Chalk it Up to Undergraduate Research
When you walk up to the D.H. Hill Jr. Library on the morning of the Sidewalk Symposium, you’re greeted by music, excited chatter and colorful chalk drawings that invite you to look closer. Those works of temporary art aren’t only decorative — they’re illustrations of the important and often groundbreaking research being conducted all across our campus by undergraduate students.
Working alongside faculty mentors, undergraduates in any major can tackle experiments and studies that contribute to ongoing research projects — or launch their own.
There are so many benefits you get from doing research. Even if you decide that’s not for me, you haven’t wasted your time.
Organizers of the Sidewalk Symposium hope visitors leave knowing that getting involved in research at NC State is accessible and that there is support available for both students and their faculty mentors.
Janet Goins, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, recommends that students come by the office for help getting connected to a mentor, securing funding for your work or seeking opportunities to present your research — like the Sidewalk Symposium.
“You don’t have to want to pursue a research career, you just have to be curious about it,” said Goins. “There are so many benefits you get from doing research. Even if you decide that’s not for me, you haven’t wasted your time because you’re working on your critical thinking and analytical skills, your time management, your ability to read and understand complex literature, your team working, your networking — all of those are going to be valuable skills, no matter where you go.
“And I think it’s perfect for people just to understand better what research is and how it impacts their lives so, no matter where they go, they can make the right decisions for themselves.”
And if you’re not yet convinced to give undergraduate research a try, maybe these students and their chalk drawings will help.
Rebecca Williams
Environmental Engineering
Harnessing Fungi for Cleaner Water: White Rot Fungi in Stormwater Treatment
“We’re looking at fungal treatments for stormwater runoff. So you can see here, we have stormwater, it goes through the city, it picks up all kinds of issues and then it gets into our rivers and causes many, many issues.
Down here, we have our two different bioreactors. We have our control with no treatment and then we have our other one with fungal treatment. Right now, we’re just putting stormwater over it. It’s ten milliliters of water every three hours, and then we collect a six milliliter sample every week or so.
And then, we run those samples through an Aqualog machine, which processes imine absorbance data, which is our excitation emission matrix. And with those we have our heat maps that are produced. You can see here our day 23 map has a lot stronger signal than our day 84.
So what we saw over the — I think we’re at 150 days now — towards the beginning, within those first 20 days, was about where the peak was and then it dropped off pretty considerably. Our next future steps will be incorporating an insecticide into the stormwater and seeing if the fungal bioreactor will process that and be a future preventative.
Right now we’re not putting anything into the system other than just plain stormwater that’s been filtered. There’s no insecticide in it. So the heat map is actually showing that the fungal treatment is processing organic matter. And it definitely has a stronger signal than the controls did, so that signal is showing us that it has the potential to treat the [contaminated water] as opposed to the control, which just has a pretty much straight blue heat map.”
Maahi Naik
Physics
Silicon Detector Characterization for Nitrogen Isotope Studies in Supernovae
“My research is looking at the origin of elements and stars. This is a cross section of a star after a supernova, so after the explosion of a giant star. And the isotope that we are most interested in looking at is nitrogen isotopes, because we found out from pre-solar grains — which are grains that predate the formation of the solar system that get caught onto meteors and fall onto earth — that they’re mostly made of nitrogen isotopes.
So we are interested in studying that and, in order to be able to even start looking at this and looking at experiments, we need to have the correct detectors.
So we did a small experiment and we put a silicon detector up against an americium 241 source, just to make sure that it’s doing what we want it to do. And we found out that it is doing what we want it to do.
We’re going to take this into a bigger lab later and recreate reactions that essentially happen in supernovas.“
How Did You Get Involved in This Research?
“I actually went up to a professor in the nuclear physics department and was like, ‘Hey, your research is cool. I like stars. Would you happen to have any space for me?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, sure. We’re actually just starting with an experiment that you can start doing.’ And that’s how I got into it. So I worked over at the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory over the summer, which is over at Duke.”
Vi Greene
Biological Sciences
Exploring Mites on Lemurs: Hair Barbs on Lemurs
“This is a drawing of hair barbs in lemurs. Lemurs are primates like monkeys or apes, but on the other side of the family tree. Hair hasn’t really been examined in them before. Not only that, but there’s two types of hair: so, guard hair, which is thick smooth hair, and down hair, which is this thinner hair down here. Down hair is not really examined in any species of mammals. It’s assumed to be identical across mammals.
So we were looking for mites in lemurs, and we noticed these, which are these barbs in the down hairs of lemurs. They are recurved, sort of shark fin-shaped structures that point towards the base of the skin. They’re found across the body in every lemur species we looked at except aye-ayes, which are these sort of weird little dudes that serve a woodpecker roll in the rainforest. But these barbs are found only on the base of the hair, so sort of in this section here. And yeah, we’re still investigating what they’re for, what they’re made of.
We got some electromicroscopy images, which make them sort of look like tents on the hair. It’s really cool. It sort of opens the door to a lot of stuff, because the reason down hairs weren’t being examined is because it was assumed they were identical across species. And some people were like, ‘Why would I look at that? It’s probably the same.’ This sort of breaks that a little bit, especially in primates, which is one of the most studied groups of mammals.
So that really opens the door to what else are we gonna find in down hair, what else are we gonna find in primate hair? Especially, there’s a lot of work with ape hair because people are like, ‘Why are humans hairless?’ But there’s not much work with ape down hair, so we don’t even know if our ancestors had this.”
Ellie Boitnott
Environmental Science
Mental Health and Climate Change
“My research is all about climate change and mental health. I actually took a validated survey that was a Canadian prevalence survey that was conducted in 2023. I took that survey and then distributed it amongst my social media and other online platforms. And so, basically, it’s studying the relationship between mental health and climate change-related events, and how climate change affects your mental health — behaviors you’re more inclined to do, emotions, things like that.
I’m still in the results portion of my research. So there’s still a lot of work to do — results, conclusions, things like that.
The survey has opened and closed, so it’s done being distributed, but it’s about 136 [participants]. Weirdly, people didn’t want to complete the survey. So like, halfway through the distribution period, I had to make all questions required. And it wasn’t long.”
What Got You Interested in This Research?
“This kind of builds off of research I did last semester for a senior capstone course. It was all about social media eco-anxiety — anxiety caused by climate-related social media, and how it affects our mental health. And so this was more just general mental health and climate change.
I’m an environmental science major and I’ve always been more interested in the humanities side of environmental science. So that’s where I always went with my courses. My minor is global public health, so very much with helping people understand how the environment affects humans and how we affect the environment.
I’m hoping to actually take my degree and go to occupational therapy school. I wouldn’t say it’s a complete 180, but a difference. I always say environmental science is applicable in any career, any field.”
Jay Dakiwas
Engineering
Live Inflamed Oligodendrocyte Analysis in Neural Culture
“I’m part of the toxicology program. We’re primarily focused on TAK1, which is a protein kinase. So my project is about oligodendrocytes. When it’s impaired, how is it being impacted by TAK1?
Oligodendrocytes are responsible for the creation of the myelin sheath. So if the myelin sheath is damaged due to the dysregulation of oligodendrocytes, since the oligodendrocytes are responsible for creating it, then how is that related to TAK1? Because TAK1 is very prominent in oligodendrocytes, so we want to see its correlation. What our hypothesis is, right now, is that a pathogen will activate TAK1, which is important for inflammation. And inflammation within our body, it’s very normal.
But what happens when TAK2, which is an inhibitor of TAK1, is completely deleted? Meaning TAK1 is just going to be continuously activated, leading to its hyper-inflammation. How does the TAK1 hyper-activation impact oligodendrocytes? Well, we think it’s going to lead to the impairment of oligodendrocytes.
The impairment of oligodendrocytes is going to lead to the damaged myelin sheath. And what the myelin sheath is responsible for doing, is that it keeps our axon safe and makes sure our brain is receiving its signals. But what happens when it’s not doing that? What if you don’t have your myelin sheath?
Well, we hypothesized it leads to memory loss, and our overall project is actually finding a preventative for Alzheimer’s disease. So something that we could actually get our feet on is [whether] TAK1 is a protein that we could focus on to find a preventative for Alzheimer’s.
I won’t say that my research in particular will be a big step forward, but a tiny step forward leads to progression, and progression itself is a big thing.
Which is why, now, in order to do this, our methodology is neuroculture. I focus primarily on stem cells … and then underneath a machine called an incucyte, I actually watched how our oligodendrocytes are differentiating.
And so AI-14, it’s a red fluorescence. And the red fluorescence tells us if TAK1 is present or not, if TAK2 is present or not. So, if it’s red, it means TAK2 was deleted. That’s our genotype. So now we have a way to actually visualize it.
For right now, our current results are that an oligodendrocyte’s proliferation, which is its ability to keep reproducing itself, it’s not getting impacted. Instead, it’s actually increasing. That’s very surprising. Because, initially, we thought it’s going to stop proliferating because of damage. But no, it’s making up for the damaged myelin sheath, it’s making up for the dysregulated oligodendrocytes.
So now we’re seeing how the deletion of TAK1 is impacting other cells around it. And that’s where I’m at right now, is measuring the neurointensity, how well are the neurons around it working … I feel like the research itself, if combined all together, it can lead us to big impact [on Alzheimers research].
I won’t say that my research in particular will be a big step forward, but a tiny step forward leads to progression, and progression itself is a big thing. I mean, someone has to do the research and I’m happy that I had the opportunity to do it.”
This post was originally published in NC State News.