Students at the M.D. Anderson Library’s Elizabeth D. Rockwell Pavilion will showcase the fruits of a summer’s worth of undergraduate research at 4 p.m. today.
"The purpose of UR Day is to give students who have done this work and research a way to share it with the university," said Karen Weber, program manager at the Office of Undergraduate Research.
Undergraduate Research Day, held by the Office of Undergraduate Research and the Honors College, started in 2007 with only 20 posters last year. This year will feature 59 poster presentations along with oral and creative presentations, which will begin at 5 p.m., ranging from subjects such as health and architecture to communications and the arts.
Stuart Long, interim dean of The Honors College and associate dean of the Office of Undergraduate Research said the event will enable students and faculty to see undergraduate research in all its diversity.
"Hopefully it will also encourage other students to participate and encourage more faculty to begin sponsoring more undergraduate research," Long said.
Student presenters come from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program, or SURF. It is a competitive-entry program in which 40 students are selected and given $2,800 so they can devote all their time and effort toward their research project.
"The students begin doing their undergrad research once they’re paired with a faculty member. They then work very closely with their mentor on their research project, and it really helps to build a strong bond between the student and the professor," Long said.
Biology and biochemistry senior Ifeoluwa Bamgbose performed research on ovarian cancer and on ways to study it through the use of nanoparticles.
"We made a nanoparticle which is injected into the patient to study the cancer to test the reactions of the nanoparticles," Bamgbose said, who worked with a postdoctoral student on the research from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Mondays through Thursday.
Bamgbose and her mentor Malavosklish Bikram, assistant professor of pharmaceutics, were successful in that their nanoparticles helped to identify tumor cells within the human body.
Economics senior Stacey Joldersma chose to do research human behavior as it relates to decision-making. Along with her mentor, economics professor Nathaniel Wilcox, Joldersma came up with a new way to look at risky decision-making.
"The research borders on psychology and economics. We set up an experiment where we used incentives to predict how people make choices," Joldersma said.
