Undergraduate Apprenticeship Program

Prof. Bishop with student Jay Patel

Prof. Jennifer Atkinson with student Rachael Graham

Professor Hirsch, Khadidiatou Lusby, and Lisa Shaw.

Prof. Timothy Born with student Minh Nguyen

Prof. Robin Couch with student Elissa Williams

For more information and resources on Undergraduate Research, please go to the council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) page: http://www.cur.org

Research Scholars Blog

Program Description

The Undergraduate Apprenticeship Program at George Mason pairs high achieving undergraduate students with faculty mentors to undertake original research or creative projects. It provides each apprentice with a $1,000 stipend for the semester or summer to enable them to undertake twelve hours of research-related activities each week and $100 to cover materials, such as posters, lab supplies, and equipment. A committee of four faculty members from diverse disciplines meets to review applications and select apprentices. Feedback is provided to non-selected applicants so that they can reapply for the following term.

Selected apprentices are required to attend three meetings each term, where they gain a greater understanding of academic life and professional issues. The first meeting focuses on effective strategies for presenting one’s research to general and discipline-specific audiences, participating in conferences, submitting research for publication, and applying to graduate and professional school. The second meeting covers designing and developing effective poster or multimedia presentations. Students offer their critiques of presentations. They also provide and receive feedback on resumes and abstracts. The third meeting focuses on the apprentices’ finished posters or multimedia presentations.

Current Participants

Arya ansari

I want to see if there are significant differences in the cognitive, social, and language development of Latino children who go to family daycare programs at age four in comparison to those in center-based care. This research proposal aims to utilize the minority group of Latinos to see if different conditions are required for school readiness in comparison to children of other backgrounds. Whether differences between the outcomes of children in family daycare vs. center-based care are the same for the three ethnic groups (Latino, Black, Caucasian) will also be explored. It is the goal of this proposal to help to understand the effects of daycare to make sure disadvantaged children are no longer left behind and have equal opportunity for success upon the entrance to school.

Michael AtKins

Grain Boundaries are of paramount importance in Materials Science; they influence the macroscopic properties of materials in very profound ways such as tensile strength and creep. Thus, the ability to accurately describe their behavior and extract material properties from their behavior is important. In this project, we present a phase-field model that incorporates the effect of temperature of the structure and free energy of grain boundaries in order to describe the behavior of grain boundaries. The model was obtained numerically using a copper bicrystal with symmetrical tilt grain boundaries of different misorientaion angles. To evaluate the accuracy of this phase-field model, its solutions will be compared with molecular dynamics simulations of the same set of grain boundaries.

janet bourne

I plan on studying the patterns and similarities between musical compositions that depict specific emotions and scenes. This concept is extremely broad; therefore, I will experiment with three popular, well-known and different classical songs used in popular culture: “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the beginning of Die Walkure’s Act III by Wagner, the “A” theme from “Symphony No. 5 in C Minor” by Beethoven, and “Morning Mood” in Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite, No. 1, Op. 46.” What about these pieces make people think about such a specific emotion and atmosphere that television and movies use these melodies to accompany the same scenes over and over again? I think that the outcome would be wonderful in that people could come a tiny bit closer to understanding why certain songs are associated with certain feelings and emotions.

Anna braum

The goal of my study is to examine whether tidal fluctuations influence larval dragonfly movement in a freshwater ecosystem, and if so, whether these effects differentially impact larval dragonflies according to their size. Fluctuations in water levels, such as those that occur with tides, can expose larval dragonflies to predation and desiccation, and therefore alter their distribution in a tidal region. Thus, understanding dragonfly movement in relation to the tide will allow for better predictions of their relative abundance and overall population success.

tiffany cambridge-williams

Examines the effects of a freshman-orientation course on student satisfaction, motivation, academic performance, retention, and graduation rates. The research will determine whether there are individual differences in motivation between the students that took the course and those that did not. The study will also identify the types of orientation courses that yield the highest student satisfaction, motivation, academic performance, retention and graduation rates.

jessica chang

Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, IPF, is a fatal incurable lung disease precipitated by relentless accumulation of fibroblast cells in the diseased lung. The lung is made up of many cell types; however it is the fibroblast cells that are believed to be the central cellular orchestrators of this disease; depositing excessive amounts of extra-cellular matrix (ECM), destroying lung architecture, and leading to lung dysfunction. In this project, the role of Thymosin-beta4 up regulation in IPF-F shall be determined via in vitro studies involving endogenous over-expression and ectopic application of Thymosin-beta4 to the normal lung fibroblast cell line, MRC5.

cathArine chavez

This study aims to determine the influence of the four dimensions that compose Emotional Support on children’s social and academic outcomes. Emotional Support is one of the three domains that are studied with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). Observers use CLASS to assess quality of the interactions between the teacher and the students in a classroom. The four dimensions that compose Emotional Support are Positive Climate, Negative Climate, Teacher Sensitivity and Regard for Students Perspectives.

Lauren-claire kelley

I will examine Deephaven, the first novel of Sarah Orne Jewett, who is one of the most canonical nineteenth-century American women writers and who, as a partner in a lifelong Boston marriage, is often discussed in gay and lesbian studies for her treatment of intimacy between women. Deephaven explores many of the questions about regionalism and relationships between women in nineteenth-century America that she later developed in her masterpiece The Country of the Pointed Firs. This project proposes to delve into theories of temporality and queerness that are rarely evoked in scholarship on Deephaven.

meghan clark

The project seeks to evaluate whether a reverence for law induces people to take a standard presented as a law, and internalize it as a personal moral. This approach to the question was devised within the framework of experimental economics, with some game theory. Simply put, we will explain a narrative to two human players, who will then be presented with a series of actions to choose. Studying the way in which the players make choices in response to each other and the environment should illuminate the formation of morality under the authority of law.

scott douglass

A minority of meteoroids originate outside the solar system. With radar observations, the velocity of the meteoroid before arrival at Earth can be determined. This suggests the intriguing possibility of tracing these meteoroids back to their point of origin. Recently, a research team including Professor Weingartner doing a feasibility study of this idea concluded that existing radar facilities would likely detect dozens of sources with moderate (of order $1M) upgrades. However, one critical issue remains unresolved. A suite of detailed numerical simulations of the grains' motion is required to determine the deflection statistics. The outcome will indicate whether or not upgrades to radar facilities are warranted.

simone erchov

As a Writing Fellow for COMM 305: Foundations of Intercultural Communication, I will work with the professor and the students on the promotion of communication through the written word as well as the development of analytical and technical writing skills. By availing myself to the students as a tutor, my goal is to encourage understanding and appreciation of the value of various forms of written and spoken communication across cultures as well as teach students the value of writing within their own discipline.

manila jindal

The purpose of this research is to study the histological effects of metal exposure in the heart tissue of laboratory rats. I performed necropsies on 36 older female Sprague Dawley rats in collaboration with students and faculty from the Biosychology Program this summer, which were fed a higher dose of metals compared to the previous experiment. The hypothesis of this project is the same as before; however, we expect to see a greater effect this time. Our collaboration will provide an understanding of how other vital organs in these rats might have been affected by the exposure as all the internal organs work together as a complete system, which could also influence their behavior.

caroline gergel

Writing in the sciences distinguishes itself from general composition in content, tone and form. Mastery often proves elusive to students in the discipline and yet, few professors are available to teach these discipline- specific writing skills. My Writing Fellow project goal is to first help students to recognize what constitutes effective writing in the sciences and then to increase student competency in this area by focusing primarily on how students learn to recognize when their writing is thorough yet concise and logic driven.

katherine kane

I am a Writing Fellow for Music 332: Music History in Society II. My role in the class is to provide students with a resource to focus specifically on developing effective written communication skills. I will be available for group work, such as writing workshops, and also as an individual writing tutor. I hope to convey the importance of effective written communication and its applications in the field of music. I am looking forward to learning and growing as a writer and helping other students to do the same.

mathieu kurosawa

Dendrites function as the primary sites of synaptic and/or sensory input and integration in the developing nervous system, thus, elucidating the molecular mechanisms governing dendrite morphogenesis is critical to our understanding of how diverse cell-type specific dendritic morphologies arise and further, how these morphologies may be affected in such biologically relevant events as sensory perception, learning and memory, aging and nervous system disease pathologies. To address these questions, the Cox Laboratory has focused on the Drosophila peripheral nervous system using a class of sensory neurons that provide an excellent model system for the investigation of these processes.

tarek lahlou

Radio transmitter localization for cognitive radio and population mapping for humanitarian aid are fields that rarely overlap but have enormous potential for multidisciplinary growth. In rural Guatemala unlicensed radio stations broadcast to a population of rural residents who have very crude hand-crank or battery-powered radio receivers. The goal of my research project is to locate unlicensed transmitters in the region and determine their coverage, thereby estimating the population that is reached by public health messages broadcasted via FM transmission.

dennis price

Recent studies have demonstrated that at the center of all, or almost all, galaxies there is a supermassive black hole. In some galaxies, the radiation produced by accretion onto one of them is larger than the radiation of the entire galaxy. These objects, which are strong x-rays sources, are called active galactic nuclei (AGN) and represent the most powerful steady phenomena of the universe. I will perform a spectral analysis on x-ray spectral data from various AGN and fit it with different models. The importance of this study is twofold; on one hand we may validate a universal method to measure the black hole mass, on the other hand, we will strengthen the link between stellar and supermassive black holes.

kendra smyth

While much is known about the behavior of wild bull elephants relatively little is known about their reproductive physiology. This lack of knowledge limits the ability to improve captive management. Scientists at the CRC hope to change that by monitoring the onset of sexual maturity in wild males and the role of social suppression among subordinates. Professor Elizabeth Freeman and her colleagues at the CRC have been able to develop a rapid field test that provides indicators of high, medium and low progesterone concentrations in freshly collected fecal samples from female elephants without the need for specialized equipment or sample exportation. With the aid of Professor Freeman’s knowledge and experience, I plan to help to develop a similar field-friendly kit for measuring testosterone in feces from wild bulls.

s. Minerva venuti

Intracranial saccular aneurysms are thin, membranous balloon-like widening of the arterial wall, the rupture of which is the most common cause of non-traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding onto the surface of the brain) which results in a stroke. Despite advances in neurosurgery, these continue to result in significant morbidity and mortality. Therefore predicting the rupture-potential of aneurysms is fundamental to clinical diagnosis and treatment. The proposed project will be continuing work we've done in trying to model such aneurysms in the brain using differential equations. The fall undergraduate apprentice program will help to develop for the first time new models that will include effects of nonlinearity and viscosity into our coupled problem.

fernando valdes

Quorum Sensing compounds (QS) are produced by members of the Domain Bacteria as a means of cell to cell communication and are especially important in biofilm formation. Biofilms are important for aggregate growth, growth in biofilms on teeth, and the biofilms formed by pseudomonad bacteria in cystic fibrosis and on medical equipment such as catheters. We have isolated a haloarchaea from a solar salt works in California, Halorubrum californiense, which, in preliminary tests, appeared to have quorum sensing activity causing biofilm formation in microtiter plates. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to examine and identify what QS compounds are expressed by the haloarchaeal bacterium. This research will provide more information on biofilm formation and Quorum Sensing.

leah wolfeld

My study focuses on the effects of office layout on productivity and job satisfaction. Because face-to-face, informal communications are effective ways to increase productivity and job satisfaction, organizations must consider how best to maximize those interactions. My study aims to illustrate an effective way to do so - by using workspace as a tool. I will explore the connection of layout to productivity and job satisfaction and/or to social networking as transmitted through ease and frequency of communication.