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Seniors Present Research At Penn-York Conference

Three Houghton College seniors presented independent research at the annual Penn-York conference last Saturday, accompanied by professor of English and writing, Laurie Dashnau.

Photo courtesy of Laurie Dashnau
Photo courtesy of Laurie Dashnau

The group travelled to St. Bonaventure University to participate with other undergraduate researchers from New York and Pennsylvania colleges. Grace MacKay presented research in psychology, Sophia Ross presented her study of American poet Elizabeth Bishop, and Wesley Payette gave a poster presentation on marine biology.

Professors “highly encourage” students to participate in the conference, said Dashnau. “Houghton has regularly participated in this conference since 2005….[Houghton’s and Dashnau’s participation] grew out of my passion for mentoring,” she said.

At this “less formal” interdisciplinary conference, Dashnau said presenters often receive feedback on their research from professors, which can be “especially helpful” for students whose research is still in progress. The five minute question and answer period after presentations “often continue into the hallway and lunch hour,” she said.

Payette’s poster presentation was titled, “The effects of ocean acidification on copepod physiological ecology.” In layman’s terms, the biology major said, “It’s just a small part of the marine food chain I was studying.” Payette said his research yielded findings “that tie in directly to climate change.”

“Copepods, which are an important part of the marine food chain, they prey on a lot of phytoplankton. When they are exposed to higher levels of CO2, they tend to eat less.” This could have major effects on marine ecosystems, he said. “If we can understand how plankton and their predators behave, we can predict how plankton will affect the ecosystem.” Payette’s research came about through a marine biology internship he participated in last summer, “a one time thing”, he said. “I’m going to try to go into biomedical research or disease ecology” in graduate school after taking a gap year, he said.

Psychology and writing major Grace MacKay presented on “The Effects of Life Orientation and Message Framing on Decision Making”.

“I haven’t done the study yet,” she said. The project is part of her honors thesis, and she plans to conduct experiments through the next several months. She will also present her research “several times in the spring”. She said psychology professor Paul Young encouraged her “to get some experience” delivering the topic to audiences at the Penn-York Conference.

MacKay said people “respond to the way a situation is described to us,” depending on whether a situation is described in terms of risk or reward. Life orientation, or optimism and pessimism,and  message framing, “the wording of a situation” influences how individuals make decisions, she said.

“A pessimist tends to be more negative in general, a negative message framing tends to reinforce their natural inclination to think in terms of losses,” MacKay said.

This research can be applied to help people make decisions “by understanding how people work” and calculate risk, MacKay noted. “This can be applied to health, investments, things like that,” she said.

English major Sophia Ross presented on the contemporary poet Elizabeth Bishop. Titled “Remembering Mother and Motherland: The Experience of Loss in Elizabeth Bishop’s Nova Scotia Prose and Poetry,” Ross’s work explored Bishop’s experience as a Canadian American. Though Bishop was born and raised in Canada before moving to New England. Ross said “She really is considered an American Poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, she was the US Poet Laureate. But if you read her letters, she says she is half Canadian and half American. In a letter to her biographer, she said she considered herself three quarters Canadian and one quarter New Englander.”

Ross said much of the research done on Bishop revolves around her [Bishop’s] years in Brazil, her relationship with Robert Lowell, and that Bishop was a lesbian. “I wanted to see how Nova Scotia played into her work and write something that really brought that forward…these [other subjects] are interesting and definitely matter, but there’s not a lot done about Nova Scotia and how that affected her work,” Ross said.

“It was good,” MacKay said. “It was a good experience- there was a broad range of research. It was cool to interact with other students in the same boat.” While Payette and Ross have closed the book on their topics for the time being, MacKay is still in the midst of her work, now gathering “as many [experiment participants] as [she] can get”.

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Students Present Research at Penn-York Conference

This past Saturday, November 9, Professor Laurie Dashnau and ten Houghton students attended and participated in the 14th annual Penn-York Undergraduate Research Conference held at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. The university hosted the conference in conjunction with their 50 year celebration of the university’s operation.

Courtesy of Mark Dashnau
Courtesy of Mark Dashnau

The Penn-York Conference is an opportunity for students to make a brief presentation of their research to a group of their peers and to “learn a lot of interesting material from areas outside of their disciplines” said Prof. Dashnau. The conference provides an opportunity for learning and for honing presentation skills. “The conference went very well. I had an opportunity to attend approximately 25 paper readings…. All of the presentations went very well.” said Dashnau.

Seniors Caleb Johnson, David Smith, Jessica Dreiling, Hannah Lily, Ben Murphy, Taylor Ross, Elizabeth Wallace and juniors Sylvia Morrow, Meghan McCuistion, and Stephanie Ford gave oral presentations at the conference. In addition to oral presentations, there were also poster presentations displaying student research and projects.

There was a varied representation of academic areas at the conference, both from the Houghton students and the conference presenters overall. From Houghton, “Five were presenting writing specifically; Caleb Johnson’s paper was from… [an] economics class and the same for Taylor Ross’s paper titled ‘How does Health-Care Affect Economic Freedom?’… Sylvia Morrow presented a physics paper,” said Dashnau. Johnson’s presentation was entitled “Free Trade Agreements,” Smith’s was “The Effects of Nonverbal Communication in the Writing Center,” Dreiling’s “Rapport in the Writing Center,” Murphy’s “The Case for Inclusivity at Houghton College,” and McCuistion’s “Electroencephalographic Measures of Negative Priming Effects on Event-Related Potentials and Reaction Times.”

Junior Sylvia Morrow’s presentation was entitled “Searching for Rigid Triaxial Deformation in 70Ge” and focused on her research that she conducted over the summer on rare nuclear shapes at low energies in 70Ge. Morrow said that “it was a good opportunity to practice bringing science to the public.” For Morrow the conference also presented a chance to “practice my presentation and public speaking skills” she said.

Senior Hannah Lily’s presentation was entitled “Personal Repertoire in Writing Center Consultations” and focused on “how the sharing of details builds repertoire,” said Lily. Lily also commented on her participation in the conference, saying “it was a good experience being able to see everyone else’s presentations and the methods that they presented in, there was a wide variety of topics.”

Besides Houghton, students from Hilbert College, the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, the University of Pittsburgh at Titusville, Alfred University, St. Bonaventure, and Clarion University of Pennsylvania also presented at the conference.

Dashnau was optimistic for the conference’s growth and development next year. “I’m delighted that next year more students from St. Bonaventure University will be joining us in larger measure… one professor there who also went to the Penn-York Conference has agreed to be the keynote speaker; his name is Gregory Privitera,” said Dashnau. Houghton has hosted the conference in 2007 and there is an expressed hope to host the conference next year.