Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Preliminary Tropical Fungal Palynology Of Early-Middle Miocene Sediments From Northwestern Peru, Jeremyah Cabrera, Christopher Marsh, Liberty Smallwood, Ollie Vanderepst, Ingrid Romero, Noelia Nuñez Otaño, Diana Ochoa, Jen O’Keefe

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

Fungal communities are a vital part of terrestrial ecosystem functions and understanding how they respond to climate change is necessary for predicting future assemblage dynamics. Sediments deposited during the Miocene Climate Optimum (MCO), 18-13 million years ago, provide an opportunity to examine fungal responses to a warming event with CO2 values similar to those today. Few fungal datasets exist for tropical regions during the MCO, and only one uses modern methods to identify fossil fungi and complete paleoecological inferences and paleoclimatological reconstructions using the nearest living relative method.

Building For The Exchange, Maddie Dodrill, Brittany Graziani, Alexa Deaton, Abigail Cooper, Gabe Barcus, Janet Ratliff

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

Our project, “Building for the Exchange,” is trying to solve a problem that has been progressing for nearly a century. Modern development practices have changed the small business landscape in Morehead. It was once a vibrant downtown core with neighborhoods built around it. A surge in population over the last 70 years has caused businesses to spread across the community. The downtown has been left with empty storefronts, struggling to keep viable businesses. To try to solve this problem, our class was split into four groups and we were tasked to create business plans to fill vacant spaces in the …

Repressor Of The Sos Response Mechanism In Acinetobacter Baumannii Requires Helix-Formation And Dimerization For Its Dna-Binding Ability, Belinda Candra, Deborah Cook, Jenelle Hare

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

After DNA damage, the multi-drug resistant pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii activates its SOS response, possibly allowing mutagenesis to occur by inducing multiple errorprone polymerases. A. baumannii uses the non-canonical repressor protein UmuDAb to repress operons of these polymerases. It has an N-terminal domain (NTD) with 2 helices (HTH1 & HTH2) whose sequences are needed for repression1. Like other bacterial SOS repressors such as LexA, UmuDAb dimerizes. BACTH analyses2 showed that UmuDAb forms dimers via its LexA-like G124 residue and UmuD-like N100 residue (UmuD is a component of an error-prone polymerase). However, N100 is not needed if the C termini are free. …

A Brief History Of Environmental Policy Through Literature, Nathan Walden, Brady Lawson, Adam Abdel-Rahman, Mathew Delancey, Douglas Mock

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

Environmental policy is a relative newcomer on the scene of federal regulation, with cries for a unified federal environmental response ignited by the publication of Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson in 1962 which exposed the new field of environmental science and its effects to the American public. However, the tradition of literature driving public awareness and federal policymaking does not stop at its genesis with many seminal works such as Collapse, by Jared Diamond, The Diversity of Life, by Edward O. Wilson, and Love Canal, by Richard Newman, continuing to do the same. These books have continued to …

Identification Of Unknown Mold Sample From Lappin Hall, Devan Herald, Geoff Gearner

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

The purpose of this undergraduate research project is to identify an unknown species of mold that was found growing in the B-wing of Lappin Hall, on Morehead State University Campus, after the summer holiday of 2022. A sample of the unknown mold was collected and isolated for identification.

Religious Beliefs & Marital Satisfaction: Examining The Impact Of Religious Beliefs On Marital Satisfaction, Trenton Rose, Monica Himes

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

The focus of the study is to examine the relationship between religious beliefs and marital satisfaction. The goal was to look at how religion was being incorporated into marriages and how it impacted their satisfaction with the marriage.

Fundamental Or Negligible?: Kentucky P-12 Teacher Websites, Maddie Stamper, Lesia Lennix

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

How does a P-12 classroom teacher communicate at large with their students or their parents? There are countless ways for teachers to communicate with others. We determined that the more effective route in teacher communication would be an access-key-based Google Classroom, or an open-access teacher website linked directly to their respective school's website. An available, published teacher website allows anyone with internet access to view teacher-proffered information. This information could include their name, email, phone number, short biography, picture, or Google Classroom link. We found that the most effective information to include on a teacher's website would be their name, …

The Kentucky Ant Project: An Attempt To Catalogue The Ant Species Of Kentucky, Josiah Kilburn, Sean O'Keefe

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

There are 74 ant species in Kentucky and 55 ant species in West Virginia. In most of the surrounding states, ant species counts are nearly double, or at least 49 more ant species than either of these two states. This indicates that there have been minimal sampling efforts in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Impact Of Nurse- Patient Interactions On Patient Outcome: A Quality Improvement Project, Suzie White

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

The purpose of this project is to address the benefits of care related to nurse and patient interactions. Throughout the project we have researched these benefits within different specialties of medicine. Some different specialties we studied include, communication in the ICU (intensive care unit), communication within the palliative/hospice setting, communication in the ED (emergency department), communication in the med surgical setting, patients’ perception of nurse/ patient interactions, nurse communication techniques and training, and lastly the costs of effective and ineffective communication.

Adverse Childhood Events, Safety, & Comfort: Associations With Adolescent Symptoms, C. Skaggs, M. Howard, T. Pangallo, Shari L. Kidwell

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

A PowerPoint that accompanied a oral presentation.

Leadership Initiatives International Public Health Internship Program, Brooklyn Adams, Mahathi Siripurapu, Jennifer Nguyen, Landon Pritchett, Josh Day, Jeremyah Cabrera, Rox Lockard, Rachel Rogers

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

In a nine-month internship for Leadership Initiatives, our team worked together to develop and implement an international public health campaign to address major health concerns prevalent in the region of Bauchi State, Nigeria. Our topic was the issue of selfmedication and its effects among the community. We launched a campaign to collect survey data and develop an educational workshop for the project.

The Impact Of Early Identification Of Declining Patients: A Quality Improvement Study, Courtlyn Salyers, Kyla Wilson, Cedric Meadows, Savannah Sizemore, Savannah Thompson, Gg Ferguson, Payton Mcglone, Leah Moore, Jordan Sims, Suzi White

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

This presentation focuses on the prevalence of failure to rescue in healthcare, that we have evidenced in the clinical setting. Proper identification of declining patient health plays a major role in early intervention, resulting in a positive patient outcome. Analyzing common themes in these issues provided a “bigger picture” of the need for proactive patient care.

Craft Academy Solar Electric Racing: The Building Of A Solar Car, Bray Paynter, Sophia Day, Casey Hovis, Hailey Castle, Hope Meyers, Landon Ray, Rachel Rogers, Joyce Stubbs, Steve Stubbs

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

The Solar Car Challenge is a nationwide program in which high school and college students design and build a car powered by solar panels, competing at Texas Motor Speedway or in a cross-country race. In the Spring of 2021, The Craft Academy for Excellence in Science and Mathematics founded a Solar Car Team called Craft Academy Solar Electric Racing (CASER).

First Examination Of Palynolgy Across The K-Pg Boundary In The Jackson Purchase Region Of Kentucky, Maeve Mccarty, Jarred Asselta, Gary Stinchcomb, William Lukens, Ingrid Romero, Matthew Pound, Jen O’Keefe

2023 Celebration of Student Scholarship - Poster Presentations

This study examines the Independence School section of the K-Pg Boundary, which is located in a creek cutbank exposure in Carlisle County, in the Jackson Purchase region of Kentucky. This section has not otherwise been examined since 1980 and has not previously been palynologically studied in detail. Specifically, we are examining the Owl Creek and upper McNairy Formations, deposited as Maastrictian-age sediments and the Clayton Formation, deposited as Danian- age sediments, in a mosaic of onshore, nearshore, and coastal environments (Tschudy, 1970; Olive, 1980). The site was relocated by G. Stinchcomb and students from Murray State University in 2020 and …

Evaluating Domain Specific Llm Performance Within Economics Using The Novel Econqa Dataset, Tate Van Patten

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This paper describes a novel dataset, EconQA, constructed to assess the performance of large language models within multiple choice economics questions. I present results from 10 experiments, varying prompts and model choices. Results challenge previous findings that prompt choice makes a large impact on quality of response. Using the GPT 3.5 Turbo model, observed performance levels ranged from 70-77% for all prompt choices, with the no prompt baseline scoring 73%. When prompted to use Chain-of-Thought reasoning with examples, performance was highest at 76%. Contrary to previous research, performance on mathematical questions when prompted with Chain-of-Thought was high. This paper closes …

Interactive Learning With Plankton: Constructing Kiosks For The Sea Discovery Center, Sierra Schuster

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project involved creating two interactive kiosks for the SEA Discovery Center to better engage visitors on their plankton exhibits. HTML, CSS, and ReactJS were used to construct web apps that could be launched in Chromium’s Kiosk Mode upon system boot time so that the application would automatically run, preventing visitors to the Center from gaining access to the computer beyond the main program. They are hosted externally on Western Washington University’s Cyber Range and are run on the kiosk machine by Raspberry Pi 4s that access it via a URL. The informational kiosk was designed to give visitors an …

Double Trouble: Applying Deep Learning To Ebs Systems, Noah Reneau, Hidemi Mitani Shen, Nicholas Chandler, Ian Pourlotfali

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Eclipsing binaries (EB) are fundamental stellar laboratories that can be detected via long-term photometric monitoring. Analyzing the orbital motion of these EBs offers a unique ability to directly measure the parameters of both stars in the system, including masses, radii, and effective temperatures, without relying on theoretical models. Nonetheless, this process is non-trivial, and arriving to a correct solution for a given system can often take significant time. In the ongoing work, we are developing deep learning models capable of providing fast and accurate predictions of these fundamental parameters in these EBs, which will enable the characterization of an increasingly …

Lagrangian Mechanics And The Motion Of A T-Handle, Eric Maurer

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This paper begins by deriving the equations of motion for the Lagrangian formulation of mechanics. Lagrangian mechanics describes the same thing as the traditional Newtonian mechanics (which is what is taught in most undergrad physics classes), but rather than model the system through forces, it models the system through energy. Energy is conserved in a system, which allows the Lagrangian formulation to model certain types of systems in a more efficient way than the Newtonian formulation.

Next, the paper explores rigid body motion, specifically looking at the motion of the angular momentum. The goal of this part is to explain …

The Role Of Volatile Enrichment In The Radiogenic Heating And Thermal Evolution Of Rocky Exoplanets, Ula Jones, Asmaa Boujibar

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Internal heating in terrestrial planets is a fundamental physical process controlling the internal structure of a planet, mantle convection, volcanic activity, and the generation of magnetic fields. Internal heating results from various processes including radioactive decay and accretional energy, as well as additional irradiation and tidal heating in planets with short orbital periods. The largest long-term heat source for terrestrial planets is radioactive heating, especially from the decay of uranium (U), thorium (Th), and potassium (K) isotopes. K is a moderately volatile element, while U and Th are refractory elements; during planetary accretion volatiles are depleted relative to refractory elements, …

From Filth It Rises Presentation, Griffin Hartz

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project contains the design, development, and partial implementation of a survival horror game made in Unity engine. The highlight of the game's design is the machine learning agents used to create the game's enemy AI, developed with Unity's MLagents system. In the game, the player controls a construction worker who traveled into a sewer to pursue a missing coworker. They eventually find their way into a crumbling undercity where their coworker was trapped, and soon become hunted by the mutant monster that killed their coworker. Their goal is to escape the ruins without being preyed upon by the mutant …

A Change-Point Analysis Of Air Pollution Levels In Silao, Mexico And Fresno, California, Rachael Goodwin

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

We analyzed PM10 levels in the city of Silao, Mexico, as well as PM2.5 and PM10 levels in Fresno, California to determine if there was a shift in air pollution levels in either location. A change point based analysis was used to determine if there was a shift in air pollution levels. In the city of Silao, there was a significant increase in PM10 levels, but there was no significant change in Fresno for either pollutant.

A Gravity Model Integrating Land-Use And Transportation Policies For Sustainable Development: Case Study Of Fresno, California, Chih-Hao Wang, Na Chen

Mineta Transportation Institute

The idea of urban compaction has been long proposed and promoted to address the problem of urban sprawl in many American cities. However, there are still rare successful cases of such implementation in the United States. This study uses a classic gravity model, TELEM (Transpiration, Economic, and Land-Use Model) to examine to what extent a land-use or transportation policy must be regulated to make the urban compaction occur in a typical auto-dependent city—Fresno, California. Five scenarios are considered (BL, L1, L2, T1, and T2), in which the baseline (BL) is a natural growth scenario. Without any policy interventions, the city …

Tropical Tree Carbon Storage At Drago Dos Forest In Boca Del Drago, Panama, Ben Dwyer

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Currently, anthropogenic carbon emissions pose a significant, global threat, contributing to Global Warming and Climate Change (CC). Today, the most effective carbon sinks are natural. Trees are highly effective carbon sinks that sequester large amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), most greatly in tropical areas. However, tropical tree carbon storage needs to be more accurately estimated to provide valuable information toward mitigating CC and its negative environmental effects. This study aimed to estimate CO2 sequestration at a tropical forest in Boca Del Drago, Panama, and compare it to that of a nearby mangrove forest. It was hypothesized that the tropical …

Women In Sustainable Leadership: A Case Study On The Perspectives, Opportunities, And Challenges Of Biologist And Conservationist Estrela Matilde, Ella Lyons

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Despite the relatively small population of 8,000 occupants and the minimal international recognition of the Island of Príncipe, located off of the Gulf of Guinea on the Western Coast of Central Africa, the region has increasingly become a leading example of sustainable practices to be taken on a global scale in the near future to combat our current climate crisis. This case study explores the sustainable practices that Príncipe has learned to embrace under the leadership of Portuguese conservation biologist and project manager for the NGO Fundação Príncipe, Estrela Matilde. Estrela integrates social, cultural, and environmental conservation to align with …

On The Accelerated Noise-Tolerant Power Method, Zhiqiang Xu

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

We revisit the acceleration of the noise-tolerant power method for which, despite previous studies, the results remain unsatisfactory as they are either wrong or suboptimal, also lacking generality. In this work, we present a simple yet general and optimal analysis via noise-corrupted Chebyshev polynomials, which allows a larger iteration rank p than the target rank k, requires less noise conditions in a new form, and achieves the optimal iteration complexity (Equation presented) for some q satisfying k ≤ q ≤ p in a certain regime of the momentum parameter. Interestingly, it shows dynamic dependence of the noise tolerance on the …

Databases And Deliberation, Britany Orozco, Quentin Jensen

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This paper describes the process taken to build a digital form-collection system in a business context. By starting with the motivation for the project, we can gather the requirements necessary to complete before we can consider the project complete. From there, we start discussing the client-server-database architecture principles that must be reviewed before we can design our database. Database design fundamentals are reviewed, such as what a schema or entity relationship diagram is, and those fundamentals are used to design the database. Next, we show how a development environment is chosen. With the environment set up, we then discuss how …

Investigations On The Active Catalyst In Pd Catalyzed Organic Reactions, Riley Mcgraw

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Cross coupling and C-H functionalization reactions are valuable tools in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals, natural products, fine chemicals, and electronics. Molecular precatalysts are frequently used in both reactions but because the reactions use conditions like those employed in intentional preparation of nanoparticles, the presence of nanoparticles is highly likely for both systems. In the case of the cross-coupling reaction, nanoparticles have been shown to have catalytic relevance, but C-H functionalization reactions are widely thought to occur by means of a homogenous catalyst. To better understand the state of the active catalyst, a method of homogeneity analysis by centrifuge is proposed. …

Solving The Genius Square: Using Math And Computers To Analyze A Polyomino Tiling Game, Noah Jensen

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This paper investigates if the claim of the game Genius Square is true, that all 62,208 boards that its dice can roll are solvable. The gameboard is a 6 by 6 grid and the objective of the game is to tile a board that has 7 blockers, quasi-randomly placed by the dice, with 9 polyominoes consisting of 1, 2, 3, and 4 squares. In order to implement a model of linear systems created by John Burkardt and M.R. Garvie, code was developed using Python and Matlab. With this code, it was shown that all 62,208 boards are solvable. The number …

Stargazer: An Interactive Camera Robot For Capturing How-To Videos Based On Subtle Instructor Cues, Jiannan Li, Mauricio Sousa, Karthik Mahadevan, Bryan Wang, Paula Akemi Aoyagui, Nicole Yu, Angela Yang, Ravin Balakrishnan, Anthony Tang, Tovi Grossman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Live and pre-recorded video tutorials are an effective means for teaching physical skills such as cooking or prototyping electronics. A dedicated cameraperson following an instructor’s activities can improve production quality. However, instructors who do not have access to a cameraperson’s help often have to work within the constraints of static cameras. We present Stargazer, a novel approach for assisting with tutorial content creation with a camera robot that autonomously tracks regions of interest based on instructor actions to capture dynamic shots. Instructors can adjust the camera behaviors of Stargazer with subtle cues, including gestures and speech, allowing them to fluidly …

Animal-Sediment Relationships Reexamined, A Meta-Analysis, Christine Franzen

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The patterns associated with the influence of grain size on the spatial variation of the deposit and suspension-feeding groups have been studied since the late 1950s. The foundational paper for the theory, Sanders (1958), proposed that a higher proportion of clay and silt-sized grains in the sediments correlates with a higher proportion of deposit feeders compared to suspension feeders. This theory has become widely accepted and taught in textbooks despite subsequent papers indicating differing observations. Through a meta-analysis, this study examines whether the observation from Sanders (1958) was indicative of a general rule or an anomaly. Additionally, this study aims …