Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium

Rutgers’ status as New Jersey’s flagship public research university was on display as more than 350 undergraduate students of all disciplines and majors presented their latest original research to their colleagues and the public on April 24th.

Justine Hernandez Levine, administrative director of the Aresty Research Center for Undergraduates, said this year’s symposium – the largest ever – showcases a breadth of new research. Topics range from innovations in cancer diagnosis, new insights into race relations, and water purification in the jungles of Southeast Asia to restoration of old movies and new twists on classic literature.

“People hear about research and they visualize people in lab coats,” Levine said. “That’s part of it, but there’s so much more. This is an event run like a professional conference that showcases all research across all class years. Virtually all disciplines are represented.”

The Aresty Research Center for Undergraduates opened in 2004 with funding from Jerome Aresty and Lorraine Aresty and a goal of getting more undergraduate students involved early university research activities. The center’s support for undergraduate research ranges from providing financial grants to matching students’ interests with faculty members’ projects. The center also sponsors the symposium event, which is often a student’s entrée into the world of professional conference presenting – an experience fundamental to success in both research and commerce.

Levine believes students should understand that Rutgers is a public research university and that they should consciously and intentionally make research part of their undergraduate experience. “If all you ever do is go to classes, you’re missing out on a large part of your education,” she said, noting that as the state university, Rutgers has a special mission to conduct research that contributes to the medical, environmental, social and cultural well-being of the state’s citizens.

Below is a sample of this year's student research projects. Click on the student's names for their full stories.
 

Aleksandra Sherman, "Object Recognition Across Domains: Vision, Language, Audition," with Thomas Papathomas, director of the the Laboratory of Vision Research. Considering the sensory mishmash we endure everyday, how do our brains ever recognize images, words and musical melodies in all the clutter? Sherman used a computerized technique that slowly morphs images , music and words out of a blur, and monitored how – and how fast – her subjects caught on to what they were seeing and hearing. Her work has the potential to help us understand how learning works.

Robert Toth, "WERITAS: Weighted Ensemble of Regional Image Textures for ASM Segmentation," with Anant Madabhushi, biomedical engineering professor. This project describes Toth's collaborative research that led to a new way to find breast and prostate cancers without biopsies. The process, based on magnetic resonance imaging, has already been patented, and Toth recently won a top imaging industry award for his paper that describes it. Toth's research has been so intense in the past 18 months that he is considered 75 percent of the way toward earning a doctorate, despite that fact that he is still an undergraduate.

Lissette Herrera, "White Educators in the Media," with Mary Curran and Nora Hyland, assistant professors in the Graduate School of Education. As a graduate of an Abbott (special needs) school district, Herrera has long known that Hollywood's musings about "tough" high schools do not accurately represent the real world. In her project, she dissects four popular movies that all follow the same formula – white actors like Michelle Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep, Matthew Perry and Hilary Swank portray teachers who come into the schools, turn things around and become heroes.

Phillip Handy, "Race and Gender in the Family: A Mixed-Race Perspective," with Diana Sanchez, psychology professor. Handy received input from almost 1000 multiracial persons from across the country in a quest to discover how mixed-race people form their racial identities. His ability as an undergraduate to conduct such a large study is a testament to today's technology, as he used social networks like Facebook and MySpace and other online forums to reach a select audience to participate in his survey.