Students Archives - Page 14 of 42

Stalking Elusive Ferns Down Under

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

Beyond Classroom Walls: Research as an Undergrad

By Cydney Livingston

On October 22, 2019

In Medicine, Neuroscience, Students

“Science is slow,” says Duke undergraduate Jaan Nandwani. That’s one of the takeaways from her first experience with scientific research. For Nandwani, being part of a supportive lab makes it all worthwhile. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. This statement needs context.

Nandwani, a prehealth sophomore, currently conducts research in the lab of neurologist Nicole Calakos, MD, PhD. The Calakos lab is focused on synaptic plasticity: changes that occur at the communication junctions between nerve cells in the brain. The lab researches how the brain responds to changes in experience. They also investigate the mechanistic mishaps that can occur with certain neurological conditions.

A neuron from a mouse brain. From Wikimedia Commons.

As a continuation of an 8-week summer research program she participated in earlier this year, Nandwani has been studying dystonia, a brain disorder that causes uncontrollable muscle contractions. She’s using western blot analysis to determine if the activity of a protein called eIF2α is dysregulated in the brain tissue of mice with dystonia-like symptoms, compared with their normal littermates. It is currently unclear if and when targeting the eIF2 signaling pathway can improve dystonia, as well as where in the brain “selective vulnerability” to the signaling occurs. If Nandwani is able to identify a specific region or time point “in which the pathway’s dysregulation is most predominant,” more effective drug therapy and pharmacological interventions can be used to treat the disorder.

Outside of her particular project, Nandwani attends lab meetings, learning from and contributing to the greater Calakos lab community. Scientific work is highly collaborative and Nandwani’s experience is testament to that. Along with providing feedback to her own presentations in meetings and answering any questions she may have, Nandwani’s fellow labmates are always eager to discuss their projects with her, give her advice on her own work, and have helped her “develop a passion for what [she is] studying.” They’ve also helped her learn new and improved ways to conduct the western blot process that is so integral to her work. Though she admits it is tedious, Nandwani said that she enjoys being able to implement better techniques each time she conducts the procedure. She also says she is thankful to be surrounded by such a supportive lab environment.

It might seem hard to believe granted the scope and potential impacts of her work, but this is Nandwani’s first experience with research in a lab. She knew when coming to Duke that she wanted to get involved with research, but she says that her experience has surpassed any expectations she had – by far. Though she doesn’t necessarily foresee continuation of research in the form of a career and is more fascinated by clinical applications of scientific research, the experience cannot be replicated within a classroom setting. Beyond the technical skills that Nandwani has developed, she says that the important and valuable mentoring relationships she has gained simply couldn’t be obtained otherwise.

Duke undergraduate Jaan Nandwani doing research in the Calakos lab.

Nandwani hopes to continue in the Calakos lab for the remainder of her time at Duke – that’s two and a half more years. Though she will work on different projects, the quest to pose and answer scientific questions is endless – and as Nandwani said, science is slow. The scientific process of research takes dedication, curiosity, collaboration, failure, and a continued urge to grow. The scientific process of research takes time, and lots of it. Of course the results are “super exciting,” Nandwani says, but it is the experience of being part of such an amazing group of scholars and scientists that she values the most.

Meet Cydney Livingston: An Inquisitive Sophomore and Our Newest Blogger

By Cydney Livingston

On October 18, 2019

In Students

My name is Cydney Livingston – Cydney with a C. I was born and raised in a rural part of North Carolina and retain my roots in the southern drawl of my voice. Though I haven’t declared yet, I am a sophomore at Duke pursuing a degree in both biology and history. And no, I am not a pre-health student. But at one point I certainly thought I might be. It was my first biomedical class in high school that truly spiked my interest in the magical (though actually very proven and not make-believe at all) world of science. I dropped my dream of going into marketing and knew then that in some capacity I would spend my life dedicated to the discipline of science.

Science endlessly answers and provokes questions of why and how. This is satisfying for someone as desperately curious about the world as I am, albeit equally frustrating at times. I was initially infatuated with how and why the human body functions as it does. I pushed myself to understand intricate details leading to the makeup, to the breakdown, to the human body as a whole. However, at some point following interests in pharmaceutical drug development and epidemiology (probably after reading Evolving Ourselves and Sapiens), I became deeply perplexed by evolution and ecology instead. I love humans, but I love other animals in their many shapes and sizes too. I also really love nature and want to be honest with myself about the things that make me the happiest. Social structures and behaviors, adaptation to environment, and conservation are a few things that really excite me right now.

I can give no specifics about my career projections – and trust me when I say many people have asked – but there is a high probability I will be performing research to quench the thirst I have for comprehending and unraveling the mysteries of the biological state of our world, its interactions, how we got to this point, and what our future may hold.

My love for science parallels that of my love for writing – which aids my frequent self-reflection, inquisitions, and creative works. In addition to writing for The Muse at Duke, I maintain a journal and extensions of my brain live in word documents tucked away in folders on my computer. Staying true to my passions, as well as to my deep desire for connecting with and learning from others, I sought out a position writing for the Duke Research Blog. Through this work I will grow as a scholar, have the chance to meet some of the most brilliant minds, and ultimately be able to give those who read my blogs a glimpse into the realm of research – a realm which alters lives, offers cognizance, and propels our societies in new directions each and every day.

The Making of queerXscape

By Lydia Goff

On September 26, 2019

In Art, Computers/Technology, Students, Visualization

On September 10^th, queerXscape, a new exhibit in The Murthy Agora Studio at the Rubenstein Arts Center, opened. Sinan Goknur and Max Symuleski, PhD candidates in the Computational Media, Arts & Cultures Program, created the installation with digital prints of collages, cardboard structures, videos, and audio. Max explains that this multi-media approach transforms the studio from a room into a landscape which provides an immersive experience.

The two artists combined their experiences with changing urban environments when planning this exhibit. Sinan reflects on his time in Turkey where he saw constant construction and destruction, resulting in a quickly shifting landscape. While processing all of this displacement, he began taking pictures as “a way of coping with the world.” These pictures later become layers in the collages he designed with Max.

Meanwhile, Max used their time in New York City where they had to move from neighborhood to neighborhood as gentrification raised prices. Approaching this project, they wondered, “What does queer mean in this changing landscape? What does it mean to queer something? Where are our spaces? Where do we need them to survive?” They had previously worked on smaller collages made from magazines that inspired the pair of artists to try larger-scale works.

Both Sinan and Max have watched the exploding growth in Durham while studying at Duke. From this perspective, they were able to tackle this project while living in a city that exemplifies the themes they explore in their work.

Using a video that Sinan had made as inspiration for the exhibit, they began assembling four large digital collages. To collaborate on the pieces, they would send the documents back and forth while making edits. When it became time to assemble their work, they had to print the collage in large strips and then careful glue them together. Through this process, they learned the importance of researching materials and experimented with the best way to smoothly place the strips together. While putting together mound-like cardboard structures of building, tire, and ice cube cut-outs, Max realized that, “we’re now doing construction.” Consulting with friends who do small construction and maintenance jobs for a living also helped them assemble and install the large-scale murals in the space. The installation process for them was yet another example of the tension between various drives for and scales of constructions taking place around them.

While collage and video may seem like an odd combination, they work together in this exhibit to surround the viewer and appeal to both the eyes and ears. Both artists share a background in queer performance and are driven to the rough aesthetics of photo collage and paper. The show brings together aspects of their experience in drag performance, collage, video, photography, and paper sculpture of a balanced collaboration. Their work demonstrates the value of partnership that crosses genres.

When concluding their discussion of changing spaces, Max mentioned that, “our sense of resilience is tied to the domains where we could be queer.” Finding an environment where you belong becomes even more difficult when your landscape resembles shifting sand. Max and Sinan give a glimpse into the many effects of gentrification, destruction, and growth within the urban context.

The exhibit will be open until October 6. If you want to see the results of weeks of collaging, printing, cutting, and pasting together photography accumulated from near and far, stop by the Ruby.

Post by Lydia Goff

Combining Up-Close Views of Science, Nature With the Magic of Light

By Robin Smith

On September 23, 2019

In Art, Biology, Students

Zinnia stamen by Thomas Barlow, Duke University

Thomas Barlow ’21 finds inspiration in small everyday things most people overlook: a craggy lichen growing on a tree, a dead insect, the light reflected by a pane of glass. Where we might see a flower, Barlow looks past the showy pink petals to the intricate parts tucked within.

The 20-year-old is a Duke student majoring in biology. By day, he takes classes and does research in a lab. But in his spare time, he likes to take up-close photographs using objects he finds outside or around the lab: peach pits, fireflies. But also pipettes, pencils.

A handheld laser pointer and flitting fireflies become streaks of light in this long-exposure image in Duke Forest. By Thomas Barlow.

Barlow got interested in photography in middle school, while playing around with his dad’s camera. His dad, a landscape architect, encouraged the hobby by enlisting him to take photos of public parks, gardens and playgrounds, which have been featured on various architects’ websites and in national publications such as Architecture Magazine. But “I always wanted to get closer, to see more,” Barlow said.

In high school he started taking pictures of still lifes. But he didn’t just throw flowers and fruit onto a backdrop and call it art. His compositions were a mishmash of insects and plants arranged with research gadgets: glass tubes, plastic rulers, syringes, or silicon wafers like those used for computer chips.

“I like pairing objects you would never find together normally,” Barlow said. “Removing them from their context and generating images with interesting textures and light.”

Sometimes his mother sends him treasures from her garden in Connecticut to photograph, like the pale green wings of a luna moth. But mostly he finds his subjects just steps from his dorm room door. It might be as easy as taking a walk through Duke Gardens or going for one of his regular runs in Duke Forest.

Having found, say, a flower bud or bumblebee, he then uses bits of glass, metal, mirrors and other shiny surfaces — “all objects that interact with light in some interesting way” – to highlight the interaction of light and color.

“I used to be really obsessed with dichroic mirrors,” pieces of glass that appear to change colors when viewed from different angles, Barlow said. “I thought they were beautiful objects. You can get so many colors and reflections out of it, just by looking at it in different ways.”

In one pair of images, the white, five-petaled flowers of a meadow anemone are juxtaposed against panels of frosted glass, a pipette, a mechanical pencil.

Another image pair shows moth wings. One is zoomed in to capture the fine details of the wing scales. The other zooms out to show them scattered willy-nilly around a shimmering pink circle of glass, like the remnants of a bat’s dinner plate.

Luna moth wings and wing scales with dichroic mirror, Thomas Barlow

For extreme close-ups, Barlow uses his Canon DSLR with a microscope objective mounted onto the front of a tube lens. Shooting this close to something so small isn’t just a matter of putting a bug or flower in front of the camera and taking a shot. To get every detail in focus, he takes multiple images of the same subject, moving the focal point each time. When he’s done he’s taken hundreds of pictures, each with a different part of the object in focus. Then he merges them all together.

At high magnification, Barlow’s flower close-ups reveal the curly yellow stamens of a zinnia flower, and the deep red pollen-producing parts of a tiger lily.

“I love that you can see the spikey pollen globules,” Barlow said.

Stomata and pollen on the underside of a tiger lily stamen, by Thomas Barlow

When he first got to Duke he was taking photos using a DIY setup in his dorm room. Then he asked some of the researchers and faculty he knew if there was anything photography-related he could do for their labs.

“I knew I was interested in nature photography and I wanted to practice it,” Barlow said.

One thing led to another, and before long he moved his setup to the Biological Sciences building on Science Drive, where he’s been photographing lichens for Daniele Armaleo and Jolanta Miadlikowska, both lichenologists.

“A lichen photo might not seem like anything special to an average person,” Barlow said. “But I think they’re really stunning.”

Leaving the Louvre: Duke Team Shows How to Get out Fast

By Robin Smith

On September 12, 2019

In Art, Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Mathematics, Students

Students finish among top 1% in 100-hour math modeling contest against 11,000 teams worldwide

Imagine trying to move the 26,000 tourists who visit the Louvre each day through the maze of galleries and out of harm’s way. One Duke team spent 100 straight hours doing just that, and took home a prize.

If you’ve ever visited the Louvre in Paris, you may have been too focused on snapping a selfie in front of the Mona Lisa to think about the nearest exit.

But one Duke team knows how to get out fast when it matters most, thanks to a computer simulation they developed for the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling, an international contest in which thousands of student teams participate each year.

Their results, published in the Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications, placed them in the top 1% against more than 11,000 teams worldwide.

With a record 10.2 million visitors flooding through its doors last year, the Louvre is one of the most popular museums in the world. Just walking through a single wing in one of its five floors can mean schlepping the equivalent of four and a half football fields.

For the contest, Duke undergraduates Vinit Ranjan, Junmo Ryang and Albert Xue had four days to figure out how long it would take to clear out the whole building if the museum really had to evacuate — if the fire alarm went off, for instance, or a bomb threat or a terror attack sent people pouring out of the building.

It might sound like a grim premise. But with a rise in terrorist activity in Europe in recent years, facilities are trying to plan ahead to get people to safety.

The team used a computer program called NetLogo to create a small simulated Louvre populated by 26,000 visitors, the average number of people to wander through the maze of galleries each day. They split each floor of the Louvre into five sections, and assigned people to follow the shortest path to the nearest exit unless directed otherwise.

Computer simulation of a mob of tourists as they rush to the nearest exit in a section of the Louvre.

Their model uses simple flow rates — the number of people that can “flow” through an exit per second — and average walking speeds to calculate evacuation times. It also lets users see what happens to evacuation times if some evacuees are disabled, or can’t push through the throngs and start to panic.

If their predictions are right, the team says it should be possible to clear everyone out in just over 24 minutes.

Their results show that the exit at the Passage Richelieu is critical to evacuation — if that exit is blocked, the main exit through the Pyramid would start to gridlock and evacuating would take a whopping 15 minutes longer.

The students also identified several narrow corridors and sharp turns in the museum’s ground floor that could contribute to traffic jams. Their analyses suggest that widening some of these bottlenecks, or redirecting people around them, or adding another exit door where evacuees start to pile up, could reduce the time it takes to evacuate by 15%.

For the contest, each team of three had to choose a problem, build a model to solve it, and write a 20-page paper describing their approach, all in less than 100 hours.

“It’s a slog fest,” Ranjan said. “In the final 48 hours I think I slept a total of 90 minutes.”

Duke professor emeritus David Kraines, who advised the team, says the students were the first Duke team in over 10 years to be ranked “outstanding,” one of only 19 out of the more than 11,200 competing teams to do so this year. The team was also awarded the Euler Award, which comes with a $9000 scholarship to be split among the team members.

Following the people and events that make up the research community at Duke

Category: Students Page 14 of 42