The Pavlis Honors College held its 2017 Undergraduate Research Symposium last Friday, March 17. Researchers and scholars from all departments and programs were invited to submit abstracts for presentation, which were then judged by Michigan Tech faculty and members of the local community. Students from all departments were able to present research on any topic of their choice once it had been reviewed by the Pavlis Honors College, with a total of 71 students presenting this year.
General viewing ran from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and was open to the campus community as well as prospective students and their friends and families as they registered for Michigan Tech’s Preview Day in the Rozsa lobby. Presenters stood in front of their posters for a two-hour time slot in the lobby of the Rozsa center to answer questions about their research and receive feedback from judges, with each presenter receiving a type of rubric with a set of criteria that they would be judged on beforehand.
Robert Handler, who’s been a judge at the Undergraduate Research Symposium for the last four years, explained that each poster is looked at by multiple judges and said that “we [judges] just want to see that students are developing skills in communicating their research to the public.” Because students are for the most part presenting on things that they’ve only been focusing on for a few months, Handler said that the symposium is a good learning opportunity for students as far as presenting research to the public.
Brian Flanagan, a fourth-year student at Michigan Tech, was presenting research on how aerial imaging can be improved when it comes to identifying damage from natural disasters. Flanagan started his research during the summer of 2016, but is unsure of whether he will continue it as graduate research. “It depends on funding, and right now the fuzzy SVM (support vector machine, a type of classifier) is only slightly more accurate than the crisp SVM,” Flanagan explained, “but we need it to be significantly more accurate for the research to move forward.”
Kelci Mohrman, who transferred from Northwestern Michigan College and will be graduating after her second year here at Tech, presented on identifying and modeling emissions from the Geminga pulsar nebula. Like Brian Flanagan, she started her research in the summer of 2016, and what was meant to be a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship project became a senior research project instead. “We’re trying to determine if particles accelerated by the nebula could be responsible for the excess in the positron fraction,” Mohrman said of her research, “it’s not so much meant to have an application as it is meant to answer a scientific question.” In the five years that the Pavlis Honors College has been putting on the symposium, this is the first year that it had to be split into two separate sessions in order to accommodate all of the participants.
