Senior Angela M. Debettencourt has brought a little bit of Panama to the fourth floor of the Davis Center – about 1.5 hectare’s worth.

She’s standing in front of a poster at UVM’s eighth annual Student Research Conference that is entirely focused on that small patch of Panamanian countryside – equal to about two-and-half acres – part of a 150-hectare coffee farm that’s been attacked by coffee rust, a recently arrived fungus threatening coffee growers across Central America as the climate warms. 

On the poster Debettencourt shows how the principals of permaculture, from vegetatve buffers to efficient irrigation to a treeline of wind breakers that will keep coffee rust pollen out, could help the farm survive. 

Debettencourt was one of 363 students, including 219 undergraduates, who participated in last Thursday’s conference, either via posters arranged in geometric rows in the Silver Maple Ballroom or by giving a presentation in one of a half dozen meeting rooms on the Davis Center’s top floor. She was also one of several winners of a social media contest asking students to show their work on Instagram in the months leading up to the conference. See the #uvmresearch photos.

Microbiology and molecular genetics professor Neil Sarkar, on hand to give moral support to one of his students in the morning poster session, said he likes coming “to see the breadth of work that is going on here. It gets better and better each year.

“I think the biggest thing students get out of it is insight into what is involved in a research project, the failures as well as successes,” he said. “And they get insight into how much work goes into just, quote-unquote, research.”

Ben Rukavinia, a senior environmental engineering major whose research project compared the health impacts of diesel and biodiesel fuel emissions, drew a slightly different lesson.

Rukavinia gathered reams of data in reaching the conclusion that a blend of the two fuels that was heavy on biodiesel was least harmful, but he wondered how reliable that hard-earned finding was.

It's kind of crazy to me that were able to draw conclusions from data that isn't so perfect,” he said. “It's never perfect. I heard that going into (the project), and now I really know it.”

Richard Galbraith, UVM’s vice president for research, whose office co-sponsored the conference with the Graduate College and the Honors College, was impressed by the “eclectic” nature of the student work. “You walk around and look at the posters and listen to the talks, and they're all over the spectrum,” he said. “That's great because there was a time when research” projects at the conference were largely in the hard sciences. “But the recognition of research and scholarship in the humanities and other areas -- there are some posters here analyzing art and perceptions of societies -- is a welcome addition.”

The experience of Taylor Poczobut, an eleventh grader at Mill River High School in Clarendon, Vt., one of four students at her school invited to attend the conference, suggests that UVM’s Office of Admissions should start targeting the conference for admissions tours.

She was very impressed that “all the students put together all of this effort to make all these posters -- like they're not just thrown together.”

For Debettencourt, who first visited the Panamanian coffee farm during a study abroad semester and returned over spring break to do a site study with a travel grant the Office of Undergraduate Research, the experience was a like a capstone course and then some.

“This project brought together everything I've been doing for the past four years,” she said. “It’s so inspiring that I could do something like this with so many people helping me and supporting me.”

The project has also pointed her toward a career helping coffee farmers. After graduate school, she said, “I want to really grab hold of this and start making it happen.”

PUBLISHED

04-29-2015
Jeffrey R. Wakefield
student research conference