Baylor Student Awarded Graduate Research Fellowship Grant From NSF
Meaghan McNeill, a graduate of Baylor University, received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship this year. While at Baylor, McNeill pursued a double major in mathematics and biology.
“It will probably take me four years to finish my graduate degree, but having three years paid for is a huge help,” McNeill said.
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McNeill said she hopes to be a professor and conduct research, focusing on imaging and diagnostics. She said she plans to continue her studies at Rice University, studying biomedical engineering.
Anthropology Makes History-Students Receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
For the first time in Washington State University history, two students from the anthropology department have received Graduate Research Fellowships. The two students, Stefani Crabtree and Kyle Bocinsky, are both working with the NSF funded Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP).
Modeling in the VEP involves computer simulation to recreate an area in the southwestern region of the United States. They input various important factors, such as farming soil, access to water, and access to animals for hunting, into the model in an attempt to recreate the human and climatic conditions of the time.
Simulated “residents” (agents) situate themselves on the landscape in relation to these critical resources, and VEP researchers compare the resulting conditions to the actual archaeological record. In this way, Crabtree, Bocinsky and other researchers are able to draw conclusions about what may have actually occurred in the past.
Researchers from the VEP hope agent-based models like these will provide answers to the mysteries surrounding climate change and sudden emigration from the region.
Stefani Crabtree, courtesty of Washington State University
Crabtree plans to use the platform of the VEP to analyze how alliance formation among ancient societies helped them deal with marginal environments and what triggers made those alliances collapse and result in warfare. She anticipates that these alliances will help her to better understand the vast and complete depopulation of the central Mesa Verde region.
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Kyle Bocinsky, courtesy of Washington State University
Second-year master’s student Bocinsky also works with the NSF funded VEP. Through his research he hopes to broaden archaeologists’ understanding of how turkey domestication spread across the southwest region of the United States.
Bocinsky has designed a module for the village simulation allowing people to hunt and domesticate wild turkeys, which show up abundantly in the archeological record and may have been a critical resource for people in the past.
He seeks to use innovative research methods to extract ancient DNA from turkey eggshells found at the site, which he believes will reveal the diet and the breeding habits of these ancient birds.
8 Honored in NSF Graduate Research Fellow Search
Utah State University hit a new record in 2010 for the most students and alumni it’s had recognized by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in one year. This year alone has been eight USU students honored, with four receiving an honorable mention and four receiving an award. The four students who received an award are Melissa Jackson (geology), Nathan Carruth (physics), Joanna Hsu (ecology), and Jan Marie Andersen (physics).
Melissa Jackson
Melissa Jackson, courtesy of Utah State University
Jackson has been studying Prehistoric Barrier Canyon Style (BCS) rock art using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating to determine the age of the alluvial terraces. She plans to continues her study and usage of OSL and developing a protocol to expand the age range it’s capable of dating by using loess deposits. Jackson’s graduate study will take place at Wales’ Aberystwyth University. During her time at USU, her other honors included being named Spring’s 2010 Valedictorian for the College of Science, a USU Presidential Scholarship, and receiving fourth place as part of USU’s Soils Team during national competitions in 2009 and 2010.
Joanna Hsu
USU graduate student Hsu is working with her advisor, Peter Adler, to study the relationship between precipitation and primary production.
“Primary production – how much green stuff plants are making – sets the amount of energy available for all organisms in an ecosystem,” Hsu says. “It’s also an important component of the global carbon cycle. Changes in precipitation patterns across the globe will impact primary production. The goal of my research is to find out just how large that impact will be.”
Nathan Carruth
Carruth, a USU graduate student finishing his master’s degree at the time of the application, had previously received two Honorable Mentions before receiving the award this year. While at USU, Carruth studied time with his faculty mentor Charles Torre.
“Among the questions we’re asking is ‘Is it possible for time to be discrete; is it necessarily continuous?’” Carruth says.
. . . Carruth will soon choose between offers of continued graduate study at University of California-Santa Barbara, University of California-Berkeley and England’s Cambridge University.
Jan Marie Andersen
After graduating from USU with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics, Andersen went to the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute on a Fulbright Student Scholarship. Andersen is now studying low-mass stars called M-dwarfs at Boston University.
“Many astronomers filter out M-dwarfs as unwanted interference in their searches for larger, brighter celestial objects,” says Andersen, who was named 2007 College of Science Undergraduate Researcher of the Year. “But our studies of M-dwarfs could yield important clues about the early universe. One astronomer’s trash is another astronomer’s treasure.”
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