UGRCE Awards Fund Innovative Summer Research, Creative Projects

How can we improve computers’ ability to detect human bodies in various poses? Can simply-worded instructions lead juries to more just verdicts? What can geologic evidence of ancient storms teach us about severe weather patterns?

These are but a few of the questions that Northeastern undergraduates will investigate this summer with support from the Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors (UGRCE) Awards. These awards will provide financial and academic support to 19 student-initiated projects under the supervision of Northeastern University faculty members; supported projects span a multitude of disciplines and professional fields across Northeastern University’s various colleges.

The UGRCE Awards offer Northeastern students the opportunity to propose original research and creative projects across a wide range of disciplines and conduct them over the course of an academic term. The Awards, funded by the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, provide support for both early and advanced projects and allow students to develop themselves both academically and professionally as young scholars contributing to the knowledge base of their field of study. The goal of the awards is to allow students to gain discipline-specific knowledge through rigorous research and learn to disseminate their work to individuals from disciplines other than their own with the intention of fostering cross-disciplinary understanding.

All UGRCE awardees participate in a Peer Talk series where they both present their projects’ progress, challenges, and successes, and offer feedback to other UGRCE Award recipients. We invite everyone to be part of the Peer Talk series to serve both as audience and reviewers for these outstanding scholars.

Join us in congratulating all Northeastern students who are recipients of the UGRCE Awards for Summer 2018:

Early Research and Creative Endeavor Awards

Indirect Cardiac Modulation via the Pharmacological Stimulation of Adrenal Chromaffin Cells In Vitro
Gabriel Burchett COE‘21
Faculty Mentor: Professor Ryan Koppes, Chemical Engineering
Project Description: Psychological stress can lead to poor heart health and chromaffin cells are stimulated by stress. Developing a pharmacological model can help us better understand how chromaffin cells impact the heart.

Extrinsic Noise Benefits Skill Acquisition
Abigail Cahill COS‘20
Faculty Mentor: Professor Dagmar Sternad, Biology, Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Physics
Project Description: We will use mathematical modeling and virtual technology to investigate if extrinsic noise can benefit motor skill acquisition by guiding humans towards optimal solutions in a throwing task.

Human Essence and American Thought: The Effects of Patriotism on Essentialist Beliefs
Hunter Coury COS‘18
Faculty Mentor: Professor John D. Coley, Psychology
Project Description: This project investigates the relationship between American patriotism and essentialist beliefs about personality traits in Americans. Beliefs about personality are expected to vary by desirability and congruency to exiting stereotypes.

Developing a New Technique for the Formation of Uniform Multicellular Tumor Spheroids
Elizabeth Fink COE‘21
Faculty Mentor: Professor Sidi Bencherif, Chemical Engineering
Project Description: This project involves the development and optimization of a simple, efficient, and cheap technique for 3D tumor cell modeling as a tool to evaluate the efficacy of cancer therapies.

RXscape the Room: Lipids Edition
Jim Huang Bouve‘19
Faculty Mentor: Professor Michael Gonyeau, Pharmacy
Project Description: A designed escape the room activity used as adjunct to regular lecture to determine its place as an aid to student learning as well as evaluation of other professional qualities.

Sequestration of Salt Marsh Microbes
Emma Riccardi COS‘21
Faculty Mentor: Professor Jennifer Bowen, Environmental and Marine Science
Project Description: In this project, salt marsh bacteria will be sequestered, using state-of-the-art devices that capture the bacteria in their natural environment, and analyzed for their role in nitrogen and phosphorus cycle.

Drug Solubility and Stability in the Presence of Gastrointestinal Mucus
Tanner Semin COE‘21
Faculty Mentor: Professor Rebecca Carrier, Chemical Engineering
Project Description: This project investigates molecular interactions between mucin, the main structural glycoprotein in mucus, and drug, focusing on determining mucin’s stabilizing effects on supersaturated concentrations of Piroxicam and Carvedilol in solution.

Overcoming Legalese: A New Methodology To Predict – and Improve – Juror Comprehension
Rachel Smith COS‘19
Faculty Mentor: Professor Janet Randall, English and Linguistics
Project Description: I am spearheading the fourth of four studies for the Plain English Jury Instruction project on the comprehension of jury instructions, testing 264 MTurk subjects using an improved “grouped”methodology.

A Novel Mathematical Simulation to Study the effect of Low Dose Naltrexone on CD4 cells, CD8 cells and HIV Viral Load
Nirali Thakor CSSH‘20
Faculty Mentor: Professor Greg Miller, Pharmaceutical Sciences
Project Description: This project involves using mathematically self-devised equations programmed in MATLAB to predict the efficacy of ultra low doses of naltrexone, a low costing drug, in suppressing HIV viral load.

Advanced Research and Creative Endeavor Awards

Role of Astroglia in the Regulation of Neural Activity of a Brainstem Oscillator: A Computational and Physiological Study
Stephanie Amaro COS‘18, Nicholas Leung COS’20
Faculty Mentor: Professor Gunther K.H. Zupanc, Biology
Project Description: In the proposed research project, the role of astroglial cells on the activity pattern of neural oscillators will be examined through computational modeling and physiological experiments

Anxious Intuitions: Does Anxiety Predict Distortions in Causal Reasoning?
Kristhy Bartels COS‘20
Faculty Mentor: Professor John D. Coley, Psychology Department
Project Description: I will examine whether individuals that use negative explanatory styles and demonstrate high anxiety are more likely to endorse teleological explanations across three domains: health, life events, and biology.

Seeking Regulators Binding to a Structured RNA Element in Acinetobacter baumannii
Matthew DePamphilis COS‘20
Faculty Mentor: Professor Veronica Godoy-Carter, Biology
Project Description: Combating antibiotic resistance acquisition in Acinetobacter baumannii by seeking a RNA binding protein to an element on the recA gene that would regulate phenotypic expression of the DNA damage response.

Annually Resolved Reconstruction of Intense Prehistoric Hurricane Activity in Caicos Islands, the Bahamas
Charmille Coleen Dizon COS‘19
Faculty Mentor: Professor Malcolm Hill, Marine and Environmental Sciences
Project Description: A comparison of annually resolved hurricane records corroborated by cores from a blue hole on Middle Caicos Island to assess the frequency of hurricane events through grain size analysis.

The Use of NBMI in Lead (Pb) Chelation of Pb-exposed Mice Pups
Isaac Hong Bouve‘20
Faculty Mentor: Professor Jonghan Kim, Pharmaceutical Sciences
Project Description: My project focuses on testing the efficacy and safety of the novel chelating agent NBMI, and seeing its therapeutic benefits in treating mice pups exposed to lead toxicity.

Minimizing Cytotoxicity, Maximizing Renal Clearance: Targeted Delivery of Cysteine-capped Silver Nanoparticles to Drug Resistant Staphylococcus aureus
Na Yoon Kim COE‘20
Faculty Mentor: Professor Thomas Webster, Chemical Engineering
Project Description:The main goal of this research project is to deliver silver nanoparticles to drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus while minimizing cytotoxicity and maximizing renal clearance.

Hinokitiol as a Dietary Supplement in Treating Anemia of Inflammation
Zipei Liang Bouve‘20
Faculty Mentor: Professor Jonghan Kim, Pharmaceutical Sciences
Project Description: This study aims to examine potential benefits of Hinokitiol as a dietary supplement compared to other means of iron supplementation in ameliorating anemia of inflammation in the turpentine-induced mouse model.

Data Augmentation for Deep Learning Based Human Pose Estimation
Naveen Sehgal COE‘19
Faculty Mentor:Professor Sarah Ostadabbas, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Project Description:This project aims to train a Convolutional Pose Machine using synthetic data generated through the 3D scanning of humans and manipulation of the 3D models into a variety of poses.

From Theory to Practice: Water Remediation for Estrogen Contaminated Agricultural Runoff
Hugh Shirley COS‘19
Faculty Mentor: Professor Vasiliki Lykourinou, Chemistry & Chemical Biology
Project Description: Our interdisciplinary research team aims to continue conducting research on the solar powered, electrolytic breakdown of estrogenic compounds originating from agricultural wastewater.

Developing Hypoxia-Inducing Cryogels (HIC) to Produce More Realistic 3D Cancer Models
James Sinoimeri COE‘21
Faculty Mentor: Professor Sidi A. Bencherif, Chemical Engineering
Project Description:This project aims to design Hypoxia-Inducing Cryogels (HIC) to serve as an invaluable 3-D cancer modeling tool to the oncology research and anti-cancer drug development industries.