Category: Students Page 14 of 42

In the first week of fall semester, four first-year engineering students, Sean Burrell, Teya Evans, Adam Kramer, and Eloise Sinwell, had a brainstorming session to determine how to create a set of physical therapy stairs designed for children with disabilities. Their goal was to construct something that provided motivation through reward, had variable step height, and could physically support the students.

Evans explained, “The one they were using before did not have handrails and the kids were feeling really unstable.”

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Teya Evans is pictured stepping on the staircase her team designed and built. With each step, the lightbox displays different colors.

The team was extremely successful and the staircase they designed met all of the goals set out by their client, physical therapists. It provided motivation through the multi-colored lightbox, included an additional smaller step that could be pulled out to adjust step height, had a handrail to physically support the students and could even be taken apart for easy transportation.

This is a part of the Engineering 101 course all Pratt students are required to take. Teams are paired with a real client and work together throughout the semester to design and create a deliverable solution to the problem they are presented with. At the end of the semester, they present their products at a poster presentation that I attended. It was pretty incredible to see what first-year undergraduates were able to create in just a few months.

The next poster I visited focused on designing a device to stabilize hand tremors. The team’s client, Kate, has Ataxia, a neurological disorder that causes her to have uncontrollable tremors in her arms and hands. She wanted a device that would enable her to use her iPad independently, because she currently needs a caregiver to stabilize her arm to use it. This team, Mohanapriya Cumaran, Richard Sheng, Jolie Mason, and Tess Foote, needed to design something that would allow Kate to access the entire screen while stabilizing tremors, being comfortable, easy to set up and durable.

The team was able to accomplish its task by developing a device that allowed Kate to stabilize her tremors by gripping a 3D printed handlebar. The handlebar was then attached to two rods that rested on springs allowing for vertical motion and a drawer slide allowing for horizontal motion.

“We had her [Kate] touch apps in all areas of the iPad and she could do it.” Foote said. “Future plans are to make it comfier.”

The team plans to improve the product by adding a foam grip to the handlebar, attaching a ball and socket joint for index finger support, and adding a waterproof layer to the wooden pieces in their design.

The last project I visited created a “Fly Flipping Device.” The team, C. Fischer, E. Song, L. Tarman, and S. Gorbaly, were paired with the Mohamed Noor Lab in the Duke Biology Department as their client.

Tarman explained, “We were asked to design a device that would expedite the process of transferring fruit flies from one vial to another.”

The Noor lab frequently uses fruit flies to study genetics and currently fly flipping has to be done by hand, which can take a lot of time. The goal was to increase the efficiency of lab experiments by creating a device that would last for more than a year, avoid damaging the vials or flies, was portable and fit within a desk space.

The team came up with over 50 ideas on how to accomplish this task that they narrowed down to one that they would build. The product they created comprised of two arms made of PVC pipe resting on a wooden base. Attached to the arms were “sleeves” 3D printed to hold the vials containing flies. In order to efficiently flip the flies, one of the arms moves about the axis allowing for multiple vials to be flipped that the time it would normally take to flip one vial. The team was very successful and their creation will contribute to important genetic research.

It was mind-blowing to see what first-year students were able to create in their first few months at Duke and I think it is a great concept to begin student education in engineering through a hands-on design process that allows them to develop a solution to a problem and take it from idea to implementation. I am excited about what else other EGR 101 students will design in the future.

Teens Have the Feels About Their Family’s Standing

By Guest Post

On January 7, 2020

In Behavior/Psychology, Global Health, Guest Post, News Release, Students

A study of British twins appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that an adolescent’s sense of their own family’s social and economic standing is closely linked to that child’s physical and cognitive health.

In fact, the adolescent’s perception of status was a more powerful predictor of their well-being and readiness for further education than their family’s actual status. The study sample represented the full range of socioeconomic conditions in the U.K.

“Testing how young people’s perceptions related to well-being among twins provided a rare opportunity to control for poverty status as well as environmental and genetic factors shared by children within the same family,” said lead author Joshua Rivenbark, an MD/PhD student in Duke’s Medical School and Sanford School of Public Policy.

Joshua Rivenbark is an MD/PhD student in medicine and policy

“Siblings grew up with equal access to objective resources, but many differed in where they placed their family on the social ladder – which then signaled how well each twin was doing,” Rivenbark said.

Researchers followed 2,232 same-sex twins born in England and Wales in 1994-95 who were part of the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study based at King’s College London. Adolescents assessed their family’s social ranking at ages 12 and 18. By late adolescence, these beliefs signaled how well the teen was doing, independent of the family’s access to financial resources, healthcare, adequate nutrition and educational opportunities. This pattern was not seen at age 12.

“The amount of financial resources children have access to is one of the most reliable predictors of their health and life chances,” said Candice Odgers, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, who is the senior author of the report. “But these findings show that how young people see their family’s place in a hierarchical system also matters. Their perceptions of social status were an equally good, and often stronger, indicator of how well they were going to do with respect to mental health and social outcomes.”

Study findings also showed that despite growing up in the same family, the twins’ views were not always identical. By age 18, the twin who rated the family’s standing as higher was less likely to be convicted of a crime; was more often educated, employed or in training; and had fewer mental health problems than his or her sibling.

“Studies that experimentally manipulate how young people see their social position would be needed to sort out cause from effect,” Rivenbark said.

The E-Risk study was founded and is co-directed by Duke professors Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt at King’s College London.

Guest Post by Pat Harriman, UC-Irvine News @UCIPat

Sharing is Caring, But How Does it Start?

By Guest Post

On December 23, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Guest Post, Students

This is the second of several posts written by students at the North Carolina School of Science and Math as part of an elective about science communication with Dean Amy Sheck.

As an occasional volunteer at a local children’s museum, I can tell you that children take many different approaches to sharing. Some will happily lend others their favorite toys, while others will burst into tears at the suggestion of giving others a turn in an exhibit.

For Rita Svetlova Ph.D. at the Duke Empathy Development Lab, these behaviors aren’t just passing observations, they are her primary scientific focus. In November, I sat down with Dr. Svetlova to discuss her current research, past investigations, and future plans.

Originally from Russia, Svetlova obtained an M.A. from Lomonosov Moscow State University in Moscow before earning her Ph.D in developmental psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. She later worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Now at Duke University as an assistant research professor of psychology and neuroscience and the principal investigator in the Empathy Development Lab, Svetlova looks at the development of ‘prosocial’ behavior in children — behaviors such as sharing, empathy, and teamwork.

Svetlova credits her mentor at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Celia Brownell, for inspiring her to pursue child psychology and development. “I’ve always been interested in prosociality, but when I was in Russia I actually studied linguistics,” she says. “When I moved to the U.S., I changed paths partly because I’ve always wanted to know more about human psychology. The reason I started studying children is partly because I was interested in it and partly because I met Dr. Brownell. I branched out a little bit, but I generally found it interesting.”

An unsuccessful sharing experience. (From Awkward Family Photos)

Although her passion for childhood development research began in Pittsburgh, Svetlova has embraced her role as a Duke researcher, most recently tackling a scenario that most academically-inclined readers are familiar with — a partner’s failure to perform in a joint-commitment — in a co-authored May 2017 paper titled “Three-Year-Olds’ Reactions to a Partner’s Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment.”

In the study, 144 three-year-olds were presented with a common joint commitment scenario: playing a game. For one third of the children, the game ended when their partner defected, while another third of the test group had a partner who didn’t know how to play. The final third of the group saw the game apparatus break. Svetlova looked at how the children’s reactions varied by scenario: protesting defectors, teaching the ignorant partner, and blaming the broken apparatus. The results seem to suggest that three-year-olds have the ability to evaluate intentions in a joint commitment.

Another paper Svetlova co-authored, titled “Three- and 5-Year-Old Childrens’ Understanding of How to Dissolve a Joint Commitment,” compared the reactions of three- and five-year-olds when a puppet left a collaborative game with either permission, prior notification, or suddenly without prior notification. If the puppet left without warning, three-year-old subjects protested more and waited longer for the puppet’s return, but both age groups seemed to understand the agreement implicit in a joint commitment.

These joint commitments are only a small fraction of the questions that Svetlova hopes to address.

“A longitudinal study of prosociality would be amazing,” she says. “What I’m interested in now is the intersection of fairness understanding and in-group/out-group bias. What I am trying to look into is how children understand their in-group members vs. out-group members and whether there’s something we can do to make them more accepting of their out-group members.”

“Another one I am interested in is the neural basis of empathy and prosocial behavior. I haven’t started yet, but I’m planning a couple of studies on looking into the brain mechanisms of empathy in particular,” Svetolova says. “We plan to scan children and adults while experiencing an emotion themselves and compare that brain activation to the brain activation while witnessing someone experiencing an emotion, the question being ‘do we really feel others’ emotions as our own?’”

Svetlova also expressed her interest in the roles that gender, culture, and upbringing play in a child’s development of prosociality.

I had to ask her why teenagers seemed to “regress” in prosociality, seemingly becoming more selfish when compared to their childhood selves.

“I would distinguish between self-centered and selfish,” she assured me. “You are not necessarily selfish, it’s just that during teenagehood you are looking for your place in the world, in the ‘pack.’ That’s why these things become very important, other’s opinions about you and your reputation in this little group, people become very anxious about it, it doesn’t mean that they become selfish all of a sudden or stop being prosocial.” She added, “I believe in the good in people, including teenagers.”

Guest Post by Sellers Hill, NCSSM 2020

How Do You Engineer a Microbial Community?

By Guest Post

On December 20, 2019

In Biology, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Guest Post, Students

This is the first of several posts written by students at the North Carolina School of Science and Math as part of an elective about science communication with Dean Amy Sheck.

Claudia Gunsch, the Theodore Kennedy distinguished associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering, wants to know how to engineer a microbial community. An environmental engineer with a fascination for the world at the micro level, Gunsch takes a unique approach to solving the problem of environmental pollution: She looks to what’s already been done by nature.

Gunsch and her team seek to harness the power of microbes to create living communities capable of degrading contamination in the environment.

“How can you engineer that microbial community so the organisms that degrade the pollutant become enriched?” she asks. “Or — if you’re thinking about dangerous pathogenic organisms — how do you engineer the microbial community so that those organisms become depressed in that particular environment?”

The first step, Gunsch says, is to figure out who’s there. What microbes make up a community? How do these organisms function? Who is doing what? Which organisms are interchangeable? Which prefer to live with one another, and which prefer not living with one another?

“Once we can really start building that kind of framework,” she says, “we can start engineering it for our particular purposes.”

Yet identifying the members of a microbial community is far more difficult than it may seem. Shallow databases coupled with vast variations in microbial communities leave Gunsch and her team with quite a challenge. Gunsch, however, remains optimistic.

“The exciting part is that we have all these technologies where we can sequence all these samples,” she says. “As we become more sophisticated and more people do this type of research, we keep feeding all of this data into these databases. Then we will have more information and one day, we’ll be able to go out and take that sample and know exactly who’s there.”

“Right now, it’s in its infancy,” she says with a smile. “But in the long-term, I have no doubt we will get there.”

Gunsch is currently working on Duke’s Superfund Research Center designing bioremediation technologies for the degradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) contamination. These pollutants are extremely difficult to break down due to their tendency to stick strongly onto soil and sediments. Gunsch and her team are searching for the right microbial community to break these compounds down — all by taking advantage of the innate capabilities of these microorganisms.

A photo montage from Dr. Gunsch’s lab page.

Step one, Gunsch says, has already been completed. She and her team have identified several different organisms capable of degrading PAHs. The next step, she explains, is assembling the microbial communities — taking these organisms and getting them to work together, sometimes even across kingdoms of life. Teamwork at the micro level.

The subsequent challenge, then, is figuring out how these organisms will survive and thrive in the environment they’re placed in, and which microbial seeds will best degrade the contamination when placed in the environment. This technique is known as “precision bioremediation” — similar to precision medicine, it involves finding the right solution in the right amounts to be the most effective in a certain scenario.

“In this particular case, we’re trying to figure out what the right cocktail of microbes we can add to an environment that will lead to the end result that is desired — in this case, PAH degradation,” Gunsch says.

Ultimately, the aim is to reduce pollution and restore ecological health to contaminated environments. A lofty goal, but one within sight. Yet Gunsch sees applications beyond work in the environment — all work dealing with microbes, she says, has the potential to be impacted by this research.

“If we understand how these organisms work together,” she says, “then we can advance our understanding of human health microbiomes as well.”

Post by Emily Yang, NCSSM 2021

Traveling Back in Time Through Smart Archaeology

By Meghna Datta

On December 9, 2019

In Art, Computers/Technology, Field Research, Students

The British explorer George Dennis once wrote, “Vulci is a city whose very name … was scarcely remembered, but which now, for the enormous treasures of antiquity it has yielded, is exalted above every other city of the ancient world.” He’s correct in assuming that most people do not know where or what Vulci is, but for explorers and historians – including Duke’s Bass Connections team Smart Archaeology – Vulci is a site of enormous potential.

Vulci, Italy, was an ancient Etruscan city, the remains of which are situated about an hour outside of Rome. The Etruscan civilization originated in the area roughly around Tuscany, western Umbria, northern Lazio, and in the north of Po Valley, the current Emilia-Romagna region, south-eastern Lombarty, southern Veneto, and some areas of Campania. The Etruscan culture is thought to have emerged in Italy around 900 BC and endured through the Roman-Etruscan Wars and coming to an end with the establishment of the Roman Empire.

As a dig site, Vulci is extremely valuable for the information it can give us about the Etruscan and Roman civilizations – especially since the ruins found at Vulci date back beyond the 8th century B.C.E. On November 20th, Professor Maurizio Forte, of the Art, Art History and Visual Studies departments at Duke as well as Duke’s Dig@Lab, led a talk and interactive session. He summarized the Smart Archaeology teams’ experience this past summer in Italy as well as allowing audience members to learn about and try the various technologies used by the team. With Duke being the first university with a permit of excavation for Vulci in the last 60 years, the Bass Connections team set out to explore the region, with their primary concerns being data collection, data interpretation, and the use of virtual technology.

Trying out some of the team’s technologies on November 20th (photo by Renate Kwon

The team, lead by Professor Maurizio Forte, Professor Michael Zavlanos, David Zalinsky, and Todd Barrett, sought to be as diverse as possible. With 32 participants ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to professionals, as well as Italian faculty and student members, the team flew into Italy at the beginning of the summer with a research model focused on an educational approach of practice and experimentation for everyone involved. With a naturally interdisciplinary focus ranging from classical studies to mechanical engineering, the team was divided, with people focusing on excavation in Vulci, remote sensing, haptics, virtual reality, robotics, and digital media.

So what did the team accomplish? Well, technology was a huge driving force in most of the data collected. For example, with the use of drones, photos taken from an aerial view were patched together to create bigger layout pictures of the area that would have been the city of Vulci. The computer graphics created by the drone pictures were also used to create a video and aided in the process of creating a virtual reality simulation of Vulci. VR can be an important documentation tool, especially in a field as ever-changing as archaeology. And as Professor Forte remarked, it’s possible for anyone to see exactly what the researchers saw over the summer – and “if you’re afraid of the darkness of a cistern, you can go through virtual reality instead.”

An example of one of the maps created by the team

In addition, the team used sensor technology to get around the labor and time it would take to dissect the entire site – which by the team’s estimate would take 300 years! Sensors in the soil, in particular, can sense the remnants of buildings and archaeological features up to five meters below ground, allowing researchers to imagine what monuments and buildings might have looked like.

One of the biggest takeaways from the data the team collected based on discovering remnants of infrastructure and layout of the city was of the Etruscan mastery of water, developing techniques that the Romans also used. More work was also done on classification of Etruscan pottery, tools, and materials based on earlier work done by previous researchers. Discovering decorative and religious artifacts was also impactful for the team, because as Professor Forte emphasized, these objects are the “primary documentation of history.”

But the discoveries won’t stop there. The Smart Archaeology team is launching their 2019-2020 Bass Connections project on a second phase of their research – specifically focusing on identifying new archaeological sites, analyzing the landscape’s transformation and testing new methods of data capturing, simulation and visualization. With two more years of work on site, the team is hopeful that research will be able to explain in even greater depth how the people of Vulci lived, which will certainly help to shine a light on the significance of the Etruscan civilization in global history.

By Meghna Datta

Stalking Elusive Ferns Down Under

By Guest Post

On November 11, 2019

In Biology, Field Research, Guest Post, Students

Graduate student Karla Sosa (left) photographs and presses newly collected ferns for later analysis while Ashley Field (in truck) marks the GPS location of the find.

In Queensland, Australia, early March can be 96 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, but that’s still pretty hot.

Although hot, dry Australia probably isn’t the first place you’d think to look for ferns, that’s precisely why I’m here and the sole reason we’ve hit the road at 6 a.m. Our schedule for the day: to drive as far south as we can while still letting us come home at the end of the day.

My local colleague, Ashley Field, grew up just the next town over. A skinny, speedy man, he works at James Cook University in Cairns and knows most of northern Queensland like the back of his hand.

Cairns is on the coast at the upper right, where the little green airplane is.

The ferns I’m looking for today are interesting because some species can move from their original home in Australia to the tiny islands in the Pacific. But some cannot. Why? Understanding what makes them different could prove useful in making our crops more resilient to harsh weather, or preventing weeds from spreading.

We’ve been driving for four hours before we turn off onto a dirt road. If you haven’t been to Australia, it’s worth noting that four hours here is unlike any four hours I’ve experienced before. The roads are fairly empty, flat, and straight, meaning you can cover a lot of terrain. Australia is also incredibly big and most of the time you’re travelling through unpopulated landscapes. While it may be only four hours, your mind feels the weight of the distance.

Here’s the one they were looking for!
*Cheilanthes tenuifolia* with lots of little spore babies on the undersides of its leaves.

The dirt road begins to climb into the mountains. We are leaving behind low scrub and big granite rocks that sit on the flat terrain. Ashley knows where we can find the ferns I’m looking for, but he’s never driven this road before. Instead, we’re trusting researchers who came before us. When they explored this area, they took samples of plants that were preserved and stored in museums and universities. By reviewing the carefully labelled collections at these institutions, we can know which places to revisit in hopes of finding the ferns.

Often, however, having been collected before there was GPS, the location information on these samples is not very precise, or the plants may no longer live there, or maybe that area got turned into a parking lot, as happened to me in New Zealand. So, despite careful planning, you may drive five hours one way to come up empty handed.

As we move higher up the mountain, the soil turns redder and sparse eucalyptus forests begin to enclose us. We locate the previous collections coordinates, an area that seems suitable for ferns to grow. We park the truck on the side of the road and get out to look.

We comb 300 feet along the side of the road because these ferns like the edges of forest, and we find nothing. But as we trudge back to the truck, I spot one meager fern hiding behind a creeping vine! It’s high up off the road-cut and I try to scramble up but only manage to pull a muscle in my arm. Ashley is taller, so he climbs partway up a tree and manages to fetch the fern. It’s not the healthiest, only 6 inches tall for a plant that usually grows at least 12 to 14 inches. It’s also not fertile, making it less useful for research, and in pulling it out of the ground, Ashley broke one of its three leaves off. But it’s better than nothing!

This delicate beauty has no name yet. Karla has to compare it to other ferns in the area to know whether it’s just an odd-looking variant or possibly … a new species!

Ashley excels at being a field botanist because he is not one to give up. “We should keep looking,” he says despite the sweat dripping down our faces.

We pile back in and continue up the road. And who could have predicted that just around the bend we would find dozens of tall, healthy looking ferns! There are easily fifty or so plants, each a deep green, the tallest around 12 inches. Many others are at earlier stages of growth, which can be very helpful for scientists in understanding how plants develop. We take four or five plants, enough to leave a sample at the university in Cairns and for the rest to be shipped back to the US. One sample will be kept at Duke, and the others will be distributed amongst other museums and universities as a type of insurance.

The long hours, the uncertainty, and the harsh conditions become small things when you hit a jackpot like this. Plus, being out in remote wilderness has its own soothing charm, and chance also often allows us to spot cool animals, like the frilled lizard and wallaby we saw on this trip.

Funding for this type of fieldwork is becoming increasingly rare, so I am grateful to the National Geographic Society for seeing the value in this work and funding my three-week expedition. I was able to cover about 400 miles of Australia from north to south, visiting twenty-four different sites, including eight parks, and ranging from lush rainforest to dry, rocky scrub. We collected fifty-five samples, including some that may be new species, and took careful notes and photographs of how these plants grow in the wild, something you can’t tell from dried-up specimens.

Knowing what species are out there and how they exist within the environment is important not only because it may provide solutions to human problems, but also because understanding what biodiversity we have can help us take better care of it in the future.

Guest Post by graduate student Karla Sosa

Malaria Hides In People Without Symptoms

By Anna Gotskind

On November 11, 2019

In Biology, Field Research, Genetics/Genomics, Global Health, Science Communication & Education, Students

It seems like the never-ending battle against Malaria just keeps getting tougher. In regions where Malaria is hyper-prevalent, anti-mosquito measures can only work so well due to the reservoir that has built up of infected humans who do not even know they carry the infection.

In high-transmission areas, asymptomatic malaria is more prevalent than symptomatic malaria. Twenty-four percent of the people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to harbor an asymptomatic infection, including 38 to 50 percent of the school-aged children in western Kenya. Out of the 219 million malaria cases in 2017 worldwide, over 90% were in sub-Saharan Africa.

Using a special vacuum-like tool, Kelsey Sumner, a former Duke undergraduate now completing her Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill, collected mosquitoes in households located in rural western Kenya. These weekly mosquito collections were a part of her pre-dissertation study on asymptomatic, or invisible, malaria. She visited Duke in September to catch us up on her work in Data Dialogue event sponsored by the mathematics department.

Sumner and colleague Verona Liao, in front of a sticky trap for mosquitoes

People with asymptomatic malaria carry the infection but have no idea they do because they do not have any indicators. This is incredibly dangerous because without symptoms, they will not get treated and can then infect countless others with the disease. As a result, people with an asymptomatic infection or infections have become a reservoir for malaria — a place for it to hide. Reservoirs are a group that is contributing to transmission at a higher rate or proportion than others.

Sumner’s study focused on examining the effect of asymptomatic malaria on malaria transmission as well as whether asymptomatic malaria infections would protect a person against future symptomatic infections from the same or different malaria infections. They were particularly looking into Plasmodium falciparum malaria. In Kenya, more than 70% of the population lives in an area with a high transmission of this potentially lethal parasite.

“P. falciparum malaria is very diverse in the region,” she said. “It’s constantly mutating, which is why it’s so hard to treat. But because of that, we’re able to actually measure how many infections people have at once.”

The researchers discovered that many study participants were infected with multiple, genetically-distinct malaria infections. Some carried up to fourteen strains of the parasite.

Participants in the study began by filling out an enrollment questionnaire followed by monthly questionnaires and dried blood spot collections. The project has collected over nearly 3,000 dried blood spots from participants. These blood spots were then sent to a lab where DNA was extracted and tested for P. falciparum malaria using qPCR.

“We used the fact that we have this really diverse falciparum species in the area and sequenced the DNA from falciparum to actually determine how many infections people have,” Sumner said. “And then, if there’s a shared infection between humans and mosquitoes.”

Sumner and her team also visited symptomatic participants who would fill out a behavioral questionnaire and undergo a rapid diagnostic test. Infected participants were able to receive treatment.

While people in the region have tried to prevent infection through means like sleeping under insecticide-treated nets, malaria has persisted.

One of the Kenyan staff members hanging a CDC light trap for mosquitoes

Sumner is continuing to analyze the collected DNA to better understand asymptomatic malaria, malarial reservoirs and how to best intervene to help stop this epidemic.

“We’re basically looking at how the number of shared infections differ between those that have asymptomatic malaria versus those that have symptomatic malaria.”

She and her team hypothesize that there are more asymptomatic infections that would result in and explain the rapid transmission of malaria in the region.

Post by Anna Gotskind

Meet the New Blogger: Meghna Datta

By Meghna Datta

On November 4, 2019

In Biology, Medicine, Students

Hi! My name is Meghna Datta, and I’m a freshman. I’m from Madison, Wisconsin, so North Carolina weather has been quite the adjustment. Apart from the humidity, though, I’m so excited to be at Duke! I’m an aspiring pre-med student with absolutely no idea what I want to major in. And it’s funny that I’ve grown to love science as much as I do. Up until tenth grade, I was sure that I would never, ever work in STEM.

My first love was the humanities. As a child I was hooked on books (still am!) and went through four or five a week. In high school, I channeled my love for words into joining my school’s speech and debate team and throwing myself into English and history classes, until being forced to take AP Biology my sophomore year completely changed my trajectory.

Science had always bored me with its seemingly pointless intricacies. Why would I want to plod through tedious research when I could be covering a groundbreaking story or defending justice in a courtroom instead? But the lure of biology for me was in its societal impact. Through research, we’ve been able to cure previously incurable diseases and revolutionize treatment plans to affect quality of life.

In AP Bio, understanding the mechanisms of the human body seemed so powerful to me. Slowly, I began to entertain the notion of a career in medicine, one of many scientific fields that works to improve lives every day.

Now, the research going on at Duke doesn’t cease to amaze me. Specifically, I’m interested in science for social good. Be it sustainable engineering, global health, or data-driven solutions to problems, I love to see the ways in which science intersects with social issues. As I have learned, science does not need to be done in isolation behind pipettes. Science is exciting and indicative of society’s shared sense of humanity. At Duke, there’s no shortage of this environment.

As a blogger I’m so excited to see the inspiring ways that peers and faculty are working to solve problems. And because science isn’t a traditionally “showy” field, I am looking forward to shining the spotlight on people at Duke who tirelessly research behind the scenes to impact those at Duke and beyond. The research community at Duke has so much to celebrate, and through blogging I’m excited to do just that!

Meet the New Blogger: Irene Park

By Irene Park

On October 23, 2019

In Students

Hi! My name is Irene Park. I’m currently a sophomore at Duke, but I was born and raised in the D.C. area: home to NIH, NASA, the Smithsonian, and countless other major research complexes. I suppose my proximity to all these different knowledge bases must have influenced my current self in some way, as I’ve got a lot of multi-dimensional ideas free-floating through my mind.

At the top of Montserrat in Barcelona, Spain!

In my free time, catch me looking up cheap flights across the world, staring out the window at nothing in particular, or trying to figure out how to magically save the Amazon. And as you might expect, I’m still relatively undecided about my major simply because I feel that there’s just too much in this world to learn. Picking one specialized area is a bit daunting for me.

But what I do know is that I love stories – both hearing and telling. At age 11, I made a whole blog dedicated to chronicling what I found to be my sister’s strange K-pop obsession. That phase of her life was rather short-lived, however, and eventually I better realized my interest in journalism. I became a writer and editor for my high school newspaper and editor-in-chief of my county one. I became a film buff as well, building a portfolio that included several award-winning shorts.

In general, what I’ve learned through my last few years of storytelling is that while research is typically considered purely objective knowledge, it’s nothing without its “softer” side. Virtually everything can change depending on how a subject is framed through words, sound, or visual media. Being able to effectively communicate – whether informatively, editorially, or both – is and has always been an immensely important task.

One of the many pictures taken while “working on a film” with my group.

That’s something I’d like to build upon during my time with the Duke Research Blog: being able to turn data into words, words into sentences, and sentences into ideas. I find historical, environmental, sociological and anthropological research especially interesting, but those are already some very long terms with highly complex concepts that desire a whole lot of unpacking.

Hopefully I’ll be able to do some of that here. I might also go out on a limb and hope that my experiences at Duke Research Blog could potentially help me decide on a major, but I’m guessing all that interesting new information will just make me more confused. But who ever said that was necessarily a bad thing?

A photo of my friend and me (R) trying to figure out the inner workings of my brain.

Predicting sleep quality with the brain

By Sarah Haurin

On October 23, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Neuroscience, Students

Modeling functional connectivity allows researchers to compare brain activation to behavioral outcomes. Image: Chu, Parhi, & Lenglet, *Nature*, 2018.

For undergraduates, sleep can be as elusive as it is important. For undergraduate researcher Katie Freedy, Trinity ’20, understanding sleep is even more important because she works in Ahmad Hariri’s Lab of Neurogenetics.

After taking a psychopharmacology class while studying abroad in Copenhagen, Freedy became interested in the default mode network, a brain network implicated in autobiographical thought, self-representation and depression. Upon returning to her lab at Duke, Freedy wanted to explore the interaction between brain regions like the default mode network with sleep and depression.

Freedy’s project uses data from the Duke Neurogenetics Study, a study that collected data on brain scans, anxiety, depression, and sleep in 1,300 Duke undergraduates. While previous research has found connections between brain connectivity, sleep, and depression, Freedy was interested in a novel approach.

Connectome predictive modeling (CPM) is a statistical technique that uses fMRI data to create models for connections within the brain. In the case of Freedy’s project, the model takes in data on resting state and task-based scans to model intrinsic functional connectivity. Functional connectivity is mapped as a relationship between the activation of two different parts of the brain during a specific task. By looking at both resting state and task-based scans, Freedy’s models can create a broader picture of connectivity.

To build the best model, a procedure is repeated for each subject where a single subject’s data is left out of the model. Once the model is constructed, its validity is tested by taking the brain scan data of the left-out subject and assessing how well the model predicts that subject’s other data. Repeating this for every subject trains the model to make the most generally applicable but accurate predictions of behavioral data based on brain connectivity.

Freedy presented the preliminary results from her model this past summer at the BioCORE Symposium as a Summer Neuroscience Program fellow. The preliminary results showed that patterns of brain connectivity were able to predict overall sleep quality. With additional analyses, Freedy is eager to explore which specific patterns of connectivity can predict sleep quality, and how this is mediated by depression.

Freedy presented the preliminary results of her project at Duke’s BioCORE Symposium.

Understanding the links between brain connectivity, sleep, and depression is of specific importance to the often sleep-deprived undergraduates.

“Using data from Duke students makes it directly related to our lives and important to those around me,” Freedy says. “With the field of neuroscience, there is so much we still don’t know, so any effort in neuroscience to directly tease out what is happening is important.”

Post by undergraduate blogger Sarah Haurin

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