2023 UHP Discover Projects

Faculty: Victoria Appatova (English, Languages, and Fine Arts)

Project Description: 

This is a study of components of effective learning environments for various student populations, internal and external factors that influence these environments, and various approaches to this issue taken by different national educational systems.  This study explores a range of components constituting ELE in higher education in such areas as curriculum, study skills, supporting services and programs, interpersonal relationships of students with other students, professors, administrators, staff, and offices on campus, as well as self-efficacy factors.

The ELE instrument, which I co-authored in 2007, has been adopted and administered at twelve universities in eight countries and translated into five languages.

Recently, our international research team has decided to redesign the survey and include new partners in Spain and Morocco. The specific goals for the proposed project include the following:

(a)      conduct literature review on the ELE topic

(b)     redesign the ELE survey

(c)      administer the new version of the ELE instrument at UC and possibly at some other research partners’ universities in Europe and Africa

(d)     collect survey data

(e)      analyze survey results

(f)      draft a preliminary report

The proposed activity will involve the undergraduate mentee in large-scale international collaborative research that will benefit the mentee, the mentor, as well as other students and faculty of UC.

Project Hours: 30

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Kate Bonansinga (Art)

Project Description:

Kate Bonansinga has an expertise in art and contemporary art curation at the US/Mexcio border that has been semi-dormant since her move from University of Texas at El Paso to University of Cincinnati in 2012.

With the assistance of the student researcher, she will spend the summer 1) re-familiarizing herself with the art today in the borderlands beginning with a search of academic and popular publications, both electronic and print, social media, and other internet outlets and 2) preparing for two presentations, including visual aids, on the topic.  The first presentation will be in conjunction with the exhibition and concurrent symposium

'What We Brought With Us"" in Fall 2023 at University of Cincinnati. The series of 18 photographs of objects that displaced persons have chosen to carry with them during their exile, curated by Vanessa Agnew and Annika Roux, Academy in Exile at University of Duisberg-Essen, which is a UC International Strategic Partner. 

The second will be part of ""The Resilient Society:  2023 Future Forum"" in New York City where German and American thought leaders from academia, the public and private sectors convene to exchange perspectives, find collaborators, and determine a collective path toward a progressive future.

The student researcher will assist Bonansinga by reading and summarizing literature about the art of the past decade about the U.S./Mexico border and how it addresses migration and resilience.  The researcher will prepare at least two visual presentations on the topic, create an annotated bibliography, including visual material.  Ideally these presentations and the bibliography will connect to Bonansinga’s recent research about art in public space, especially in urban environments, and how it conveys the concept of resilience. The student researcher may also assist in the printing or preparation of the photographs for exhibition and in communicating with and deepening the relationship with Academy in Exile.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Isaac Campos (History)

Project Description:

I have two research projects that I would like a research assistant to work on. How much the RA works on each depends on their language skills. The first project only requires English. It is an oral history of the opioid epidemic in southeastern Ohio since the mid-1990s. More than one million people have died of drug overdoses in the U.S. since 1999. Cincinnati has been one of the “ground zeroes” of this epidemic. Work on this project will primarily involve newspaper research sketching out the unfolding of this epidemic since the mid-1990s, but may also involve the transcription of some actual oral histories (i.e. interviews with people who have experienced these events).

The second project involves a history of drug addicts in Mexico City in the 1930s. Even an English-only RA could do some work on this, but ideally this project would be worked on by a student fluent in Spanish. The project involves the analysis and mapping of drug crime in Mexico City during the 1930s based on a collection of 250 original arrest records from the period. About 45 of these need to be re-analyzed and an RA fluent in Spanish could do that work. An RA without Spanish would mostly work on the first project.

Project Hours: 30-40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Sherae Daniel (Operations, Business Analytics, and Information Systems)

Project Description:

This research is designed to understand how a person's activities on various social medial platforms serves to create an impression of them and thereby influences outcomes of interest to them.  For instance, we may explore how the impression that a person creates online influences career outcomes or hosting opportunities on Airbnb.

We will explore behaviors on LinkedIn, Github, Airbnb and/or Twitter.  We plan to explore text that the person writes.  This text could be about the person or ask questions or answer them.  In addition, we intend to analyze pictures that the person posts. This will include photographs that they post of themselves. In addition to what the person posts, we will explore how what other people post about them influences outcomes.  For instance, we will explore recommendations for the person on LinkedIn.

Finally, this research will seek to understand a series of other factors that might change how a person’s activities influence their goals. For instance, we will explore to what degree deception is common in how a person presents themselves on social media and how it influences outcomes. We also may explore differences such as the person’s gender, country of origin or race.

This project is ideal for a student who has interests in data analysis and psychology.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Steven Ellis (Classics)

Project Description:

Our Classics Department here at UC runs two archaeological excavations in Italy: one at the famed city of Pompeii, the other at Tharros on the island of Sardinia.  The student researcher would work directly with the Director of these projects, Steven Ellis, on various projects in Cincinnati to support the excavations while they are ongoing.  This means that data and information will be sent from the live excavations each day to Cincinnati; the student researcher would work on this data and return it to the team to help support the excavations. This would include working on 3D images of the excavations (photogrammetry), organizing, and editing the photographs of the finds and of the trenches, and some work with the website and social media.  In all a great opportunity to work behind-the-scenes of an archaeological excavation.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Lauren Forbes (School of Public and International Affairs)

Project Description:

This project is about supporting local food systems in low-income communities through capacity building and collaboration.  The student researcher will engage both qualitative and quantitative research skills in this project.  They will be involved in the transcription and coding of interviews with local food systems actors.  They will also clean survey data, generate descriptive statistics and produce data visuals for use in a community food systems report.  The student researcher will be supported by the faculty mentor and a graduate research assistant on these projects.  This is a justice-centered and interdisciplinary project that explores topics of racial and social equity, equitable food-oriented development (EFOD), and public policy. The outcome of the project will inform the work of grassroots community organizations working to achieve food security and build collective action in Cincinnati’s divested communities. This project may be a good fit for students interested in doing applied research and those interested in topics of racial justice, political economy, environmental justice, and equitable urban development.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Virtual/Hybrid

Faculty: Patrick Guerra (Biological Sciences)

Project Description:

Our goal is to develop a new framework for increasing our understanding of the phenomenon of design, by comparing and examining the architectural design of human and non-human made structures, structures that influence how individuals experience their natural environment. In collaboration with Professor Christopher Bardt (Faculty of Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design), we will (1) develop terminology for use as a common metric for assessing design principles, (2) examine the universality of design principles, and (3) create new learning activities that teach students design principles. Our project integrates concepts from design, architecture, philosophy, education, and the social sciences. The student working on this project will have the opportunity to conduct interdisciplinary research, which involves learning the use of systematic research methods and different analytical tools.

The architectural design of structures underlies how individuals interact and interface with their environment. These structures can serve as an extension of individuals and help them ‘solve’ critical problems that they encounter. For example, the design of buildings found globally allows humans to live in dynamic or harsh environmental conditions. Similarly, architectural structures built by other animal species, such as the cocoons of silk moths, allow other species to do the same thing. Our work focuses on determining how architectural structures made by humans and non-human animals in various contexts, might converge on a common set of design principles for solving a specific problem or solve the same problem but use divergent solutions that possess wholly different design properties.

In this project, the student will help conduct a systematic literature search to develop terminology for describing design principles, i.e., form and function, of a broad spectrum of human and non-human architectural structures. Using this common language, the student will conduct research that then examines how universal principles of design are across diverse architectural structures. This work involves classifying and comparing the form and function of structures built by different species in different environmental, social, and historical contexts. Here, the student will do research that quantifies the properties of structures using photogrammetry and 3D imaging techniques and conduct tests that assess the function of different structural designs. The student will also conduct work that examines the human and non-human architectural structures that can be found in Cincinnati, to examine what design principles are found in a particular area and to develop a database of different architectural designs. Although aesthetics as a design principle and philosophy is normally conceived as a purpose-driven feature of human structures, the student will help examine if aesthetic design components are shared by non-human structures. Finally, the student will help create a learning module that helps K-12 students learn and appreciate design principles. This module will include an activity in which students learn how to recognize, classify, and quantify elements of the form and function of structures that they regularly encounter, e.g., their home or school. Students will then apply this knowledge in problem-solving activities, such as how to improve the design of these buildings to make them more energy efficient.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Kristopher Holland (DAAP)

Project Description:

The Strange Tools Research Lab is creating an archive of 'strange tools.' The Archive will be hosted on our website and have both a digital and analog component. The analog archive will contain examples of strange tool design, fabrication, testing, and prototypes and be housed at the Digital Futures Building. The digital archive will contain a larger set of materials and be hosted on our website and on servers at UC. We are also in this process making the concept of the archive 'strange', or creating 'strange tools for archiving' in the form of a virtual reality interface with experiences to access the materials in new ways (this will be in conjunction with other labs at the Digital Futures space). The 'Strange Tool Archive' project goal is to create a new model for ways to create access and unique ways to conduct research with archival materials.

Project Hours: 30-40 May-August

Anticipated Format: In-Person/Hybrid

Faculty: Heidi Kloos (Psychology)

Project Description:

When summer comes, many children struggle to retain what they have learned during the school year. This so-called summer-learning loss is particularly pronounced for children from economically disadvantaged communities. We seek to address the summer-learning loss by interfacing with a summer program that is organized for homeless children. Our specific focus is on elementary-school math (arithmetic, pre-algebra). This is a particularly challenging academic subject, with children often being several years behind their grade level. Children also struggle with learning motivation and persistence. They might even suffer from math anxiety. The proposed research will explore ways in which children can overcome these barriers and learn math in a positive environment. The research involves designing, carrying out, and testing the effect of a math-enrichment program that will be rolled out during the summer.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: In-Person

Faculty: Theresa Leininger-Miller (Art History, School of Art)

Project Description:

There is a wealth of undiscovered visual material in books published in Cincinnati (the Queen City) from its founding in 1788. Among the treasures are lithographs of funerary monuments by the German-American firm of Ehrgott & Forbriger made after photographs by two free African Americans, James Presley Ball (1825-1904) and his brother-in-law, Alexander Thomas (1826-1910), in The Cincinnati Cemetery of Spring Grove Report for 1857 (a beloved colleague gave me this book). It is remarkable that whites credited Black men for their artistic work in publication at the time of slavery. This has made me wonder what other art has not been available or obvious to scholars because no one has taken the time to look. Certainly, there are plentiful images of this city, with its explosive growth, including riverscapes, landscapes, cityscapes, and landmarks like the Plum Street Temple, Suspension Bridge, and Fountain Square.

Cincinnati was a major publishing center with superb printing presses. UC’s Archives and Rare Books Library has at least 350 books produced here in the 19th century. The only way to locate art in these tomes is to go through them page by page. I expect we will make exciting discoveries by such nationally known Cincinnati artists Henry Farny, Elizabeth Nourse, Robert Duncanson, Joseph Henry Sharp, Lily Martin Spencer, Thomas Worthington Whittredge, James Henry Beard, Frank Duveneck, and Charles Webber, and by such lithographic companies as Klauprecht & Menzel, Onken, Middleton, Wallace & Co., C.W. Fleetwood, Schnicke, and L. Samyn.

Research will involve independent, on-site work on campus, cataloguing all illustrations in these books by artist, title, date, medium, and page (along with bibliographic information), and taking digital images of the art (with a camera or phone camera). If an industrious student completes the inventory in the rare book library, the next stop is additional publications in Langsam Library, and then at local institutions such as the Mercantile Library, the Cincinnati Historical Society, and the downtown public library. The goal of this detective work is to ferret out compositions and bring them to light with possible exhibitions on campus, presentations at professional conferences, and publications. This involves formally analyzing images and placing in them in the cultural context of their time and in individual artists’ oeuvres.

I am happy to credit students for their contributions. Honors research assistants worked with me on illustrated sheet music in 2020 and 2021. I acknowledged the first one in print when I published journal essays, and both undergrads on labels when I mounted exhibitions at the DAAP and Langsam Libraries in 2022. Such research is a great resume builder; I wrote letters of recommendation for these majors in History and Urban Studies, and now both are in graduate school.

Anyone in the humanities is eligible for this position; best are those who are visually attuned and who love old books. By the way, this project connects to the Honors seminar I’ll lead this fall, “Cincinnati Art & Architecture.”

Illustration studies are expanding rapidly, garnering serious scholarly attention with dissertations in Art History and Musicology. Intellect Books began publishing the Journal of Illustration in 2014, and the first textbook, History of Illustration, came out in 2018. As the home of American Visual Studies, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts launched a fellowship and co-sponsored a conference with the D.B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University in St. Louis in 2019. Since 2010, the

Illustration Research Network has hosted annual symposia. The next one takes place this November.

During the whole academic year, 2022-23, I am on sabbatical. I’ll chair a session on illustrated sheet music at the College Art Association conference in NYC, Feb. 15-19, and be without email.

Project Hours: 30-40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Hexuan Liu (Criminal Justice)

Project Description:

Clinical notes allow medical professionals to communicate with one another regarding a patient’s history, diagnosis, and treatment. Prior research indicated notes have been structured and written for those with advanced medical knowledge. However, clinical notes are currently being shared between patients and providers to increase adherence to treatment and improve overall health outcomes for the patient. With access to the notes, patients can increase their own medical knowledge and communicate their questions to their providers, becoming better advocates for their health. However, patients with lower health literacy levels may not be able to fully utilize the notes because they are written from clinicians’ perspectives and professional terms. Furthermore, research states that patients with low health literacy levels are more likely to be diagnosed with a chronic disease. Despite the improved accessibility to clinical notes, the content of the notes should also be reorganized and simplified to allow patients to gain the most benefit.

Patients that would benefit the most with their chronic disease management cannot utilize them. The main purposes of this project are to 1) revise original clinical notes to be more patient-oriented, 2) conduct a semi-structured interview with participants (residents and patients) to examine the effectiveness of the revised notes in terms of understandability and actionability, 3) develop a Natural Language Processing pipeline to automatically revise the notes.

Project Hours: 30-40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Vikas Mehta (School of Planning)

Project Description:

Whether ancient, medieval, or modern, cities are artefacts that come to being over time. With time, urban processes transform cities. Many large and small changes alter the landscape to create new urban conditions and geographies. In most case, though, the transformations do not fully erase the past and the landscape can be read as a palimpsest that continues to bear visible traces of its earlier form. In essence, many layers of urban form that formed over long periods of time are perceptible. It is these layers of urban form that have much to learn from.

The faculty researcher is currently conducting research on a project titled Urban Palimpsest: an atlas of city identities. The work focuses on reviewing and studying cities across the world, historic and modern, to find and document a unique aspect of each of the selected city that is reflected in its urban form. The aim is to create a collection of visualizations that communicate these identities to serve as a learning tool for urban designers, architects, and city planners.

There are several very good collections and documentations of cities worldwide. However, none of these categorically focuses on curating and discussing important takeaways from the urban form and urban design of the city. The goal for the project during summer 2023 is to review over a hundred cities from all continents and to identify the unique morphological aspects of each. This also includes creating a logical classification of the types of identities and takeaways from each city. A parallel task (that will be done by the faculty researcher) includes visualizing the works using diagrams, sketches, and other visual means of communication. This collection can serve as a very powerful and unique learning tool for urban designers, architects, and city planners.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Kelly Merrill (School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies)

Project Description:

One in every six LGBTQ+ individuals (hereafter sexual and gender minorities) report facing at least one experience of discrimination or mistreatment in health care. These include refusal of care, abusive language, intentional misgendering, harassment, and unwanted physical contact. These experiences negatively affect how sexual and gender minorities view their health care providers, and they may negatively impact the health care sexual and gender minorities receive. 

To better understand these issues, this project seeks to inquire about various experiences of discrimination and mistreatment in health care experienced by sexual and gender minorities. This study will also assess the ways in which sexual and gender minorities cope with these experiences. To accomplish these goals, approximately 50-60 semi-structured interviews will be conducted with sexual and gender minorities. 

For this project, the student researcher will engage in several research-related activities. These include, but are not limited to, searching for literature, writing a section of a literature review, conducting a few interviews (based on the student’s comfortability), transcribing interviews, and coding data. Though this is not a requirement, a student researcher that is interested in health disparities, social justice, and LGBTQ+ health might find the particular research to be of interest.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Thomas Moore (School of Public and International Affairs)

Project Description:

Although the world today features unprecedented levels of cross-border interdependence socially, culturally, ecologically, environmentally, and militarily, many observers argue that economic ties remain the primary driver of global interconnectedness. Working on this project should provide an enriching experience for anyone interested in international economic affairs, changes in the global corporate landscape, the geopolitical implications of a globalizing world economy, and the use of quantitative and qualitative evidence to address policy-relevant social science questions.

Two decades into the 21st Century, scholars in the field of international relations – economists, political scientists, public policy experts, and foreign policy specialists – are reassessing the extent to which “developing” countries from the “Global South,” such as China, India, and Brazil, have begun to challenge – individually and/or collectively – the long-standing economic dominance of “developed” countries from the “Global North,” such as the U.S., Germany, and Japan. In particular, scholars are debating two big issues: (1) whether intensifying economic globalization from 1980 to 2020 helped or hindered the ability of the Global South to challenge the Global North’s dominance economically and (2) whether growing economic ties between countries such as the U.S. and China, China and Japan, and India and China have mitigated, exacerbated, or had no effect on prospects for geopolitical or military conflict.

At an empirical level, my project engages these questions by examining the ebb and flow of multinational companies (MNCs) from different countries in the annual Forbes Global 2000 rankings. Given the growing role that MNCs have played in recent decades as the principal organizers of international economic activity, governments regard the strength of “their” MNCs – public and private companies alike – as being almost synonymous with, national economic competitiveness. As evidenced by the recent escalation of commercial and technological jousting between China and the U.S., governments believe there is a synergistic dynamic between MNCs and their home countries that has critical implications for long-run national power and security.

Students working with me have already created original databases in which the world’s top 2,000 companies are organized by industry and nationality so we can track changes in the prominence of companies from more than 60 countries in over 80 industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and computers to telecommunications and automobiles. We’ve collected company-specific data about how “globalized” companies are in their ownership, revenue generation, and asset deployment. Take Toyota as an example. We’ve retrieved data on how the company’s percentage of Japanese ownership vs. foreign ownership has changed over time; digging deeper, we’ve identified the particular foreign countries have accounted for the highest portion of foreign ownership in Toyota (US, Germany, China, etc.). We’ve also extracted data on how the share of Toyota’s domestic vs. foreign sales has changed over time. In a similar vein, we’ve retrieved data on how the distribution of Toyota’s physical assets (e.g., factories) has shifted between domestic and international locations. All of this is designed to assess whether companies from certain countries and industries are more “globalized” than others.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Kara Moranski (Romance & Arabic Languages & Literature)

Project Description:

This research is part of an ongoing longitudinal study that measures Spanish language development within the context of the University of Cincinnati’s unique Spanish Summer Local Language Immersion (LLI) Program. This intensive six-week program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to learn Spanish in immersion settings in which they are afforded opportunities to interact with members of the Hispanic community in the Greater Cincinnati Area. Now in its third year, the LLI program has collected data on language learning gains by using measurement procedures drawn from traditional study-abroad settings (acceptability judgments tasks, lexical decision tasks, and elicited imitation tasks). Preliminary findings have shown that LLI students had significant language learning gains in some of the same areas where development has been found in traditional short-term study abroad programs, such as subject-verb agreement and spoken production (measured via elicited imitation tasks). A manuscript detailing these findings has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers: The International Journal of Study Abroad. The current research project will extend this longitudinal study into its third years for the 2023 LLI Program, including the same battery of language tests but also including several new quantitative measures in an effort to triangulate findings and provide a more holistic understanding of results. Student is expected to be familiar with Excel. Further consideration will be given to applicants with experience with data collection. The student must have an intermediate or higher level of Spanish.

Project Hours: 30

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: David Niven (School of Public and International Affairs)

Project Description:

Ohio was not only a competitive political state, it was THE competitive state.

Books were written depicting Ohio as a perfect reflection of American political sensibilities. For a century from 1912-2012, no state better mirrored the nation's presidential voting preferences than Ohio. In fact, no state even came close.

And then the great mirror of American politics cracked.

In 2016 and again in 2020, in a nation that favored the Democratic candidates in the popular vote, Ohio produced two easy wins for Republicans.

What happened in Ohio? What happened to Ohio?

This project will explore the apparent transformation of Ohio politics. Beneath election results and public opinion polls, the project will take a close look at several communities that took a dramatic turn to support Republicans in 2016 and 2020.

For example, Trumball County in northeast Ohio voted for Democratic candidates for president in every election from 1976 to 2012. Even in Republican landslides like 1984, Trumball County voted for the Democrat Walter Mondale. But in 2016 and 2020, Trumball turned red. The student researcher will help compile news coverage and conduct interviews with local political figures in places like Trumball County to help tell the story of Ohio's transformation.

The ultimate goal of the project is to produce a work that answers the central question, and does so with evidence that is both strong and approachable so that it would be accessible to academics, journalists, and students.

Project Hours: 35-40

Anticipated Format: Virtual

Faculty: Mehdi Norouzi (EECE)

Project Description:

With rapid advances in artificial intelligence in recent years, it is expected that various machine-learning (ML) tools will become part of our daily function. Utilizing emerging machine learning tools such as DALL-E 2 [1], Imagen [2], Midjourney [3], and Stable Diffusion [4] for generating visual arts or ChatGPT, Jasper AI [5], and Sparrow for research and article generation is a new challenge for people without science, technology, or engineering background. Addressing this challenge, In this project, students will study the methodologies for overcoming the fear of working Americans in using ML tools and review the best teaching practices and case studies for integrating ML tools into daily function. The goal of this project is to develop a training guide that comprises the following:

A - Prioritization of ML tools depending on the objective of different professions, specifically the Arts, Sports, and Public health

B - Develop a step-by-step map on how to teach/learn the usage of ML tools with minimal requirements targeting people from non-stem fields

C - Provide integration points of the developed learning maps to the corresponding educational system pipeline, such as non-STEM degrees.

[1] Ramesh, Aditya, et al. ""Hierarchical text-conditional image generation with clip latents."" arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.06125 (2022).

[2] Saharia, Chitwan, et al. ""Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding."" arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.11487 (2022).

[3] https://midjourney.com/

[4] Stable Diffusion (https://stability.ai/)

[5] Jasper AI (https://jasper.ai)

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: In-Person, Virtual, or Hybrid

Faculty: Christopher Platts (School of Art)

Project Description:

Dozens of small museums, special-collection libraries, and other public institutions in the Midwest contain significant early modern European artworks (ca. 1300-1700) that remain in storage, unpublished, and virtually unknown to art historians and public audiences alike. These little-known repositories of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculpture, drawings, and illuminated manuscripts were inventoried by two scholars in the early 1970s, but the resulting publication included very little data about the artworks and not a single illustration. Consequently, art historians have ignored this useful book and in so doing have neglected to consider the hundreds, if not thousands, of early modern artworks currently housed in local and regional institutions. 

This project aims to discover, research, and share the most important early European art objects stored in little-known museums, libraries, and churches in the Midwest. To do this, we will write to curators, librarians, archivists, and others to request information and images about the collections they oversee. With photographs and data to hand, we will study the artworks, including their style, quality, iconography, and design, determining which objects deserve further research and in-person examination. 

I have already begun to contact and visit local institutions in Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and other nearby cities, and based on the promising results, I am eager to expand the scope of the project to include institutions in Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia, and other states. So far I have found a handful of unpublished Renaissance and Baroque paintings, drawings, and illuminated manuscripts that I have discussed in scholarly conference papers and plan to publish. I believe that a dedicated research assistant and I will find additional important artworks that we can examine and share, not only with the institutions that own them but with their diverse audiences and with the scholarly community.

Project Hours: 30

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Emily Porter (Theatre Design & Production)

Project Description:

Live Theatre is by nature impermanent. Productions open and close. They are not meant to last forever. ""What happens to the materials when we are done?"" is the big question surrounding the impact of our industry on the future. The problem we want to solve is how to mitigate the consumption issues inherent in Live Entertainment. We are setting out to provide hard data and to create concrete practices that are measurable for Live Entertainment. In theatre, we often use the word ‘sustainable’ as a way to reframe and rebrand practices that are in truth traditional parts of a theatrical industry that has always been thrifty and good at reusing. This practice, however, can become a way of maintaining the status quo instead of really deep-diving into exploring new and innovative practices around our Art. The focus of this project is not to shift how theatre is fundamentally practiced, but rather to focus on how several large impact items could be isolated, studied, and improved leading to better theatre and better theaters.

Theatre is made of collaborations among multiple disciplines; scenic, lighting, costumes, sound, projections, etc... We are looking for assistance with our first phase of research of 3. In this phase we will document the life cycle of several pieces of equipment from each discipline. In costumes, that might be analyzing a single garment such as the structural integrity of a pointe shoe. In sound, that could be the component parts of the mixing console. In scenic design, it could be the sourcing, transportation and disposal of a plywood set piece. We will search for high impact items suitable for analysis, study, and potential redesign. We imagine a series of cross-disciplinary brainstorming events with Theatre practitioners, students, and people from outside industries that will bring new viewpoints into the discussion. Our goal from these sessions will be to create a list of problematic theatre items that might be further studied. This research will dissect the items down to their component parts and then measure the ecological and human costs at each stage of the item’s life cycle. A few of these items will ultimately be chosen to be modified or re- designed to have more sustainable parts, production process or uses. We conceived this approach after an informational conversation with Drew Boyd (UC Professor-Educator Marketing and Innovation) where we discussed strategies for how to tackle the messaging of sustainability in Live Entertainment. We are calling this the “Parts of the Whole” Approach.

The student researcher will help us gather information & plan the Parts of the Whole event series. This may include finding and summarizing articles, assisting with organizing materials and documentation for events as well as helping analyze data from the events.

The student researcher should be organized and familiar with the basic office suite of software and comfortable with file sharing. An appreciation of the performing arts and concern about environment sustainability is not necessary but will make the experience more meaningful for the student.

Project Hours: 33

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: David Reeping (Engineering and Computing Education)

Project Description:

Substantial efforts have been made over the past few decades to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of credit transfer between two-year and four-year institutions in the United States, primarily through contracts between institutions called articulation agreements. Articulation agreements aim to streamline the coursework transfer process by identifying transferable courses, packages of courses (e.g., general education), and programs (e.g., A.S. transfer degrees) between institutions to preserve credits during transfer and improve students’ time-to-degree. However, systems with well-articulated courses or programs may be derailed by misalignments in course sequencing spanning transfer degree plans that delay timely degree completion. Misalignments are persistent in highly sequential disciplines, such as engineering and nursing.

However, statewide common course numbering systems (CCNS) provide a framework that removes the course equivalency process for entry-level courses, ensuring that all those courses share the same name and numbering convention. In this study, we will explore the impacts of CCNS policies on the complexities of course sequencing that community college transfer students navigate in engineering programs.

The student on this project will help test and refine new metrics – which we collectively call Transfer Student Curricular Complexity (TSCC) – to measure the nuanced complexity of community college transfer curricular pathways using ideas from network analysis. TSCC builds off a previously defined framework for quantifying complexity articulated by Heileman and colleagues in 2018, which does not empirically correlate with transfer completion rates.

The project will involve addressing the following two research questions.

1. How does TSCC compare to the curricular complexity of engineering transfer plans of study in describing the accessibility of transfer pathways across different institutional, state, and policy contexts?

2. To what extent does a CCNS impact the TSCC of transfer pathways, considering both high and low transfer institutional contexts within states?

We will use TSCC to compare transfer curricular pathways for four majors from four community colleges and partner university pathways in ten states. These pathways will be constructed by concatenating plan of study data from the community college and the partner university. Two universities will be classified as higher transfer-in, and the other two will be classified as lower transfer-in using the Carnegie Classification 2010: Undergraduate Profile (HD2013) variable relative to other institutions in the state. Five states will have a common course numbering system (CCNS), and the other five will not. The student will help collect, enter, and validate data for approximately 160 plans of study (in collaboration with other researchers).

The student will help create visualizations and summarize the data using descriptive and inferential statistics. The student will help formulate how to algorithmically calculate the TSCC metrics using the R statistical programming environment for each plan of study and conduct a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to compare the original curricular complexity measures and TSCC measures for the pathways across CCNS policies and transfer-in rates (i.e., low vs. high). If interested, there will be opportunities to publish the results in a conference and/or journal and continue working on similar projects.

Project Hours: 30-40

Anticipated Format: Virtual

Faculty: Stephanie Sadre-Orafai (Anthropology)

Project Description:

How do our encounters with specimens shape how we come to know ourselves, the natural world, and our trajectories through it? This project examines a variety of specimens—from self-collected and diagnostic biological specimens to institutionally displayed and reposited natural history specimens to commercially promoted and marketed typeface specimens—to show how these objects surface tensions between intimacy/estrangement, human/non-human, subject/object, me/not-me, and seen/unseen. Conceived as a staged, multimodal project, the research combines cultural history, (auto)ethnographic analysis, art practice, and material culture studies, resulting in single-authored general audience book manuscript and a series of collaborative Risograph publications and/or installations that collect, reflect, and refract these themes. I am seeking a student researcher interested in one or more of the following topics to aid in bibliographic research about these specimens and to document everyday contexts of these specimens.

1.       Biological Specimens. From fertility and pregnancy tests to rapid antigen and genetic screening, there are a host of products marketed and distributed that require at-home collection of biological specimens. How do these messy engagements with our own urine, spit, snot, and stool contrast with our increasingly quantified sense of self gained through wearable sensors and tracking technologies? How has the increased ubiquity of swabs, strips, and collection containers at home changed us, enabling new kinds of immediacies, temporalities, and relations?

2.       Natural History Specimens. What are the histories and legacies of natural history specimens in museums and their gift shops? Probing tensions between collection and display, ephemerality and permanence, this strand of the project explores how specimens not only allow us to record and map specific instances of natural forms throughout time, but also come face-to-face with them. It considers the power of embodied co-presence and how it fits the scientific method’s need for direct observation and access, while also fulfilling human curiosity.

3.       Typeface Specimens. The final strand of the project examines typeface specimens, promotional material used to highlight features of new typefaces to designers. Underscoring the importance specimen designers place on context for understanding form, and the lengths they go to stage and create it, this section of the research theorizes how specimens are not only used to isolate (diagnostic) or organize (science/museums) differences, but to create and imagine new worlds through them.

Project Hours: 30-40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Kristina Shin (School of Design)

Project Description:

Development of a hemostatic vest for patients with cardiac implantable electronic devices: A multidisciplinary approach

More than 3 million pacemakers and 200,000 implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) are implanted every year worldwide and this number is expected to grow. A major complication of this surgery is device infection caused by a collection of blood around the pacemaker and ICDs (i.e., Device-pocket hematoma). Despite major advances in device miniaturization, device infection remains a significant cause of morbidity and mortality.

Up to 50% of patients who undergo pacemaker implants are on blood thinning therapy to reduce the formation of blood clots, which increases the risk further.

Application of an evenly distributed compression force on the complex curvature of the implant location (i.e., the deltopectoral region) is challenging. A common practice is to apply pressure dressing with adhesive tapes. The adverse effects of such dressings include skin tears, allergic or inflammatory reactions to the adhesive, migration of pressure point and insufficient and uneven pressure. Our team aims to develop a compression garment that can effectively prevent device-pocket hematoma, which will prevent device infection.

Our expectations of the student researcher include:

1. 3D body scanning participant recruitment and scheduling

2. Scanning the participants by using a 3D full body scanner

3. Processing/creating a set of virtual body models from the 3D body scan images

4. 3D printing of the body models

5. Creating a series of hemostatic vest prototypes via patternmaking and sewing according to the 3D body models’ shapes and sizes

The student researcher should have skills and experience in 3D modelling and 3D printing. It will be ideal if the student researcher possesses patternmaking and sewing skills, but it is not a must.

The student researcher is required to complete the human participant research ethics (IRB) training to work with the participants.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Susan Longfield Karr (History)

Project Description:

Faculty: Ming Tang (Architecture and Interior Design)

Project Description:

This summer project investigates the application of Eye Tracking (ET) technologies to understand an airport traveler's wayfinding performance and perception of signage at the CVG airport. Combining holographic signage with media projection, the UC team, including UC SIM and XR-Lab, is developing augmented reality (AR) content to enhance CVG's wayfinding methods. With the holographic installation expected to be completed in early 2023, this summer UHP project will investigate how effective holographic signage might affect a traveler's visual attention and perceptions under various environmental complexities and mental conditions. The study explores the visual perception of several spatial features, including signage modality, scene complexity, and animated features of the UC bearcat brand. The student will work with Prof. Ming Tang, the director of XR-Lab, UC SIM, and CVG administration, UC marketing and branding to apply the Eye-tracking method utilizing total fixation time and time-to-first fixation data to evaluate the effectiveness of AR installations presented to airport travelers.

The previous study on the influence of the path environment on pedestrians' wayfinding mainly concentrated on the physical environment while rarely discussing the impact of digital media, specifically holographic media and video projection for the naked eye. Taking the CVG airport as an example, this study aims to investigate whether the difference in the AR content along the route will affect pedestrians' walking experiences and wayfinding, with the ultimate goal of ascertaining the underlying relationship between the airport environments and the user behavior in the process of wayfinding and implementation. The research methods include data analytics, questionnaires, and comparative analysis. Firstly, through Eyetracking glasses and surveys, psychological and physiological data were collected. Secondly, Analysis of Variance was used to examine whether there was a significant difference in pedestrians' walking experience impacted by the AR signage. Thirdly, the eye tracking analysis will determine the factors that play an essential role in pedestrians' wayfinding and attention to the AR ads.

For information, visit our website.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: Hybrid

Faculty: Gary Weissman (English)

Project Description:

Internet archives contain many hundreds of science fiction pulp magazines and radio programs that would otherwise be lost to history. 1950s science fiction radio shows, such as Dimension X and Exploring Tomorrow, are available online for free listening, while collections such as the Luminist Science Fiction Periodical Archives, the Pulp Magazines Project, and the Pulp Magazine Archive preserve innumerable issues of cheaply printed popular magazines devoted to science fiction, from Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories to Nebula Science Fiction and World Beyond. While this is a boon for researchers, their content has not been catalogued in any systematic way. I am seeking a researcher to generate a record of their contents by combing through archives of material dating from the late 1940s through the 1950s. In particular, I am looking for a researcher to find any short stories that contain subject matter relating to World War II, Nazism, Nazi camps, and the genocide of the European Jews. Because this work will involve reading through online archives, it will involve much sitting at a computer and may quickly grow tedious. This project is a good fit for the student who has a real interest in science fiction and who enjoys reading and doing online research. Ideally, the student researcher will also develop their own writing project based on their research in the archives. This would involve discovering something of interest, such as an aspect of one or more short stories, and drafting and revising an essay in which that thing is analyzed and discussed. The goal will be to publish the resulting essay in an online undergraduate journal.

Project Hours: 30-40

Anticipated Format: Virtual

Faculty: So Yoon Yoon (Engineering and Computing Education)

Project Description:

Spatial ability has been considered one dimension of multifaceted intelligence and is known as a critical skill for one’s successful performance in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) education and at work. Therefore, numerous studies have used spatial training to improve students’ spatial ability, which might improve their STEMM performance. However, there has been a lack of effort to review and evaluate the training effects from the literature. This project aims to (a) systematically review various spatial training methods in STEMM education, (b) estimate the effects of the training on student performance, and (c) develop an efficient spatial task as a means to accurately assess students’ spatial ability.

This project will start with searching for and locating experimental research articles on available spatial training methods. An undergraduate research assistant will systematically document characteristics of the various spatial training methods in the identified research articles, such as (a) target population, (b) STEMM content areas, (c) the types of spatial tasks (e.g., gaming, animation in surgical training, augmented reality, virtual reality, apps for engineering design graphics, etc.), (d) types of spatial assessment tools, and (e) changes in student performance due to spatial training. By reviewing spatial training methods, the student will be able to contribute to the development of a new spatial task or training tool for improving one’s spatial ability. The student will also have an opportunity to collaborate with graduate students who work on different projects in Dr. Yoon’s research group.

Project Hours: 40

Anticipated Format: In-Person