2021 Symposium for Student Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

The purpose of this study was to examine participants' emotional and neurological responses when listening to stimulative and sedative music through electroencephalography (EEG) using the MUSE 2 headset. Brain waves were monitored using the MUSE 2 headset while participants listened to 7 musical excerpts (3 stimulative, 3 sedative, and 1 control). Data from these recordings were analyzed using the MATLAB EEGLAB toolbox. Following each musical selection, participants also provided self-reported mood assessment using a 5-point Likert-scale between pairs of bipolar adjectives (i.e., happy/sad, restless/calm, joyous/gloomy, whimsical/serious, vigorous/quiet, majestic/soothing, playful/dignified, and exhilarated/dreamy). Data analysis was aimed at identifying brain wave activity patterns associated with each category of music as well as assessing correlations between brain wave activity and self-reported mood ratings. Given the constraints of participant recruitment and data collection due to COVID-19, preliminary results from this pilot study will be presented. Additional discussion will include study modifications and limitations resulting from the need to incorporate COVID-19 precautions for all portions of the study. Perspectives on conducting collaborative student-faculty research using human subjects during a global pandemic will be addressed, along with suggestions for future research given the constraints of COVID-19.

3-manifold is a topological space that locally looks like Euclidean 3-dimensional space. Finding a global understanding of a 3-manifold, however, is much more difficult. Here we describe the face pairing identification which provides a combinatorial characterization of a 3-manifold and go on to consider how small changes in a given pairing results in significant changes to the manifold.

This creative project investigated the process behind choreography and dance training, and what is required to produce choreography based on specific research. From January 5th-January 11th, 2020, I traveled to Nashville, Tennessee to complete a Creative Research Dance Intensive with the contemporary dance company, New Dialect, under the artistic direction of Banning Bouldin, who led the research process. In this dance intensive, we focused on methods to create movement in nonconventional ways, such as creating a sensory environment, an imaginary setting, and a character. These movement studies were generated with writing prompts that allowed me to explore different departure points and motivations for creating movement. Throughout the spring 2020 semester I have integrated these creative techniques in a solo that I have performed in both classroom and stage venues.

Gaia is an ESA astrometric mission to compile an 3d space catalog over a billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The Gaia mission will allow the understanding of the universe to deepen by determining the position of celestial bodies accurately. In this research project, I will be reading papers published by scientists associated with ESA to focus on the importance of Gaia. It is expected to discover hundreds of thousands of new celestial objects, such as Extra-Solar planets, brown dwarfs, and asteroids within our own Solar System. The mission will also study about 500,000 distant quasars and will provide stringent new tests of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Over the centuries astrometry has greatly contributed to the advance of the knowledge of the Universe. I will be assessing some of the outstanding contributions that Gaia will provide to our knowledge in the field of astrophysics.

The role of dance in the Musical Theatre genre has evolved throughout time. In the beginning years of Musical Theatre, dance's function was merely that of entertaining the audience during a hiatus in the storyline. A quick change of costume or set design, or a pause in between scenes, was an opportunity to send the dancers on stage to liven up the mood with dances that didn't have much to do with the theatrical plot. Agnes de Mille's work as the choreographer of Oklahoma in 1943 changed the function of dance in Musical Theatre substantially. Through my research, I argue that de Mille was able to successfully incorporate dance into the storyline of Oklahoma. Through her choreography and its relationship to music, set design, costume and stage lighting, she was able to enrich the narrative and enhance the emotional content of the story being told. She proved that dance as a non-verbal form of communication has the capability of contributing to a narration, even if in an abstract manner. The presence of dance in Musical Theatre was never the same after de Mille's work in Oklahoma. Dance became an integral partof the storyline and the choreographer became an essential part of the artistic team. Her contribution to Musical Theatre has been so valuable and appreciated that younger generations of choreographers have based their reconstructive works on the original versions of her choreography. I based my research on historic documentation by scholars such as Scott Miller,Jennifer Homans, and Erick Neher. I additionally examined various video recordings of the many different versions and reconstructions of the dances in Oklahoma.

Authors after the Civil War sought to preserve ideals of the Antebellum South, teaching the world that white slave owners were benevolent caregivers. This practice erased centuries of abuse, family separation, rape, and murder that plagued the African American community. This misinformation and the racism caused by these changes form the basis for American literature since the late 19th centuries. Children's books during this era were designed to mend the crippled relationship between the north and south caused by secession. These books were used to teach everything from counting and reading, to table manners and basic hygiene. In many cases, these books were the children's first exposure to the outside world. White supremacists used this vulnerability to their advantage by including racist depictions in children's literature, encouraging racial bias to continue. The Story of Dr. Dolittle, first published in 1920, includes a scene where an African prince asks Dolittle to help bleach his skin so he can marry a white princess. Dolittle has the prince put his face is a bowl of lye, and when he lifts his face, he has white skin and gray eyes. This demonizes interracial relationships and prioritize whiteness, further spreading the racist ideas held in the 1920s.These stories are passed down with each generation and the negative effects of slavery were forgotten as the south rewrote history to fit the Old South. They mended their relationship to the north, labeled the Black community the enemy, and allowed for racist ideas to be shared from one generation to the next, ensuring the continuation of racial inequality and discrimination. Citation: Hugh Lofting, 'Chapter 12: Medicine and Magic,' The Story of Doctor Dolittle, Lit2Go Edition, (1920), accessed February 03, 2021, https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/221/the-story-of-doctor-dolittle/5626/chapter-12-medicine-and-magic/.

My presentation will be a blend of both creative and academic, as both parts inform one another. The creative part of my presentation will be a PowerPoint showcasing chapters from my graphic novel, Galeton Ghoul: an American Manga, which takes place in my hometown of Galeton, Pennsylvania. I will provide excerpts to discuss the process of the story's creation, from the daydreams to the finished piece.My graphic novel centers on a female protagonist who works for an agency that hunts ghouls to keep humans safe, and along the way finds a town where being openly racist is tolerated (maybe at times encouraged), and people who are accepting are rare and hard to come by. The town has been plagued with ghouls for the last several years, however, things have only ramped up since a Muslim family moved to the area. She needs to find the actual ghoul terrorizing the town before a Muslim family gets lynched. These issues are a part of the central plot of the story, and are relevant issues in rural communities today.The academic, scholarly part of my presentation will be a critical analysis of the famous Japanese manga series, Tokyo Ghoul and its sequel Tokyo Ghoul:re, written and drawn by Sui Ishida. In my paper, I will be examining issues of intertextuality, as Ishida frequently references mid-twentieth-century novels like The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai, Demian by Herman Hesse, and most notably explicit references to Kafka's Metamorphosis. I will be mainly focusing on how Metamorphosis provides a narrative arch for Tokyo Ghoul.

Normally, a cell's lifecycle is characterized by the growth phase followed by DNA replication and then finally cell division. This process generates genetically identical cells. Alternatively, in the process known as endoreduplication, cells grow and DNA replication occurs, but the cell does not divide. In plants, whether a cell divides normally or if it undergoes endoreduplication is dependent on CDC20 and CCS52 proteins. These two classes of proteins are anaphase promoting complex (APC) activators. In conjunction with the APC, CDC20 proteins have been found to promote normal cell division while CCS52 proteins promote endoreduplication. They do this by targeting specific proteins called cyclins, which control the progression of a cell through the cell cycle, for degradation. In soybean (Glycine max), a potential third type of APC activator, GLYMA10, has been identified. It currently has no known function, but it shares sequence similarities with CDC20 and CCS52 proteins. Like CSC20 and CCS52 proteins, GLYMA10 has defining traits such as a conserved C-box, WD40 repeats, RVL motif and an IR tail, which indicates that it may also function as an APC activator. For CDC20 and CCS52 proteins, the conserved C- box and IR tail are both needed to bind to the APC and the RVL motif found within the WD40 domain is involved with cyclin binding. To begin the process of understanding the function of GLYMA10, it will be expressed in Schizosaccharomyces pombe, a model system to study cell division, and the phenotype will be examined to determine if the gene is in fact an APC activator.

Previous investigations on calculus students' misconceptions of tangency have noted that many students tend to include properties that are consistent with the treatment of the subject in algebra or geometry in their definitions of a tangent line (Biza et al., 2008; Vincent et al., 2015). One might suspect that these students had developed these misconceptions in a prior mathematics class, however, in our previous research on the subject (Hogue & Scarcelli, 2021), we found that students could hold these algebraic or geometric conceptions of tangency despite the fact that they could not remember learning about tangent lines in any other course. Whether students develop these misconceptions in algebra, geometry, or entirely within their calculus class, the cause of these misconceptions is still not entirely clear. Some potential causes include an overuse of certain examples of tangency (e.g., a tangent line to a circle or a parabola), improper language use when discussing tangent lines (e.g., the use of the phrases “barely touching, just touching, or hugging), and student exposure to tangent lines in other mathematics or non-mathematics courses. Our current research examines in-service mathematics teachers' conceptions of tangency in an attempt to establish a link between teachers' understandings of the subject and common student misconceptions about tangent lines. We interviewed 16 mathematics teachers that are currently teaching at the secondary level to come to a better understanding of what teachers know about the subject. Our findings show that these teachers held many of the same misconceptions that the students in our previous study held, which sheds some light onto the question of where these misconceptions originate.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends sixty minutes of daily moderate to vigorous physical activity for children (2018). Children with disabilities experience more barriers than children without disabilities in achieving the daily recommended physical activity (Shields & Synnot, 2016). Children with physical and intellectual disabilities are at a higher risk for disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, and obesity when compared to their peers (Kirk, 2019). The purpose of this study is to assess how video-based instruction influences heart rate during virtual physical activity time of children with disabilities. Research on influencing the physical wellbeing of youth with disabilities through virtual formats has social validity, especially during the increased use of online instruction due to COVID-19 education mitigation policies (Theis et al., 2021). Research Question: The research question for this study is, can video-based instruction influence heart rate during virtual physical activity time of children with disabilities? Method: A single-subject alternating treatment research design will be used. School-aged children recruited from an after school physical activity program will participate in eight weeks of pre-recorded and synchronous fitness-focused physical activity sessions. Sixteen sessions each 20 minutes in duration will be held. Fitness trackers will be used to collect heart rate data. The duration of time spent in the light to vigorous heart rate zones will be analyzed using visual analysis. The investigators expect to learn how video-based instruction influences heart rate during virtual physical activity time, and what is the most effective form of video-based instruction for children with disabilities. This study is in progress and the results are expected in spring of 2021. With our findings we will contribute to the growing knowledge base of virtual physical activity programming for children with disabilities.