College Science Scholars talk about the program

Q: What is being part of CSS like?

Q: Where do our students conduct research?

Cognitive Science

My 2nd semester of my first year, I was a Research Assistant in Prof.
Willingham's cognition lab. Our research, headed by Jim Miles, was on motor priming. We tested subjects in Gilmer Hall, and my job was to run the experiments. Every week we had a lab meeting where we discussed something happening in our field somewhere else in the world. These meetings taught me the most about how to evaluate other research, and informed me about cognitive psychology in general. -Eli Adler

Astronomy

I have worked on several projects through CSS: A Search for Tidal Tails on Pal 11 & Pal 15, Astrometric Calibration Data Reduction for duPont Telescope, Gravitational Harassment of our Dwarf Galactic Neighbors (Harrison Undergraduate Research Award), Comparison of Spectroscopic & Trigonometric Parallax (with Allan Sandage), and The Boxy Bulge and Bar of M31 (with Lia Athanassoula) - Rachael Beaton

Neuroscience

I am working in Prof. William Levy's (Neuroscience) lab investigating naïve Bayesian classifiers in neural networks. –Donald Norum

Environmental Sciences

I have worked with Alexia Kelley, who is a PhD student under Prof. Howie Epstein in the Environmental Science Department. We went to Alaska together this summer (2005) where I aided in her research of arctic ecosystems, specifically plant and soil interactions. I also did some preliminary research with Alexia in the spring semester of 2005 and will continue working with her this year. My project specifically focuses on the seed bank in the tundra. –Leyland Willliams Del Re

Biochemistry

I began work at the WM Keck Center for Cellular Imaging in January 2005. My mentor there is Dr. Ammasi Periasamy, in the Biology Department. I've been conducting a prostate cancer drug study, testing a drug synthesized by Dr. Milton Brown from the Chemistry department. The drug has been known to prevent the spread of prostate cancer, but it's mechanism of action remains to be fully understood, and I am conducting fluorescent microscopy experiments to shed light upon this mechanism. I have already determined that the drug prevents the cells from dividing as well as migrating, leading me to the conclusion that it somehow acts upon cellular actin polymerization. –Ali Yusuf Asif Hafiz

Physics

My first semester at UVA I worked in Prof. Gallagher's lab on Rydberg atom interactions with chirped microwave pulses. I continued in his lab through the summer constructing a magneto-optical trap for Rubidium. Currently I am measuring the quantum defect of the Rubidium f-series. –Donald Norum