First Year Research Experience (FYRE)

Research project: Rehabilitation and Analysis of Archaeological Collections at Southern Methodist University's Archaeology Research Collections. Students will assist in the curatorial management of archaeological collections, including prehistoric and historic artifacts, documents, and photographic records. Responsibilities will include learning basic laboratory processing, archival-quality digitization, 3D scanning, and digital photography. Students may also be asked to contribute creative content for Web-based and real-world educational exhibits and for technical reports detailing activities performed in the management and curation of these collections. 

 

Associate Professor, Creative Computation

About the project: My project, Dinosaur Choir, brings the calls of extinct dinosaurs to life as singing dinosaur skull musical instruments. Musicians and gallery visitors give voice to these dinosaur instruments by blowing into a mouthpiece, exciting a computational vocal mechanism and resonating the sound through the dinosaur’s nasal cavities and skull. This intimate action with an extinct creature aims to stimulate excitement and educate the public about dinosaurs, paleontology, and raise awareness of global ecological instability. Scientific research is the starting point to create the sound production and resonation for these dinosaurs. The skulls are fabricated using Computed Topology (CT) scans of the hadrosaur skulls for use as resonators. The sound production is via custom bioacoustic models drawn from bird and crocodile research and altered to reflect skull and skeletal fossil measurements. Musical works are also composed with the instruments, using extinction and evolutionary change as subject matter, drawing attention to the instability of our own ecosystem and global warming.

About the project: SMU chemistry professor John Buynak and his team have received a $3.5 million, 5-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to design and synthesize new antibiotics to fight some of the deadliest and most clinically challenging infections of the 21st century – drug resistant strains of bacteria that cause tuberculosis and leprosy.

About the project: Around the world, wildfires are burning at scales and intensities not seen in generations with potentially devastating impacts on watersheds, ecosystems, and human communities. Drs. Roos and Hollenback (SMU), with collaborators at Utah State University and the USGS, have an active National Science Foundation grant to analyze 400 years of tree-ring fire records, 1,000 years of heat sensitive archeological artifacts, and surface and soil charcoal to determine if fires today are burning hotter than they have historically. After more than a century of fire suppression, forests are full of undergrowth, dead fuel, and overly dense stands of trees. Warmer temperatures and severe drought make these forests explosively combustible. It is difficult to disentangle the relative contributions of environmental change and of fire suppression to wildfires because of these confounding factors. Comparing recent fires under cool weather conditions versus those that only burned in pre-fire suppression fuels will enable these scientists to separate the influences of environmental change from those of fire suppression.

Read more about Dr. Hollenback

Read more about Dr. Roos

About the project: Dr. Monnie McGee, Associate Professor of Statistics and Data Science, has been exploring the performance of ChatGPT3.5 and ChatGPT4 on questions typically asked on statistics exams. Students will extending her current investigation to other generative AI platforms. In addition to examining generative AI output for accuracy (i.e. “grading” the output), students will examine text output from the platforms to determine common words and topics that are part of the AI output. Another project involves collecting author names, article titles, and abstract text from published articles in popular statistics journals to determine “hot” and “cold” topics in the statistics literature. Dr. McGee also has interest in sports analytics, particularly use of video to improve performance in various sports.

About the project: Students will assist with research related to consumer behavior and decision making. We examine how consumers interact with marketing materials (ads, social media, store shelf, product packaging) and how they decide what to purchase. This helps us understand how consumers make decisions and how they can optimize their decision making for enhanced consumer judgment and heightened well-being. It also informs business and policymakers about effective business practices.

Read more about Dr. Langlois

Read more about Dr. Mormann

About the project: Students will support "Improving Communities through Smart and Resilient Infrastructure Investments" (congressional earmark). The project goal is to develop a Smart and Resilient Infrastructure (SRI) Toolkit to address infrastructure disparities in underserved communities with novel planning and management strategies, and neighborhood infrastructure investments.

About the project: Dr. Jeanna Wieselmann, Assistant Professor of STEM Education, has several current educational research projects with opportunities for undergraduate research assistant involvement. First, the Research on Integrated STEM Efficacy (RISE) project is funded by a National Science Foundation grant. The project is focused on studying and supporting elementary teachers' confidence and skills in teaching integrated STEM lessons. Second, Dr. Wieselmann is using Mursion mixed-reality simulation technology to train pre-service and early-career teachers to facilitate equitable discussions with elementary and middle school students. Finally, Dr. Wieselmann is exploring undergraduate STEM students’ experiences with bias and microaggressions at SMU. This work is exploratory in nature and will lead to the development of a conference proposal, research manuscript, and/or grant proposal.