Shaozhuo Cui / SPPSAaron Rudd, a junior in HNFE, works on research on skeletal muscle fibers in the CRC. Rudd will present his findings at Meeting of the Minds.
At the conference, which will be held April 18 and 19, students from each college in the ACC will attend and present research projects in the arts, humanities, sciences and engineering.
The selection process for choosing the students who will represent Tech in the conference was highly competitive and twofold. Each college called for undergraduate research projects, and up to three research projects from each discipline were placed in front of the university review committee. From many applicants, only four were chosen to attend the conference.
The four Tech students chosen to attend the conference each represents a different university discipline: Lizzy Carraway of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Aaron Rudd of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Andrew Lucas of the College of Science and Tyler Haak of the College of Engineering.
For the conference, Carraway, a senior English major, expanded on research she had done for a paper in professor Fritz Oehlschlaeger's modern American literature class titled "Fitzgerald and Anderson on Lovers, Wives and Mothers."
"It started out as just an exploration into what the authors were saying about the modernist idea of the new woman through their characters," Carraway said. "I submitted it to the English department's undergraduate research conference and presented it there, and then I was contacted about expanding my research and sending it to a national conference."
However, having the English undergraduate conference under Carraway's belt didn't make expanding her research any easier.
"I found through expanding my research just how varied and controversial these characters were even within feminist scholarship," Carrway said. "So my paper has definitely evolved and changed over the past year to encompass a lot more than when I started out with just a literary analysis."
Andrew Lucas, a junior biology and chemistry double major, found his way into the Meeting of the Minds by spending most of his time working in a Derring lab. Since the spring of 2006, Lucas has been studying protein ligand interactions and protein stability.
"I'm pretty much always in the lab," Lucas said. "What I've been studying is what happens when a ligand, a small molecule, binds to a protein. We think that when that happens, it starts to degrade."
Lucas said that his time spent in the lab hasn't been the most difficult aspect of his research; rather, it's been keeping his research a secret.
"It's sometimes hard to talk about because you don't want other people to overhear or read something that you've done and then take all of the credit before it's been published," Lucas said.
While some of the students had been working on their research for months, Tyler Haak's journey to the Meeting of the Minds Conference has been a bit different.
Haak, a junior civil engineering major, along with 15 other students from universities across the country, was accepted into a National Science Foundation summer program during the summer of 2007 in Dalian, China. at the Dalian University of Technology.
"I had no idea what I was going to be doing research on until I got there," Haak said. "But when I got there, I was paired with a Chinese graduate student from the university there, and he helped to guide me along."
While in China, Haak conducted his research on offshore oil platforms in the bay outside Dalian.
"When the bay freezes in the winter, ice will move across the bay and run into the platforms, which will make the platforms unserviceable," Haak said. "So my research was to look up ways to minimize the vibration that can happen whenever they collide with ice and what is the best method to do that."
Raymond Plaut, D. H. Pletta professor of civil and environmental engineering, kept in touch with Haak during his time in China and when he returned, encouraged him to submit his work to the conference.
"Dr. Plaut helped me edit and organize my research and encouraged me to apply," Haak said.
Aaron Rudd, a junior human nutrition, fitness and exercise major, also has his mentor to thank for much of his success. Rudd was a part of the HNFE's summer scholars program and began his research studying the role of the gene Nhlh2 in skeletal muscle tissue as it relates to obesity and reduced activity. His mentor, Deborah J. Good, started researching the gene over 10 years ago.
"Dr. Good, she was the one who pushed to apply the ACC Meeting of the Minds," Rudd said. "She definitely pushes me in the right direction and gets me to take initiatives I may not normally take."
Lucas also credits his mentor, Carla Finkielstein, assistant professor of biological sciences, for suggesting that he apply for the Meeting of the Minds.
"Carla told me about the conference, so we got together and talked about it and decided it would be a good idea," Lucas said. He looks forward not only to his personal success but the success of his department.
"All of my accomplishments are also hers," Lucas said. "We share the accomplishments with our lab."
Despite the great honor and accolade that comes with being accepted into the conference, nerves don't seem to pose much of a threat to these scholars.
"I'm pretty comfortable with the information I'm going to present, so I'm not too nervous about it," Rudd said.
Haak agrees that nerves take a backseat when they know that the university is fully supportive of their research endeavors. "One of the best things about going to a school like Virginia Tech is that people really look out for you if you do good research," Haak said. "And if you do well, the school will totally support you."
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