Developing a More Affordable Way to Measure Air Quality

Presenting at the symposium’s Earth Day panel was Santiago Plaza, a senior who works as a research assistant for Project FRESH Air, an initiative where Fordham students and faculty visit middle and high schools in the Bronx and New York and install air quality monitors to teach the children about how pollution affects their environment. Unfortunately, those monitors aren’t cheap. The price of the Project FRESH Air monitors ranges from $179 to $259. 

Plaza’s goal was to create sensors that perform similarly, if not better, than the sensors currently on the market—and for a much lower price. He developed a successful prototype that cost about $70 to make (though he stressed that it will require more testing in the future). 

“Being able to have lower-cost monitors will allow us to work with more schools. It’s also really important to have a low-cost means to measure air quality so that people who don’t have as much financial support can take their health and care for their environment into their own hands,” said Plaza, an integrative neuroscience major who plans on applying to graduate or medical school. 

The Role of ‘Magic’ in Early Modern Russian and Ukrainian Societies

Grace Powers, a senior who double majors in sociology and history and minors in Russian, presented her research on the role of “magic” in Russian and Ukrainian societies during the early modern period. Powers defined magic as anything unexplainable. 

“It was a way of understanding the world and to claim agency or knowledge during a time when many people didn’t have any,” she said.  

Notions of magic permeated many parts of life, including healing practices, politics, and warfare.

Some events perceived as “magical” were so powerful that they could lead to riots and the murder of neighbors, said Powers. In 1547, the city of Moscow experienced a devastating fire that killed about 1,700 people. The citizens blamed the fire on the tsar’s grandmother and uncles, claiming that they had caused the destruction by sprinkling blood from a stolen heart over the city. As a result, the people rioted and demanded the execution of the royal family. 

In her research presentation, Powers, who studied primary documents and scholarly articles, argued that magic was a powerful tool and resource during that time period—and has implications for today’s world.  

“This is really important for understanding the culture at that time, which is the basis of culture for many Eastern and Slavic European countries now. Understanding their mindsets better is also important for us in the United States, since we have diplomatic ties with them,” said Powers, who was recently awarded a Fulbright to teach English in Estonia for a year. 

Several members of the Fordham community were also celebrated at the symposium’s awards ceremony. The Faculty Mentor of the Year award was given to Molly Zimmerman, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, and Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis, associate professor of music. The inaugural Anne L. Geiger Award, awarded to a student whose contributions and research bring together diverse people and perspectives, was given to senior Sophia Maier. The Fordham College Alumni Association Award was given to senior Miguel Sutedjo. 

“Dean Mast and I were determined to celebrate our senior researchers and their extraordinary work this year,” Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D., professor of psychology and associate dean for strategic initiatives at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said in an email. “I am so deeply grateful for this chance to see them and to celebrate all that they have done.”

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, more than 200 FCRH undergraduate students conducted research this semester. The school also saw a record number of travel grant submissions this spring, though the majority of them were suspended due to the pandemic. Research results were published in a commemorative program for the FCRH 13th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium and the 10th volume of the Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal.  

More than 50 people joined the two-hour-long Zoom call, including faculty, donors, graduating seniors, and their labmates and friends. Each student presenter spoke for several minutes about their research, on topics from nonsuicidal self-injury to the relationship between Instagram use and adolescent male body image. 

“At the [in-person] research symposium, I’m going from one place to another,” Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, said during the Zoom session. “[But today] I was able to focus on each talk. I pulled up your abstract. I actually had my 14-year-old with me for a while—she’s very interested in many of your topics, she may follow up with you—so it was just terrific. It just reminds me of the joy of learning, and that’s what we’re all about.” 

‘A Sense of Normalcy During This Weird Time’

Lindsey Register, a communications and environmental studies double major, presented her senior thesis: “Documentaries Making a Difference: Communication Effects of Environmental Film and Television.” She surveyed roughly 90 Rose Hill students via SurveyMonkey and investigated how nature documentaries have impacted their lives. 

Register recalled the first documentary that made an impact on her life: The Cove, an Academy Award-winning film about dolphin-hunting practices in Japan. 

“It was about an issue I had never been presented with in my life,” said Register, who first watched the film in a high school science class. “It was so fascinating to me because these people were out there advocating for an issue that I had never known about … I really liked how a film was able to give me that impact of inspiration and feeling of advocacy.” 

For her senior thesis, Register also created policy recommendations for environmental education. 

“I think governments should be more involved in the funding of documentaries, in the funding of environmental education as a whole,” said Register, who is now searching for jobs that combine her two majors. “There also should be stricter policies in the screening of facts and information that are portrayed in the documentaries.” 

Shubarna Akhter, a psychology and biological sciences double major, also spoke about her senior thesis, “South Asian Mental Health Service Use: Risk and Protective Factors for Young Adults.” While working as a research assistant in the labs of two faculty members, Tiffany Yip, Ph.D., and Lindsay Till Hoyt, Ph.D., Akhter learned that many Asian Americans—especially South Asians—don’t use mental health services as frequently as other racial and ethnic groups. 

To investigate, she recruited and paid 20 students of South Asian heritage to participate in focus groups at Rose Hill and share their personal experiences, with the aid of a fall undergraduate research grant. She analyzed her data and developed risk and protective factors for using mental health services. Finally, she made predictions on how future interventions could promote mental health services among South Asians. 

“As an aspiring psychiatrist, I was able to have these important conversations with South Asian young adults in a professional setting,” said Akhter, who wants to eventually work in the Bronx with minority communities. “I learned what we can do to better improve that field that I want to go into.” 

Unlike past presentations, Akhter had no poster to show. Instead of hearing “Congratulations!” in person, she received congratulatory emojis on Zoom. But the virtual symposium was still a special experience for Akhter and her family. 

“I really felt the energy radiating from everybody, and I felt like everyone was so engaged at hearing about what I had to say,” said Akhter, who presented her project from home in the Bronx, with her parents cheering her on from the sofa across from her. “And just listening to everybody else was inspiring, and it really gave a sense of normalcy during this weird time.”

A Homemade Poster and Yoga

As a gift to the graduating seniors, Annunziato’s nine-year-old twin boys created a “Howl at the Moon” poster and showed it to the students on camera. 

“That’s a bar off of Arthur Ave that my students have told me about for years,” Annunziato explained in an email. “My sons have been very moved by what our seniors especially are going through and surprised even me with this hilarious poster that was meant to be a tribute to senior week.”

Towards the end of the Zoom call, many of the participants struck a yoga pose and took a group screenshot for Nicole Smina, a student who is training to become a yoga teacher. Smina explained that she is participating in a 14-day yoga challenge, which requires posting photos on social media. In the spirit of her practice, she wanted to post a photo of people doing yoga in a Zoom call. 

“You’re really exposing people who are in sweatpants right now,” one student joked. 

“We are such versatile researchers!” Annunziato added. 

As the event came to a close, Annunziato offered a few last words. 

“You’ve given me joy, you’ve given me laughs, and I feel like we’re still together. So, thank you,” Annunziato said, raising a glass and a toast to everyone on Zoom. “Cheers to our senior FCRH researchers.”

“The projects this year run the gamut, from fungus and bats, to lichens to blue-green algae, to an invasive tick, to evolution in lichens, to pollination trials, back to bats and how they are affected by light, and finally diversity in forests,” summarized Thomas Daniels, Ph.D., director of the Louis Calder Center, in his opening remarks. 

In 20-minute-long presentations, seven Fordham students spoke about what it was like to explore the sprawling 113-acre biological field station through CSUR: a 21-year-old program that allows Fordham undergraduates to conduct independent research projects with a Fordham faculty member and a $5,000 stipend. In wooded areas, Ian Sokolowski, FCLC ’20, foraged for Asian long-horned ticks with a white corduroy cloth and forceps. In the middle of Calder Lake, Julia Sese, FCRH ’20, retrieved water samples and analyzed algae blooms. 

Several of the students also shared how their projects began. Joseph Laske, FCRH ’21, recalled the day he found a wild bat while cleaning a Harlem park with members of the Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice club at Fordham. 

“I was raking some leaves, and I heard a squeak. I looked down, and there was this bat curled up on the ground in a fetal position,” recalled Laske, an environmental studies student. 

Concerned about the wild creature’s well-being, Laske snapped a picture of the animal and sent it to his professor, Craig Frank, Ph.D., who studies the effect of white-nose syndrome in bats. Could this bat be affected by the same disease, Laske wondered? 

It wasn’t. But his email sparked a conversation with Frank that would lead to Laske’s application to the CSUR program. For 10 weeks, Laske looked at how white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease, grows at different temperatures and how one species in particular, the Eastern small-footed bat, is able to resist the dangerous disease. 

“Bats are important pollinators [and pest eaters]. They contribute a huge amount to the agricultural industry,” said Laske, who plans on working as a technician in Frank’s lab this fall. 

The keynote address delivered by Alexandria Moore, Ph.D., a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and adjunct professor at Columbia University, also explored science research. Most of her speech spotlighted her work in coastal wetland restoration. But the rest focused on her identity as a queer person of color and how it informs her work as a scientist. 

“What I have talked about so far today has been sort of referencing gaps: The first one is a gap in our knowledge of how ecosystems work and how we can do a good job at recovering them; the other one is a gap in our understanding of the differences between people and the importance of those differences that people have,” Moore said. “What I do now in my work is combine all of those things together …. What I do at the museum is I ask the same kinds of research questions that I asked at Yale. I ask them in areas where we haven’t asked them with people who never really get to be part of those conversations.”

Sitting in the audience were eight local high school students in Fordham’s Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP)—an academic enrichment program for underrepresented youth from 7th to 12th grade—who presented their summer research posters that afternoon. 

The year before was the first time that STEP students participated in the program. One member of the inaugural cohort will be a first-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center this fall, said Patricio Meneses, Ph.D., who helped bring the students to the annual program. 

For DaiJon James, a rising senior at Equality Charter High School in the Bronx, the six-week research experience clarified his career path. It showed him that he wants to become a scientist—a first for his family, he said. But what surprised him this summer was the level of respect and collaboration that he experienced with his Fordham mentors, including Rachel Annunziato, Ph.D. 

“It was kind of like …  jarring because as a teenager, you don’t ever really expect to be given the kind of opportunity to show what you know,” said James, who studied how to best use teletherapy to improve post-procedure care for teenagers with liver transplants. “Working with Dr. Annunziato changed that perspective for me.” 

This summer, another student—Alexa Caruso, a rising senior at New Rochelle High School in Westchester County—performed data collection and analysis on perovskites, a promising material in solar cell research. 

“With the people and the resources that we now have in this day and age, we can definitely make something useful,” Caruso said. “What I did, it’s gonna help the future one day.” 

Fordham University students gathered in the Schiff Family Great Hall to take part in the 4^th Annual Bronx Science Consortium Poster Symposium. The event was a presentation of student research on the high school, undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels.

“What is really so great about this symposium is the diversity of the projects,” said Ron Jacobson, Ph.D., associate vice president in the Office of the Provost and one of the event’s organizers. “It shows all the interests of our students and the many things the consortium has to offer.”

J. Alan Clark, Ph.D., associate professor of biology and an avian expert, shared his doctoral study on penguin vocalizations. He documented the calls of feeding and mating Spheniscus penguins and tested the penguins’ responses to the calls.

He also gave the students important advice:

“Look for something that interests you, and when you see something weird, question it. There’s a wonderful world to explore, so always keep exploring,” he said, adding in jest they should “become rich and famous” as well.

Project TRUE Students Chasing Opportunity

One of the groups of high school students from Fordham’s Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology) presented a project on what kind of small mammals live within the Zoo’s enclosure.

The project is the result of a $2.6 million grant Fordham received with the Wildlife Conservation Society in order to teach and train local high school students in ecology and other STEM subjects.

The study discovered seven species of mammals that roam free within the zoo, the most prominent being white-footed mice.

“Everyone was so welcoming. I come from a small school where there’s not a lot of interest in stuff like this,” said Stephanie Blackwood of North Salem High School. “It’s great that I got to meet kids my age who are interested in the same subjects.”

“It was much better than sitting at a desk all summer,” added Anye Frimpong, of the Bronx Academy of Software Engineering. “I got to try something new. It makes me want to pursue a liberal arts education.”

HPV Research and the Benefits of Catnip

Fordham undergraduate and graduate students were also in attendance.

Fordham senior Victoria Sieverson’s project addressed the positive benefits of catnip for humans. In her study, she tested the effectiveness of pantolactone, an active ingredient in catnip, as a repellent against black-legged ticks.

“The catnip was effective in repelling the ticks away from human skin for about two hours. When I eventually come back to this project, I want to increase the concentration levels to see if I can get it to last longer,” said Sieverson.

(The ingredient, she said, has no negative side effects on cats.)

Jacqueline Heffner, a Rose Hill junior majoring in physics, discovered a way to detect the presence of the HPV virus without long, drawn out tests.

By creating a microsphere, she was able to decipher whether the virus was present based on shifts in the air’s frequency near the sphere’s edge. By testing for HPV infections this way instead of using biosensors, Heffner believes that diagnosis and treatment can begin more quickly.

“In developing countries, instead of wasting time taking tests and sending them miles away to a facility to get results, doctors can take samples and test the frequency right where they are,” said Heffner. “It speeds up the process and allows those who need help to get it faster.”

In all, some two dozen posters were presented. The projects were created in conjunction with the Bronx Science Consortium, an educational partnership of five Bronx institutions that focuses on bringing together science research and intellectual support from its partners.

–Mary Awad

In all, 36 undergraduates presented 33 research posters in physics, biology, mathematics, psychology, chemistry and computer and information science. According to Brennan O’Donnell, Ph.D., dean of FCRH, the symposium was designed to help foster a culture of undergraduate research and strengthen interest and support for the sciences.

“The symposium was designed to feature the great work that is being done in our labs and to give our students and faculty an opportunity to talk across disciplines,” O’Donnell said. “Our work in strengthening science education . . . is one of the big stories in the college.”

David Carretero, a senior who presented research on the dynamics of ultracold atoms, said that the symposium brought attention to an area of strength at the University that is often overlooked by students.

“It’s good for students to be able to see what’s going on academically and not just socially,” the physics major said.

“It makes me feel like I’m leaving my mark at Fordham,” said Marsiyana Henricus, a chemistry major who found herself explaining her project on biocompatible nanotubes to a group of fascinated freshmen. “I’m a senior. I’ve spent hours in the lab researching this; it’s great to share it. If my project has made an impression on younger students, it could change the direction of their lives.”

One impetus behind the symposium, according to Donna Heald, associate dean for science education at FCRH, was to bring the student research together to foster an interdisciplinary program.

“Scientists today really work across disciplines, and truthfully, our students are doing it too,” said Heald, who oversaw the event.

Following the symposium, a committee of faculty judges presented awards to the outstanding posters.