Ever since she was 15, Nora Awadallah has dreamed of joining the Society for Neuroscience. So getting to present at their annual conference — as a UVM sophomore — was, well, if you look at her Instagram that captures the moment last October, best described as equal parts heart-eyed and wide-eyed emoji wonderment.

Now a junior, Awadallah, a neuroscience major, has been at work in the lab of Eugene Delay and Rona Delay since her first year. After starting out learning basic laboratory skills like making solutions, she’s worked her way up to studying the destructive effect of chemotherapy on olfactory neurons in mice. It’s research that she hopes will someday help shed light on the negative effects of chemo on nutrition and body weight in human patients.  

Nora Awadallah
Nora Awadallah

She’s also presented that work to the Association for Chemoreception Sciences, and on April 28, joined nearly 400 UVM students in presenting at the 10th annual UVM Student Research Conference, a showcase of an impressively wide-ranging and deeply impactful research, scholarship and creative work under way across the university.

Read on for snapshots of the work, from both undergraduate and graduate students, on display.

Ant mates

Senior zoology major Rachel Mellen, working under biologist Sara Cahan, has investigated the mating habits of a species of ant, Veromessor pergandei, that, unusually, forms three kinds of colonies: single-queen colonies, colonies with multiple queens, and colonies that temporarily are home to multiple queens but then aggressively compete until a single queen remains.

“There’s a hypothesis,” Mellen explains, “that polygyny, which is multiple ant queens in one colony, and polyandry, with is one queen mating with multiple males would be negatively associated, and that’s because both make a colony more genetically varied. You wouldn’t want to do both because they’d both have the same result.”

And her work, which involved genetically testing more than 1,000 ants, helped contribute to and expand on the growing evidence that this hypothesis is correct. “The solitary males did mate with more queens than the queens that formed groups, which is what I expected to see,” she says.

Her work relied on the same type of genetic testing used by forensics experts to match DNA from a crime scene to a person — analysis of microsatellites, repeats of one short sequence. “They’re really, really good,” Mellen says, “at differentiating both humans and ants.”

Beyond learning the genetic testing methods to complete this ambitious project, Mellen says she enjoyed both the camaraderie of a shared lab and the satisfaction of seeing her spreadsheets of data fill over time. “There’s something nice,” she says, “about seeing them fill up and making progress toward finding the answers that I’m looking to find.”

On the hookworm

Another student working with DNA, Ambrose Orr, a senior medical laboratory sciences major, is playing a role in an effort to improve treatments for hookworm infections, which impact nearly a billion people worldwide. In Ghana, government-sponsored deworming measures have showed faltering efficacy of the drug between neighboring communities, suggesting drug resistance. Orr is part of a team, led by Yale researcher Dr. Michael Cappello, that is developing a diagnostic tool for detecting drug resistance. Because their research suggests that treatment exacerbates the mutation that’s linked to resistance, it’s important that public health workers can perform field tests that allow them to determine whether administering the drug will do more harm than good.

This groundbreaking work is now on it’s way to being published.

Ambrose Orr
Ambrose Orr

How did Orr become a research partner with a Yale doctor? He was childhood friends with Cappello’s son, saw the doctor back home in New Haven two years ago, and expressed interest in his work. With advising lines to Paula Deming, director of UVM’s Medical Laboratory Science Program, and funding from a Brennan Summer Research Fellowship, Orr proceeded with the work as a UVM undergrad.

After graduation, he hopes to find more medical laboratory or research work, racking up more experience before applying to med school himself.

London to Burlington

For senior microbiology and molecular genetics major Lauren Donnelly, medical school is right around the corner. She’ll be attending the UVM College of Medicine this fall, following her impressive work as lead author on a study published by the Journal of Bacteriology that contributes to a better understanding of the notoriously difficult to treat Clostridium difficile infection. With mentorship from Professor Aimee Shen, Donnelly's work has identified two proteins that can be targeted to make C. diff spores more susceptible to death by heat.

Lauren Donnelly
Lauren Donnelly

Donnelly handled questions from passers-by at the conference with ease. She’s fresh off a test of her skills with even higher stakes. Last week, with funding from UVM, she presented at a conference in London, taking questions from several scholars the paper cites.

Food insecurity stories

A number of projects also completed research on behalf of local partner organizations. Tenley Burlingame and James Lesley, Master of Science in Dietetics students, worked with Linda Berlin, Extension associate professor, on behalf of Vermont Foodbank. The pair conducted nearly 300 phone interviews to evaluate the efficacy of an outreach program that aimed to boost the enrollment in the food assistance program 3SquaresVT. Burlingame and Lesley found that the program was largely successful, with 75 percent of those they surveyed, comprising primarily elderly Vermonters, indicating they felt more food secure and that the quality of their food improved after receiving the benefit.

Although the nature of their research was quantitative, providing important data for Vermont Foodbank to share with the national parent organization, Feeding America, the effect the process had on the students was qualitative, revealing an in-depth understanding of the human lives affected by food insecurity.
 
“I’ve spent six years learning about food insecurity, but really talking to those people and hearing their stories, it gives you a totally different perspective on the issue,” Burlingame says. “It definitely lit a fire in me to be more proactive in tackling the issue, especially in our state where there is so much food insecurity. We have a short growing season, but we have so many farmers who are willing to help. I think it will definitely impact where I go professionally.”

Augmented reality

About 300 augmented reality sandboxes have been created in the world, and UVM senior environmental studies major Rachel Seigel built one of them. Designed by UC Davis faculty member Oliver Kreylos, the tool uses a Microsoft Kinect, a data projector, open source visualization software and a box filled with sand to teach the basics of watershed science. Students can shape the sand, changing its topography, and see how that affects simulated water flow. Kreylos designed the system to serve as an exhibit in science museums, and visitors will find one at Burlington’s ECHO aquarium and science center.

augmented reality sandbox
Augmented reality sandbox

Seigel, though, hopes to take the technology in a new direction. At the conference she showed off stage one of her work: to build a functioning version of Kreylos’ design. Next, she’d like to do something others haven’t yet tried: replacing the sand with 3D-printed topographical models to create a new, and potentially cost effective, way to study watersheds and flooding.

Her work was on display in a space new to the conference this year, a creative lounge that featured interactive exhibits like this and grad student Andy Reagan’s work that charts the emotional dynamics of books, dance students presenting on their collaboration with University of Nebraska dancers, advanced painting students’ work, and more.

On faith

One of the organizers of the conference, who worked to expand participation among students in the fine arts, social sciences and humanities, was senior religion and self-designed Renaissance studies major Lily Fedorko. She joined the surge of student presenters in these areas, with a talk on Jewish identity, art looting and the Holocaust, the subject of the culmination of her work as a religion major, her colloquium paper.

As part of her research, Fedorko took a shot at contacting Monument Man Harry Ettlinger, the last surviving member of the group who worked to save art from Nazi destruction. To her surprise, Ettlinger answered the phone and granted an interview. With funding help from the Office of Undergraduate Research, she traveled to New Jersey and spoke with him in his home, where he showed her a Rembrandt print of his grandfather’s that he recovered from the Nazis. It was a story that has helped inform Fedorko’s point in her paper: that art is deeply connected to Jewish identity and its recovery and return is a critical part of obtaining closure and repairing the fragmented identities that the Holocaust left.

Sitting down at the end of a successful conference, the stress of helping organize it and presenting at it beginning to fade, Fedorko reflects on the experience of talking about her research to a room filled with religion and anthropology faculty, fellow students, friends and museum staff. “This was a chance to share all the work that I’ve done, and to have people who care hear about it,” she says. “It’s so exciting to be able to have these conversations with people who are nerdy about what I’m nerdy about.”

PUBLISHED

04-29-2016
Amanda Kenyon Waite