Celebration highlights undergraduate research

The 30th annual Student Research Celebration on Wednesday, Nov. 29 allowed students participating in undergraduate research to display their work to people across campus. In turn, MSU students got a chance to see why MSU can call itself a top-tier research university.

The Undergraduate Scholars Program (USP) funds undergraduate research projects and organizes the celebration, USP director Colin Shaw said. Partnering with faculty mentors, the USP helps students get experience in hands-on research, extending what students have learned in class to real-world research problems, he said.

“Sometimes I half-jokingly say that we’re like a mini National Science Foundation,” Shaw said, “because [the USP] operates in basically the same way.” Students pair with a faculty member and write a proposal for a project based on a specific research question that they want to explore, he said.

The USP reviews the proposals with a committee of faculty experts who have experience in the subject of the project, Shaw said. They then select the best proposals and provide money to the selected students to fund their projects, he said. Currently, year-long and summer projects receive $2,400, while semester-long projects receive $1,200, according to Shaw.

“The idea is to give students resources which they can use either to offset research expenses or, in many cases, students are able to keep that award as a stipend to compensate them for their time working on the project,” Shaw said. The stipend makes performing research equitable, so that students don’t have to necessarily stress about completing a project and working an off-campus job at the same time. 

“This gives you a chance to get paid for doing something that’s in your field of study,” Shaw said.

The USP requires students who are funded to present their projects at a celebration, whether that was the most recent one in the fall, or the spring event happening on Apr. 25, Shaw said. The USP also encourages other students not funded by the USP to participate, he said. Another way the celebration gains participants is through faculty mentors and advisors, Shaw said, by reaching out to their students and encouraging them to present their work.

Students who engage in undergraduate research are more likely to continue their college education, go to graduate school after finishing their undergraduate degree and get employed in their respective fields, Shaw said. “Undergraduate research is open-ended and students [are] actually solving a problem on their own and coming up with an answer that nobody has known before,” he said.

Research isn’t just confined to the sciences, Shaw said. Students in the humanities are also welcome to present their work, including film, he said. For example, last Wednesday, art history student Storrs Bishop presented his 15-page paper entitled “Wearing Survivance: Postindian Rhetoric in Native American Garments,” written for ARTH 491 — Native American Clothing — taught by Jennifer Woodcock-Medicine Horse.

“Survivance” – a term coined by Gerald Vizenor – is the active presence of native identity in the modern world, Bishop said. He synthesized this concept of survivance through various Native American artworks on clothing items. “Clothing, if not intentionally symbolic, is the material product of a culture,” he said. Bishop’s poster included the prime example of the “indigenous Hulk,” designed by Steven Paul Judd, portraying a Native American man angered by a broken treaty and becoming an indigenous version of the iconic Marvel hero.

More science-focused projects included the work of Taylor Carey, a junior studying chemical engineering. During the celebration, she presented her project called “Engineering Biodegradable Plastics Through Thermophilic Value Added Polyhydroxyalkanoates.” Carey explored the possibility of using thermophiles, bacteria that live at high temperatures, to create a new bioplastic, one that degrades in three to six months. “My goal is to take these plastics out of the environment and produce a new bioplastic,” Carey said. 

Senior paleontology student Brendan Clark presented “Digital Rendering of a Unique Turtle Specimen from the Blackleaf Formation,” using a microcomputerized tomography scanner to examine turtle remains from the early Cretaceous period. Although the entire specimen couldn’t be scanned, “it could very well be one of the more complete fossil turtle specimens that we have from the early Cretaceous in North America,” Clark said. 

“That can give us a lot of insight into what was happening as ecosystems were developing at that part of the Cretaceous,” he said. Clark was advised by David Varricchio, the interim department head of the Earth Sciences Department. 

If you’re an undergraduate student and you want to do research but don’t know where to start, get in contact with the USP or talk to your academic advisor. Another option is the Freshman Research Symposium, HONR 131, a one-credit class that opens students up to starting research in their fields, according to the MSU website. 

The USP also operates a program called First Year Research Experience (FYRE), Shaw said, a fall seminar class that provides an introduction into how research works, placing students in labs across campus as research assistants and paying them a stipend to complete their work. However, FYRE is still a small program with only enough room for about 30 students a year, Shaw said.

To get in touch with the USP, visit https://www.montana.edu/usp/.