URSI Symposium showcases research

Hayley Tsukayama News Editor

Robots! Lasers! Fruit flies! The Undergraduate Research Summer Institute (URSI) symposium, on Sept. 26 has all that and more. The annual ten-week program allows students to do in-depth researching projects in fields including biology, physics, mathematics, psychology, environmental studies and astronomy.

This year, over 60 students worked with Vassar faculty on 49 research projects. Most of the participants were Vassar students, though research teams also included students from Wesleyan University, Colgate University, Wheaton College and James I. O’Neill High School in Highland Park.

The program is nationally known for giving undergraduate students the chance to work closely with professors, producing revolutionary research in many of the fastest-growing fields in science. Many students, after finshing their research, are published with their professors in academic journals.

“This year’s URSI summer was the best one I have had in 16 years here at Vassar,” said Professor of Biology Kate Susman, crediting collaboration between her lab and that of Associate Professor of Biology Nancy Pokrywka for the success of her research.

The two professors worked with Anna Payne-Tobin ’08, Amory Meltzer ’09, Tasmin Rahman ’09 and Michelle Krasny ’09 on individual projects examining “the role of microtubule-associated proteians at two different life stages, early embryonic development and in mature neurons, in two different model organisms, fruit flies and nematodes,” said Susman.

Of her project, Payne-Tobin said “basically, our lab uses Drosophila (fruit flies) that are missing the minispindles gene, and we look at their eggs to figure out what goes wrong.”

By observing eggs—used because they are essentially large, single-celled organisms—the researchers were able to identify what function the missing gene serves in normal cells. Payne-Tobin said she learned valuable researching skills, in addition to building ties with her fellow researchers.

“2007 was probably [one of] the most productive URSI summers at the observatory, due to a very fortunate combination of clear weather and four energetic astronomy students,” said Professor of Astronomy Fred Chromey.

Under Chromey, Claire Webb ’10, Alex Shvonski Wheaton ’08, Erin Scott Colgate ’09 and James O’Neill High School senior Alison Goldblatt, “not only observed quasars all night every clear night at Vassar, but also used the Web to observe some of the same objects with a telescope in Australia when it was daytime in Poughkeepsie.”

In the Physics Department, students Sarah Palaich ’09 and Jake Arlein ’09 produced “very positive” results, said Assistant Professor of Physics Brian Daly, measuring the scale heat and acoustics of nanostructures—literally very small structures—with ultrafast lasers.

Josh de Leeuw ’08 and Professor of Psychology Ken Livingston worked on programming robots to learn on their own. “The goal of our research is to develop algorithms that will allow us to create robots that develop throughout the course of their ‘lifetime,’” said de Leeuw. “This summer we looked at basic quesions about how the type and amount of information that robots are exposed to affects their ability to learn basic navigational skills.”

Livingston and de Leeuw plan to continue their research during the academic year. “Once navigation is mastered,” said Livingston, “we can move on to things like object recognition, reaching and grasping, and classification, again working to build software that learns as the robot interacts with the world.”

Three research teams will present their work to the whole symposium: de Leeuw and Livingston, Virginia Engel ’08 and Professor of Biology John Long, who studied the science of how whales swim, and Tessa Solomon-Lane '08 and Professor of Biology Erica Crespi, who will speak on how environmental stressors affect the sex of fish.

Other projects included an environmental studies survey of Casperkill creek, a mathematical foray into reverse tessellation and research on whether the media’s portrayal of race, especially in popular crime shows, affects a person’s ability to make legal decisions.

Of the program itself, Payne-Tobin said, “It’s the URSI students who make the summer here fun. Everyone this summer was enthusiastic about their research and enjoyed talking about it all the time. The barbecues were always dominated by scientific discussion, which the science nerd in me really loved.”

All full-time Vassar students are eligible to apply to URSI. Each summer, about 35 URSI Fellows (usually rising juniors or seniors) and about 15 URSI Explorers (usually rising sophomores) spend the summer researching in Poughkeepsie.

To meet with these researchers and others and to learn more about their various projects, attend the symposium in the Villard Room at 3 p.m. on Sept. 26.