Junior Fellows Projects 2010-2011
RUSSELL BEAUMONT
Project Title: The Social Sustainability of Relief Housing
Description: Natural disasters and poverty cause detrimental housing shortages all around the world. Many organizations are devoted to providing shelter and sustenance for those in need, but fewer focus on the social implications of such aid and the necessary guidance--both for the victims and government--needed to lift a community out of despair. My research will examine physical as well as cultural needs following a housing crises in order to generate long-term design solutions.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Larry Speck
SAMUEL BIENVENU
Title: Producing Protein Prisons to Illuminate a Molecular Key
Description: Affecting over 30,000 individuals in the U.S. alone, Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is one of the most common life-shortening genetic disorders in the world. Sufferers of this disease have less than half of the average lifespan due to the combination of their weakened immune system and a particular property of the ubiquitous bacterium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This pathogen persists in these patients' lungs despite constant antibiotic treatment and eventually forms colonies and communities called biofilms. In the biofilm state the single-celled bacteria cohere and act as a multi-cellular organism. Cooperating confers boons to the biofilm community including a resistance to antibiotic medications and the ability to more easily damage and digest lung tissue. Ultimately, the growth of biofilms in the CF patients' lungs leads to their untimely passing. With my research, I hope to discover the molecule responsible for the transcriptional transformation that grants P. aeruginosa its ability to abide antibiotic attack. Implementing my background as a physicist and the techniques of my mentor's biochemistry lab, I create traps small enough to catch and confine individual bacterium. These cages of porous protein provide a suitable environment for the microorganisms to survive while at the same time sequestering them for experimental manipulation.
Faculty Adviser:
HANNAH BISEWSKI
Title: Surrealism and the Threshold of Modernity
Description: The Dadaist literary movement that surfaced during the first World War and the Surrealism derived from it shortly thereafter is a radical departure from any previous literature. Conceived at an intellectual and political crossroad, the tendencies of this movement include the subversion of values in place since the Enlightenment. Because the production of Surrealist writing takes place in the space between traditional syntax and semantic derive, readers are forced to cling to the literary forms rather than content to orient themselves in each text. This shift in focus from content to form reflects a distrust (or even disregard) in the ability of the individual to articulate himself honestly and successfully, within the social confines of modernity. I am addressing the intellectual and political implications of the sudden non-traditional treatment of language present in Surrealist literature from a structural standpoint, contextualizing the movement and its writers historically.
Faculty Adviser: Dr. Jean-Pierre Cauvin
IAN BRIDGES
Project Title: Reason Theory in Moral Particularism
Description: My research is two-fold. The first part involves decomposing moral dilemmas, in order to demonstrate one of the central tenants of moral particularism; the rigidity of moral principles leaves them unsuitable for serving as the basis of moral judgment. The second consists of showing how moral judgment can be derived from the application of practical reasoning to these broken down dilemmas.
Faculty Advisers: Professors Daniel Bonevac and Jonathan Dancy
ABRAHAM CALLAHAN
Title: Radical Historiography: Thucydides and Howard Zinn
Description: Thucydides and Howard Zinn's historical narratives stood in stark contrast to the general perception of history in their respective eras. In 5th C. B.C. Athens, the presentation of history was, in some senses, more entertaining and superstitious than objective and scholastic. Conventional American History today is often vastly oversimplified and about as objective as high school textbooks present it. This project will examine these historians and their settings in place and time in order to extract and compare what makes them similarly "radical."
Faculty Adviser: Professor Thomas Palaima
MORGYNN HANER
Project Title: Measuring Experiential Avoidance
Description: In clinical psychology, the term experiential avoidance is defined as a refusal to stay in contact with one's painful emotions or experiences. Prominent researchers have done extensive work with experiential avoidance and have established the importance of researching this tendency-including how to measure it and what its implications for mental health may be. I plan to develop a new measurement of experiential avoidance using the Scrambled Sentences Test as a model. The original SST was designed to measure cognitive biases and their relationship to major depressive disorder and proved to be very successful as demonstrated by numerous studies. The SST also seems to be more sensitive and able to detect biases in ways of thinking that are not easily observed in questionnaires, which makes it a unique and invaluable measurement.
Faculty Adviser: Dr. Stephanie Rude,
KAYLEIGH HUGHES
Project Title: Swift and Voltaire: A Comparison of Eighteenth-Century Satire in England and France
Description: Satire has been long been an important literary force for drawing attention to pressing social issues. Particularly, in eighteenth-century England and France, there was much to be satirical about. My research will consist of an in-depth comparative textual analysis of the works of Voltaire and Jonathan Swift, in their respective native languages and will draw conclusions about their work and their particular social environments.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Karen Pagani
NITYA KUMAR
Project Title: Sri Lankan Post-war Recovery
Description: My research concerns Sri Lanka, an island off the coast of India. After a 27-year long civil war that just ended in May of 2009, the "Teardrop of India" remains in a state of social and political disarray, especially in regards to what future lies ahead for the major minority group, the Tamil people. My research examines the effect of the war on Tamil youth, as well as existing needs and possible solutions for this group of people.
Faculty Adviser: Dr. Kamala Visweswaran
JAMES LAMON
Title: The Survivalist Fiction of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace
Description: I'm looking to explicate how the postmodern fiction of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace struggles to adapt itself to the digital age. In the broadest sense, these authors participate in literature's struggle to remain relevant during a period of exponential growth in digital media. More specifically, I'm interested in how this larger issue appears across their technologically dystopic fictions. Situated within realities parallel to our own, DeLillo and Wallace's characters deal with issues of identity, solipsism, and mortality-all concepts challenged by the technology of their fictional worlds. While DeLillo and Wallace envision absurd and, at times, bleak futures for technology and humanity, the trends they base these predictions on have only increased. As such, their fictional endeavors have largely become our reality.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Martin Kevorkian
MATTHEW LEVINTON
Title: Free Thought and Social Unity: Founding Efforts to Tame Tyranny of the Majority
Description: When French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 1830s, he encountered a political system that he ultimately found impressive, but that was, he believed, inherently threatened as well. Tocqueville explained that deep within the fabric of the American democratic state was a pervasive threat of majority tyranny-an intangible yet ubiquitous danger posed by the omnipotence of majority opinion in all aspects of American society. Tocqueville, however, was not the first to appreciate this problem, for America's own Founders had themselves wrestled with the same dilemma. I am interested in studying how, through the society the Founders sought to cultivate and the institutions they sought to craft, they hoped to both check the threatening power of a majority tyranny, and to moderate the content of that dominating opinion itself. I intend to research James Madison and Thomas Jefferson's ideas specifically, focusing on how they worked to address the tension they predicted would emerge between majority and minority opinion, and how they endeavored to shape the character of that tension through efforts such as the educational project behind the University of Virginia.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Lorraine Pangle
KATHERINE LUETHCKE
Title: Analyzing protein-directed regulatory mechanisms of DNA damage repair
Description: DNA is constantly bombarded by potential mutagens such as sunlight and chemical compounds that we encounter daily. The mechanisms of genetic repair for any resulting lesions are intricate and powerful, yet extremely delicate. Even slight impairments to this system often lead to an accumulation of DNA damage that irreparably thwarts the natural cell cycle and leads to malignant mitotic division, also known as cancer. I am conducting an investigation on the mechanisms of DNA repair, specifically focused on elucidating the regulatory roles of the protein factors that precisely orchestrate this critical series of events. Such knowledge could catalyze the development of pharmaceutical treatments that duplicate or enhance these protein properties and consequently safeguard against or retard the progression of cancer.
Faculty Adviser: Dr. Vishy Iyer
CHRISTINE MANTHURUTHIL
Title: High-resolution fMRI reveals distinct forms of associative novelty activation in the medial temporal lobe
Description: Previous research has indicated greater medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation when encountering novel versus repeated events. However, novelty responses can take on several forms. For example, stimulus novelty (that is new versus old stimulli) is distinct from the focus of this study, associative novelty (that is new, versus old, stimulus configurations). Associative novelty can be further broken down into associative novelty per se, which are simply novel stimulus configurations, and associative mismatch novelty, which are novel stimulus configurations that violate existing expectations. Many studies have found that while MTL cortical regions are more sensitive to stimulus novelty and associative novelty per se, hippocampus responds more strongly to associative mismatch novelty. Additionally, PFC has also been shown to be important in processing the relationships between objects. In this study, we used high resolution fMRI to characterize different associative novelty signals across MTL as well as PFC; specifically, we were interested in first, whether there was a dissociation of associative novelty signal types between the hippocampus and the surrounding cortical regions and second, whether there was an apparent associative mismatch novelty signal in PFC.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Allison Preston
CHARLES NWAOGU
Project Title: The Role of Foreign Agents in African Disharmony
Description: To varying degrees, the exploitation of religious and ethnic differences has fostered armed and violent catastrophes worldwide from Bosnia and Kosovo to Sudan. Though these problems may initially seem to be internally-bred, it has been shown that foreign agents are likely contributors to these conflicts. I will seek to analyze the extent to which international actors, such as Western corporations and agencies, have contributed to religious/ethnic conflict within the modern African continent, with particular focus on Nigeria and Egypt.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Peter Trubowitz
JILLIAN OWENS
Project Title: Victors, Not Victims: A Congregational Study of America's Largest Church
Description: Joel Osteen, senior pastor of Houston's Lakewood Church, preaches to more than seven million Americans each week, 43,500 of whom flock to see him in person in his basketball-arena-turned-church. Heir to the nondenominational church his late father founded in 1959, Osteen has transformed Lakewood into America's largest and fastest growing church, boasting three Sunday services in its 16,000-seat sanctuary, along with dozens of classes, ministries, and community events. But why do Lakewood's Sunday morning services attract such a large crowd? My Junior Fellows project will draw on techniques of ethnography and reception theory to pose an answer to this question, looking not at the preacher, but at members of his flock as they respond to, interpret, and reinterpret what they see and hear at Lakewood.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Thomas Tweed
KELLI SCHULTZ
Project Title: Who Controls History? The New Red Scare Behind US History Textbooks
Description: In the spring of 2010, social studies curriculum gained much attention in the media when the Texas State Board of Education voted to add overwhelmingly conservative content to US History textbooks. Though contentious, the debate surrounding textbooks is hardly new. In fact, the battle over who controls US History can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century when the process of teaching American values to children became extremely political. My research will compare the Rugg textbook controversy of the 1930s and 1940s to the recent Texas Board of Education decision. By examining the fears surrounding Rugg's progressive books and the media's attack that followed, we may perhaps glean insight into our current political climate and the impact this decision has made on the future of education.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Mark Smith
EMMA TRAN
Project Title: The Politics of Science
Description: Despite common belief, the sciences are not epistemologically unique disciplines that are immune to the limitations that characterize other branches of knowledge. As with any other academic discipline, there is always a bit of what Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolution, calls "arbitrariness." That is to say, empirical data must always be interpreted, consolidated, and communicated through some form of human intervention. The subjectivity the underlies much of science's methodology and processes are particularly apparent when governmental and institutional policies are established to restrict the funding and access to scientific research. My own research will examine how science policy and communication can regulated-and even, at times, hindered-the scientific process. Taking from my experience with various types of science research institutions (public, private, and international), I hope to gain the understanding necessary to develop policies and strategies that would continually improve the progress of scientific research.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Moon Draper
RYAN TRUBY
Project Title: Synthesis of a Hybrid Plasmonic-Superparamagnetic Nanoparticle Contrast Agent for Magneto-Photo-Acoustic Imaging
Description: Magneto-Photo-Acoustic (MPA) imaging is a novel multimodal imaging technique which couples photoacoustic (PA) imaging and magneto-motive ultrasound (MMUS) to obtain medical images with enhanced molecular, spatial, and contrast resolution at considerable depths. In previously reported studies, plasmonic and superparamagnetic nanoparticles have been used to provide imaging contrast in tissue for PA imaging and MMUS, respectively. Therefore, I aim to synthesize a hybrid nanoparticle that simultaneously exhibits both plasmonic and superparamagnetic properties and demonstrate that this nanoparticle is an effective contrast agent for MPA imaging. Once functionalized with the proper targeting moieties, this contrast agent can specifically label and allow for the targeted MPA imaging of various pathologies - even during their earliest developmental stages.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Stanislav Emelianov
ALEXANDRA VAN BRUMMEN
Project Title: Inhibiting Synuclein Aggregation to Increase Spinal Cord Recovery after Injury
Description: In the United States, it is predicted that there are nearly 40 new cases of spinal injury per year per million people, with costs for recovery extending into the millions of dollars, thereby demonstrating the importance of resolving this problem. The purpose of this research is to find a way to increase the ability of neurons in spinal cords to regenerate after injury. We are using the lamprey as our model organism. Lampreys are small jawless fish. Like humans, they are vertebrates. However, unlike humans, their spines regenerate, thereby allowing simple observation of recovery after injury, and they have 30 giant reticulospinal (RS) neurons that are very easy to observe during regeneration. By studying the lampreys, the ultimate goal of my project is to find a substance that could also increase spinal cord regeneration in humans
Faculty Advisor: Professor Jennifer Morgan
LUCAS WOLLENZIEN
Title: Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin: a Study in Composition and Performance
Description: Composed in 1720, Johann Sebastian Bach?s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin reflect a brief but important period of secular instrumental writing in a career primarily devoted to religious music. Although published posthumously in 1802, these pieces became only remotely popular in the middle and late 1800s, with editions published by romantic violinists such as Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim. In the 20th century, Bach's sonatas and partitas became widely recognized as a staple in the solo violin repertory, and have since been subject to a wide array of interpretations and recordings. My presentation will include a brief history of these pieces as well as an examination, of the various performance methods that have ensued. I will also
perform selections from these works alongside a general analysis of their composition.
Faculty Adviser: Professor Eugene Gratovich,
