While pursuing baccalaureate degrees in the disciplines of chemistry, physics and engineering, three Cameron University students have also ventured into the realm of outer space by conducting undergraduate research projects that have them casting their critical thinking and analytical skills beyond the classroom. Under the mentorship of Dr. Susmita Hazra, Dalton Chase, Jennifer Lane and SheKayla Love are participating in research projects related to space weather and observational astronomy.
Chase, a physics major from Lawton who earned an Associate in Applied Science degree in engineering in May 2023, is utilizing data from SOHO, ACE and GOES satellites to understand how the sun varies across different solar cycles and the impact caused by the variability on space weather. This work will be helpful in building a framework for an empirical model for future solar activity prediction. Chase has presented his research at the National Council of Undergraduate Research and is assisting Hazra in publishing the results in a peer-reviewed journal.
“I learned and gained experience in professional settings,” Chase says of his research project. “I never knew the vast opportunities undergraduate research could provide me, and I am extremely grateful to Cameron and my research advisor Dr. Susmita Hazra for allowing me to have these experiences.”
Lane, a physics and engineering major from Fletcher, has been analyzing the light curve of exoplanets, which are planets in other solar systems. She is part of an exoplanet watch program via NASA’s partnership with the MicroObservatory Robotic Telescope Network at the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian and Las Cumbres Observatory, a network of 25 telescopes at seven sites around the world. She also has access to telescopes at NASA’s Propulsion Laboratory. Exoplanet research gives scientists crucial hints for determining whether and where life might exist elsewhere in our solar system, as well as teaching us about how exoplanets were formed and evolved.
Lane has been analyzing light curves on these planets to find distance, size, composition and mass. She has presented her research at Oklahoma Research Day and plans to present at the National Council of Undergraduate Research at California State University Long Beach in Spring 2024. She is also writing her results to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.
“Conducting undergraduate research has been helpful for me by making me get out of my comfort zone,” Lane says. “It has challenged my critical thinking skills as well as presentation skills. Doing research over a topic I found very interesting is an enjoyable experience and boosted my confidence.”
Love, a senior chemistry major from Lawton, has analyzed data from four robotic telescopes on variable stars, which are located millions of light years away. Starlight is the only data available from that distance, so analyzing those lights can provide information about distance, mass, size, and composition. This research is significant as it gives information about stars, their life cycle and perhaps about our universe.
She has also been working on another space weather project using ionosonde data from around the world. Ionosondes are like ultrasounds; they send signals to the sky, and the returning signal gives information about the electron composition and irregularities. These parameters vary with the activity of the sun and Earth’s magnetic fields. Understanding the ionosphere is extremely important for satellite communication, a technology that is omnipresent in daily life.
“One of my biggest academic accomplishments is publishing my research work in a peer-reviewed journal,” Love says, who has presented her research at more than 10 conferences and has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. “I am very thankful to Dr. Hazra, Cameron University and the Department of Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering for giving me this opportunity.”
Written by: Cameron University; used with permission. Find the original article here.
The Cross-Institutional Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) Workshop, hosted by the Intercollegiate Biomathematics Alliance (IBA), June 5-10, at Illinois State University, is a summer research program designed to prepare undergraduate students for graduate-level research while advancing professional academic development for their futures.
Biomathematics, defined by Illinois State University’s Professor of Mathematics and IBA Executive Director Dr. Olcay Akman, is “a science in the interface of biology, mathematics, statistics, computer science, ecology, and related fields.” Akman said with the use of biomathematics, workshop participants model life problems, make predictions, and develop strategies for real-life scenarios like diseases, global warming, cancer, and the coronavirus.
At the CURE workshop, students select a research topic, work in small groups, and collaborate with faculty research mentors and industry professionals to experience the process of conducting research in mathematical biology.
Since the workshop was developed in 2014, Akman said it has gained national recognition from students. Students and faculty from a wide range of universities in the U.S. traveled to Illinois State University to participate in the weeklong workshop. In preparation for the in-person sessions held on campus, participants met for the Pre-Workshop Online Boot Camp, May 15-June 2.
“It’s an academic year crammed into a week,” Akman said. “Students start their day with a formal lecture on a topic that’s related to the core of the workshop. Then, faculty members from various institutions teach them hands-on formats of various tools used in research, such as computer programming, modeling, and data analysis techniques.”
During the workshop, students research their topics in groups led by Illinois State graduate students. Akman said toward the second half of the week, faculty research mentors propose research projects to students and break out into sessions to discuss their projects of interest.
“Once the workshop ends, students go back to their home institutions, but they continue to stay in touch with their faculty research mentors to keep working on the projects with them and report to us weekly on their progress reports,” he said.
Akman said after the summer workshop concludes, the students will later attend the annual Biomathematics, Ecology, Education, and Research (BEER) Symposium, held since 2007, where they will present their research results and submit their papers to a journal that the University sponsors.
Written by: Julie Mana-ay Perez for Illinois State University; used with permission. Find the original article here.
Last fall, in a course titled Music and Poetry in the Harlem Renaissance taught by Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper, six music majors were required to edit unknown, little-known, or unpublished compositions by African-American musician Florence B. Price. Their projects had to be “prepared from the manuscript according to source-critical editorial principles,” says Cooper. The students worked with archival materials from the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville, to prepare a preface, a score, and a critical report for their chosen work. In completing their final projects, each student claimed copyright over their new scholarly editions of Price’s music.
Katiebeth Brandt ’19 chose a longer choral piece for the assignment titled “Bluebell,” with lyrics by Mary Rolofson Gamble. Then, in a move that Cooper says “went above and beyond the call of duty,” the Southwestern music literature major arranged for the work to be recorded by the choir at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in December 2018 and then performed live on UTSA’s campus by the UTSA and Jack C. Hays High School choirs. The March 2019 performance not only constituted the posthumous premiere of Price’s “Bluebell”; it was the first time the work had been seen or heard in at least 60 years.
“I told the vocalists and pianist that they were making history. And everyone who performed was so amazing,” Brandt recalls, flush with excitement. “They did so well! Their voices filled the concert hall so wonderfully, the dynamics were there, and I felt like they felt it.”
For Brandt, who is now in her final semester at Southwestern, the performance had even greater significance because it combined three of her scholarly interests: musicology, social justice, and feminist studies. In addition to representing the work of Price, a female musical master of the socially progressive Harlem Renaissance, Brandt says that “the poet, the editor (me), the conductor, the pianist, and all eight vocalists were female. And out of the eight vocalists, all but one are queer, so they really felt it and connected to it … . I listen to that recording once a week. I’m so happy with it.”
Piecing together the pieces
The Southwestern student originally selected “Bluebell” to edit because of its air of mystery: it was unclear when the piece was composed, whether it had ever been performed in Price’s lifetime, and what genders the speaker and intended audience of the lyrics were supposed to represent—Brandt was intrigued by the potentially “homosocial underpinnings” of the work. She was also drawn to “Bluebell” because at the time of Cooper’s course, the music major was singing in a church choir, and although there were many piano pieces she could have chosen instead (as a performer, Price was primarily a pianist and organist), Brandt liked the idea of editing a work in which voice was the featured instrument.
Having the opportunity to hear female voices soar as the musicians performed Price’s piece gave “so much more life to it,” recalls Brandt.
Prior to the rehearsals, recording, and concert, the only way the young musicologist could hear Price’s piece was through the software she uses to edit and notate music—or, as Brandt puts it, “where magic happens.” Much of the young musicologist’s work includes what she calls “clicking and pointing,” or transcribing Price’s scores into the computer program, much like one might type handwritten notes into a word processor, which then allows for easier editing. The software allows her to plug in the number of measures, the key, the voice ranges, the instruments, the time signatures, and the notes. It’s a process that requires acute attention to detail and patience; it can take five hours to input just the notes of a 74-measure piece like “Summer Clouds,” another Price composition that Brandt professionally edited. Then, she inputs tempo markers (i.e., beats per minute) , dynamics (e.g., crescendo or decrescendo), phrase markings (e.g., slurs), and rhythms, layer after layer after layer. Afterward, she edits the digital version of the composition—because, like any human being, “composers do make mistakes,” she says—to make it performance ready.
Brandt makes such corrections, such as omitting an unintended sharp or flat marking, based on her knowledge of musical theory and practice, or what she refers to as “a lot of deductive reasoning.” She also checks the score by using the music-notation software’s playback feature. However, the program can only produce notes and replicate the sounds of instruments but not articulate song lyrics—which is why getting to hear “Bluebell” performed by a live choir was so exhilarating.
A passion for musicology
Brandt loves the work, and she’s known that she’s wanted to pursue musicology since her first year in college. She initially attended a small private Christian university in North Carolina, where she thought she’d major in international business. But after only six weeks, she abandoned the idea—“I had one business class and absolutely hated it!” she recalls—and switched to music. The change made sense: she’s played the flute and French horn (she proudly brandishes a tattoo of the latter on her left thigh) since middle school, and her favorite class was music history. However, like most undergraduate institutions, the school offered only music education and music performance as majors, and as she considered her career options down the road, she didn’t want to teach, nor did she want to endure the anxiety of performing. So she decided to transfer to Southwestern, where she could not only major in music literature but also study with Cooper.
“He’s a wonderful person,” says Brandt. “He’s really good about teaching history without any angles and not leaving anyone out. We need more people like him.” She credits the Southwestern music faculty with helping her transition as a transfer student and make the most out of her major. “I’ve stayed at SU for Dr. Cooper and Dr. Creel, my French horn teacher, because they’ve helped me beyond what anyone else could do. I personally adore Dr. Cooper and Dr. Creel, and they were exactly what I’ve needed in undergrad and as people.”
The respect is mutual: Cooper has been delighted to mentor Brandt and trumpet her accomplishments during her time at SU. “She’s smart, she’s diligent, and—surprisingly rare among music majors—she loves listening to classical music,” he says fondly.
Brandt confirms that passion for classical music, which she imbibes the way most consume pop music. It’s why she’s enjoyed studying world music, music history, music theory, and solfège (i.e., assigning syllables to notes of the musical scale for the purposes of composing and sight reading; if you were ever made to memorize and recite the indelible “Do–Re–Mi” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music like some of us were in fifth grade, you’ve dabbled in solfège).
Her studies have even taken her to Vienna, where she spent the spring 2018 semester engaged in a music research internship that she describes as “really, really awesome.” There, she visited the original manuscript of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 at the Austrian National Library and even had tea at a café with Mahler’s granddaughter, Marina Fistoulari Mahler. She had the opportunity to practice her German and learned how to read Fraktur, a sixteenth-century calligraphic typeface, while translating and transcribing manuscripts. And she developed a critical edition of a composition by nineteenth-century Austrian organist Hans Rott, which Brandt says helped prepare her for the editorial work she’s been doing on Price since returning to Southwestern.
Approaching musical masters
Evaluating and interpreting the work of composers and bringing what they wrote to life clearly bring the SU musicologist great joy. She delights in researching the multiple copies of manuscripts that might need to be sifted through and selected for notating, correcting, and referencing. And she revels in interpreting whether the “layers of ink” in any given edition belong to the composer, to performers, or to editors who have previously worked on the piece. “I love getting these primary sources. From brain to pen, this is as close as I can ever get to these composers,” she says.
Her excitement only grows as, in a tumble of words and breathlessness, she talks about her Sarofim Student Travel Grant, which allowed her to visit the University of Arkansas archives this past June to explore more about Price’s work. There, while wearing a face mask to protect herself from documents that had been partially damaged by water damage and mold, Brandt was still happy getting to have direct contact with the composer’s diaries, photographs, correspondence, and, of course, musical scores.
As she completes her senior capstone—a third critical edition, this one of Price’s lengthy and complex Suite (Octet) for Brasses and Piano—Brandt is applying to Ph.D. programs in musicology. She looks forward to graduation, after which she hopes to spend several months traveling (a map of the world is tattooed on her other thigh). She’s considering taking a brief gap year (well, eight months) in Ireland or the Czech Republic or else researching the German Romantic composer Emilie Mayer back in Vienna. But wherever she lands, it won’t be long before Brandt will be back in the archives. “I love the manuscripts. I love the field research. I’m rewarded for doing what I find fascinating!” she adds, almost incredulously.
