Month: November 2016

Stephanie Shields, ’17, is Psychology major and German minor with a concentration in Neuroscience. Over the summer she was able to travel abroad to Hamburg, Germany through an internship program called the German Academic Exchange Service Research Internship in Science and Engineering. She worked with Ph.D. student Signe Luisa Schneider to complete her project on electroencephalography (EEG), learning, and memory.

“She’s using electrophysiological and behavioral methods to examine differences in EEG patterns and memory between elderly subjects and a young comparison group. She’s also using a brain-computer interface to attempt to train elderly participants to alter their brain activity in the hopes of increasing the activity in certain frequency bands, which have been found to be associated with subsequent memory in prior studies. I helped to set up for, run, and clean up after EEG sessions. I also helped Signe preprocess EEG data, and after gaining more experience with the MATLAB computing environment and reading literature related to the methodology and research questions, I helped with data processing and analysis. I also conducted a literature search, which will hopefully help Signe as she completes the project and writes up the results for publication.”

Stephanie’s favorite moment was when she suggested an idea that would improve the quality of the data.

“I sat down with Signe to talk to her about our preprocessing script and was able to suggest an idea to her that improved the quality of data we ended up with after preprocessing it to remove artifacts. That step is essential in obtaining valid results, so being able to work with my supervisor on that problem and make a meaningful contribution to its solution was both exciting and rewarding.”

For anyone considering doing research, Stephanie recommends giving it a shot.

“Even if you think something may be a long shot and even if you’re worried that you don’t have all the skills or abilities you’ll need, go for it and see what happens. Do your best, and take every experience you have as an opportunity to learn and grow.”

Samantha Waby performing a natural spawn

Samantha Waby is a senior majoring in Environmental Studies who interned at Patuxent Environmental and Aquatic Research Lab (PEARL) in Saint Leonard, Maryland in the summer of 2016. She worked in their oyster hatchery to complete her research and to learn certain processes in oyster hatcheries such as cleaning the tanks and spawning new oyster larvae. Sam’s research project was titled “A comparison of developmental and economical differences between two oyster larvae diets”.

“Many hatcheries feed their larvae with concentrated algae that comes in a bottle and is stored in a refrigerator. This mitigates the cost and unpredictability that comes with culturing microalgae in a lab, but there has been little research done on the performance of this concentrate in regards to what oyster larvae eat in the wild: live microalgae. There were two components to my project. The first compared the differences the two diets had on certain aspects of larval development (quantified by size and metamorphoses potential on day fourteen of life), and the second part of my project compared the difference in cost between feeding live versus concentrated algae”.

Samantha’s favorite moment while completing her research was finding organisms that made it through PEARL’s filtration system.

“There are many researchers at PEARL, all with expertise in different fields of aquatic ecology and/or fields that relate, so we would take these mystery critters to different labs and try to find someone who could identify them. We found things like nudibranches and fish lice!”

To anyone thinking about doing research, Samantha says:

“Do it! Creating and executing your own research project gives you experience in a field you are interested in, which is really fun and is going to look great when you are applying for jobs”.