes, which plays out today on a national and international sphere. The purpose of this presentation is to highlight an early colonial history of Laikipia County, as seen with primary source research. In doing so, one may understand that the idea of "land conflict" is not new to the Maasai pastoralists who call Laikipia home, and create questions I seek to explore in my Honors Thesis.

For my research fellowship, I studied the way climate change will affect our political systems. In particular, I researched how, as climate change worsens, the need for ever more radical action increases. Because of this, democracy is beginning to fall out of favor among scholars, pundits, and scientists for its slow and deliberative nature that seems unable to handle the vastness of the crisis before it.

This is a representation of a classroom from the early Cold War. It is intended to be an interactive study tool, museum exhibit, or educational resource that can attract and engage a general audience. The viewer is free to click around and explore the virtual space to discover primary source material as it would have appeared in the classroom setting during the height of Cold War tensions.

Football professionals are always concerned about injury due to the high level of contact within the sport, but non-contact injuries are often overlooked. This summer, I attempted to investigate the relationship between non-contact injuries and their relation to the playing surface a player was injured on. The data was provided by the NFL on a site called Kaggle, which is where companies will put out their data for data scientists to analyze. The data was provided in three separate datasets, which would have to be combined to make a complete analysis.

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.