Undergraduate Student Research Grants awarded

Samantha Foster
Spectrum Editor

Michael Todd
Assistant Spectrum Editor

For the past six years, VCU has awarded $30,000 to groups of students who apply with a creative and scholarly investigation that is relevant to the student’s major. Research grants are given to groups that include students from different majors as a means of encouraging students to work together. It is preferred that a faculty member with a background in the field accompanies the team as a mentor, but it is not required. The average amount awarded in a grant is $2,500, but amounts can vary between $500 and $5,000. Each of the following six groups has been awarded grant money for their research grant proposals.

Wood Steamer for VCU’s School of the Arts

Team:
Casey Burkett, sculpture and extended media (team leader)
Matthew Burnette, mechanical engineering
Chuck Meas, mechanical engineering
Jose Ocampo, mechanical engineering

Faculty mentor: Mary Eisendrath, assistant professor and administrative director, sculpture and extended media

Grant: $5,000

Burkett and her team will work together to construct a wood steamer for the sculpture and extended media VCUarts department, while exploring different properties of wood and how it can be bent.

Wood steamers are used to bend and shape pieces of wood into curves that the piece does not normally or easily bend to. They are generally used once or twice and then discarded. Burkett and her team of mechanical engineering majors will be creating one that can hopefully be used by VCUarts students for an entire semester and that will use less water than traditional steamers.

The wood steamer will be tested on the variety of wood most available to art students, like those from the Lowe’s on Broad Street and scrap lumber from dumpsters in Richmond.

The team will also be researching the aesthetic qualities of wood as it bends. Students have been bending wood within the art school using various methods since a wood steamer is not readily available to art students.  Burnette said that friends of his had used the showers in the freshman dorms to attempt to bend wood while in the art foundations program.

The grant project has a projected end time of late April, when it will be delivered and given to the School of the Arts.

Medical Motion

Team:
William Hernandez, communication arts (team leader)
Mary Anne Matel, kinetic imaging
Deborah Me, medicine
Maya Sosa, communication arts
Carlos Valdes, kinetic imaging
Laura Zalles, medicine

Faculty mentors:
Dr. Alan Dow, assistant vice president, interprofessional education and care, School of Medicine
Matt Wallin, assistant professor, communications arts
Dr. Chris Woleben, Associate Dean of Student Affairs, School of Medicine

Grant: $1,924

Hernandez realized that, despite the constant advances of the digital world, instructive and explanatory medical videos were still not as widely available as illustrations by Frank Netter, a medical illustrator whose artwork is still referred to in the medical field today.

The specific topic of lipids was chosen somewhat arbitrarily, but it was a topic that a specific group of medical students coincidentally had difficulties grasping. Hernandez found that there was not one single, primary source that provided the information in a comprehensive manner.

The group aims to create a medical video that will communicate the consumption and breakdown of lipids in the body. Medical students Me and Zalles will break down the scientific information, while Valdes and Matel
will create 3-D models of lipids. Sosa and Hernandez will draft storyboards for the video.

A majority of funds will be put
towards hardware and software, including Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, as well as materials for 3-D modeling and books.

This Makes Sense

Team:
Jihyung Yoon, sculpture and extended media (team leader)
Perrin Turner, sculpture and extended media
Taylor Robinson, cinema
Dillon Meyer, cinema
Michael Flynn, electrical engineering
Marcus Massok, mechanical engineering
Laura Pretzman, chemical engineering/chemical science
Elliot Roth, biomedical engineering/chemical engineering

Faculty mentor:
Michael Jones McKean, associate professor, sculpture and extended media

Grant: $5,000

Investigating the concept of sensory perception, this team will collect sound, image and vibrations from various locations around Richmond, including VCU’s campus, Main Street and the James River. Using software and code programmed by the team’s engineering students, the group will convert this data into alternative sensory information, like a tactile or visual representation.

The group is primarily interested in the miniscule details of the senses that often go unnoticed. Data will be collected between February and October 2013. This will allow for a diverse range of seasons, time of day and weather conditions to be represented in the information gathered. The research project will culminate in a gallery show, tentatively set for December 2013, at which the translated data will be displayed.

The idea began with sculpture and extended media students Yoon and Turner who later, after a long series of fliers, meetings and emails, recruited the four engineering students and two cinema students who make up the rest of the group.

Cinema students Robinson and Meyer will track the research process with a documentary style film featuring interviews of the team members and faculty mentors.

People’s Library

Team:
Mark Strandquist, photography/film and sociology (team leader)
Courtney Bowles, anthropology and environmental studies
Riley Duncan, sculpture and extended media

Faculty mentor:
Hope Ginsburg, assistant professor, art foundation and painting and printmaking

Grant: $5,000

This team will take the average library to a new level. Taking old and discarded books from the Richmond Public Library, the group will be creating new books for the public to write their stories in.

The old books will be shredded and created into a pulp to make new paper, which will then be bound into blank paper books.  Prompts will be printed on the pages of the books at the local, nonprofit, community print shop, Studio 23, to encourage patrons of the library to write their stories in the books.

The team will also be hosting weekly workshops at Studio 23 throughout their project to allow the public to screenprint new prompts into the handmade books.

“Libraries reflect one of the most challenging and radical ideas behind democracy, that free and equal access to information is a human right,” Strandquist said. “We’re interested in pushing this idea further.”

Duncan will be creating sculptures for the project to house the created books and will also make furniture for patrons to use while visiting the library.

The project will be housed at the Main Street branch of the Richmond Public Library, with other incarnations of the library opening in spring at the MLK Memorial library.

There will be an interactive opening at the Main Street branch of the library on the first Friday in March.

Aerogel Exploration

Team:
Ginger Kitchen, sculpture and extended media (team leader)
Robert Williams, physics

Faculty mentors:
Jesse Burrowes, adjunct faculty, sculpture and extended media
Massimo Bertino, associate professor, physics
Carlton Newton, chair, sculpture and extended media

Grant: $3,584.30

Kitchen and Williams will investigate the properties of aerogel, a low-density solid similar to glass and commonly used in thermal insulation.

Kitchen first began working as an intern with Bertino in the fall 2012 semester. Since then, Bertino has been working to revise and improve upon the original aerogel formula, as the material is extremely brittle in all stages of its existence and very difficult material to work with. These improvements will hopefully make the mixing process more exact and predictable.

Bertino is also working on a method of light exposure that would increase the material’s durability. Williams is a recent addition to the team and will act primarily as Bertino’s assistant.

In the lab, Kitchen has been working to push aerogel’s applications by casting the gel into shapes that, while simple, test the physical limits of the material.

While Williams and Bertino are primarily interested in the material’s practical applications, such as insulation for extreme weather hiking boots, Kitchen hopes to eventually incorporate the material as a medium in her sculptural practice.

A large portion of the grant award will go toward materials. The heat-resistant rubber used to make casting molds costs nearly $1,000. The research grant funds will allow the team to experiment more freely and experimentally with materials, including an array of different rubbers, to improve upon the aerogel formula and casting process.

A Psychophysiological Model for the Assessment of Chronic Muscle Tension in Trumpet Players

Team:
Hannah Rumsey, music performance (team leader)
Sahil Aggarwal, biology
Erin Hobson, biology
Jeeyun Park, biomedical engineering

Faculty mentor:
Dr. Ross Walter, associate professor, music

Grant: $4,692.71

As a trumpet performance major, Rumsey knows the pain of playing a brass instrument. For her research project, she will be working to assess the muscle tension in students who play brass instruments.

Chronic muscle pain in the neck, face and upper back is common in people who play brass instruments.  These pains can also affect how well an instrumentalist can perform, leading many to stop playing their instrument.

The team will be using electromyography (EMG), which reads the electric signals emitted by muscles when they contract, to understand which muscles are used while playing a brass instrument, specifically the trumpet, and the degree of pain experienced by those with chronic muscle tension.  While this sort of test has been done with other instrumentalists in the past, it has not been conducted on only brass instruments.

Rumsey, with her team of biology and biomedical engineering majors, hopes to use this information to reduce instrumentalist’s pain or prevent muscle tension while performing.