Category: 2020

Marivi Sifuentes

Women remain vastly underrepresented among university graduates with computer science degrees. Understanding what deters female students from majoring in computer science is crucial to reaching gender equity within the field, but what are the experiences of female students who attempt to attain a degree in computer science? Instructors teach the skills and knowledge required for a career in this field, so it is vital to understand how they are engaging with computer science students. In this project, I will investigate female students’ experiences with computer science instructors and how instructors positively or negatively influence students’ confidence and sense of belonging in computer science. Through interviews and surveys of current computer science majors and students who left the program, I hope to understand how instructors positively and negatively influenced students’ experiences and how to increase the retention of women in computer science.

Library Mentor:  Craig Smith

Leonard Bopp

The wandering pathways of the Central Park Ramble have been a site of community and solidarity, cruising, and refuge for New York’s LGBT community, from the activism of the queer liberation movement to the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. This project will use sound as a medium to explore the social history of the Central Park Ramble, an important site in LGBT history in New York City. In my recent work, I have been interested in how physical objects and places can be sites of ephemeral moments and hidden histories. This is particularly true for queer histories. As Jose Esteban Muñoz writes in his essay “Ephemera as Evidence,” “queerness is often transmitted covertly,” because “leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open to attack.” This is especially true of the history of the Central Park Ramble, which became a vital site for the queer community in large part because of its unnavigatability, its inscrutability, and its hidden pathways. This work will use sound, archival material, and possibly other media to bring the physicality of ramble into proximity with the ephemeral moments of its past. Part of my project will be based on taking live sound samples from the ramble. During my work on this project, I will wander through the ramble myself, taking samples of found sounds as I walk. At the same time, I will go through the archives at the New York Public Library to collect archival material, including text, photographs, and oral histories. I will then construct a composition from the archival material I assemble and the sound samples I collect, the ultimate form and shape of which will be determined by this material.

Library Mentor:  Meredith Kahn

Mario Sanchez Gumiel

“’What’s your Accent?’ Collaborative Creation of an Online Library of the Spanish Language is a website that pretends to be a future resource for students, professors and lecturers who teach Spanish or Linguistics, offering phonetic transcriptions, syntactic explanations and sociolinguistic approaches of the different variations spoken of the Spanish language. Combining video and audio, it is conceived as an effort to bring together both a representative sample of the Spanish speakers in the University of Michigan and in the Ann Arbor area, and the work of different units of the campus, such as the Language Resource Center and the U-M Library. The goal of the website is not only to serve as a pedagogical tool for language instructors, but also for Linguistics scholars, as well as a mirror in which someone can observe and study the diversity and intricacies of the Spanish language.

Library Mentor:  Barbara Alvarez

Evangeline Yeh

Michigan Active Citizens Alternative Spring Break is a program through the Ginsberg Center here on campus that provides opportunities for students to engage in meaningful service as they enter into a community over spring break. In our specific topic and site, we will be exploring Youth Disabilities in Burton, TX, through Camp For All, a barrier-free camp for youth around the country.

Library Mentor:  Stephanie Rosen

Alisa Liu

Project Alivio is a student-run team comprised of members from all different majors, working with a co-design team (Student Association of International Medical Research) to reduce the incidence of pressure ulcers at the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Guatemala City. Pressure ulcers, or bed sores, are wounds that form due to prolonged pressure on a part of the body. In order to alleviate this pressure and prevent ulcer formation, nurses in hospitals are responsible for turning patients every few hours. However, at San Juan de Dios, the understaffing of nurses and added physical demand of turning a patient contributes to infrequent turning. This results in a high incidence of these sores at this particular hospital. After assessing this need, our team has prototyped a patient-turning device that will lower nurse effort and allow for patients to be turned more efficiently. Currently in the stage of designing a high-fidelity prototype, our goal is to travel to Guatemala this summer to gather feedback and ensure that our device is suitable for our community partner. We would like to be able to implement this design into the hospital setting and begin looking more into manufacturing. Overall, we hope to create a low-cost, sustainable solution that will reduce pressure ulcer formation for patients at the San Juan de Dios Hospital.

Library Mentor:  Leena

Melissa Perez

This project focuses on amplifying the voices of youth in seasons of homelessness through an audio series centering their experiences. The purpose of this project is to humanize this experience and to increase people’s awareness about the phenomena of youth homelessness. I am working with an organization based in Chicago called One Heart One Soul, which provides art workshops to youth in seasons of homelessness. As part of this project, I will interview some of the youth involved in this program to capture their experiences in their own words. Ideally, this project will begin to change public attitudes about homelessness.

Library Mentor:  Darlene Nichols

Paola A. Guerrero

*Image Coming Soon*

The Latinx Students Psychological Association (LSPA) is a student organization serving the community of Latinx graduate students in the psychology department. We have cultivated a prolific, creative community that works to produce cutting-edge science in psychology and support the success of Latinx scholars. Our members’ research informs a variety of applications in social work, education, developmental sciences, and biopsychology, among others. LSPA hosts writing sessions to boost our members’ productivity by providing assistance through academic challenges and fostering a sense of belonging in academia. Through our collaborative accountability system, we aim to help members navigate defined milestones, such as scholarly papers, research proposals, and job-market materials, along with strengthening opportunities for academic collaboration. The library grant awarded to LSPA has supported our efforts in creating our collaborative and systematic plan to provide research resources to our members.

Library Mentor:  Jesus Espinoza

Denise Bilbao

STEM Society is a student organization that aims to expose K-12 students in lower socioeconomic areas to inquiry-based learning in the STEM fields. We hope to displace common stereotypes that students may have about accessibility to STEM education and careers, as well as increase their awareness about the diverse opportunities available in these fields. In addition, we strive to provide our organization members with a chance to advance their interests in teaching and sharing their passion for STEM. Our STEM Saturday teaching event is held once each semester. During this day, we bring students from the Detroit area to the University of Michigan campus to engage them in a day of hands-on STEM learning activities. Each student participates in 5 different lessons in diverse STEM topics (some examples are computer science, environmental sustainability, and genetics), where they learn more background on the subject, apply it in hands-on experiments, and learn how this knowledge is applied to the real world. They are also taken on campus tours, engage with organization members during lunch, and ask STEM and education-related questions to members in a structured panel. Through presenting STEM and education in an engaging and interactive manner, we hope to broaden their knowledge, challenge any thoughts they may have that STEM is inaccessible to them, and spark excitement and passion for pursuing a STEM education. We also hope to promote diversity and inclusion in the STEM fields by reaching out to groups that have historically been underrepresented in higher education or STEM careers and showing them that if they have a passion for the field and motivation to pursue it, that they belong in these fields as much as anybody else.

Library Mentor:  Sam Hansen and Alex Rivera

Logan C. Burley

I am a senior working with Dr. Susan Gelman in the Conceptual Development Lab, Dr. Victor Mendoza of the Women’s Studies Department, and two grad students, Rachel Fine and Zach Schudson to conduct first-hand research for my honors thesis. My research focuses on if and when people make nonbinary attributions and examines the cognitive representations people have of nonbinary genders. Examining the distinction that the people make between who is a man, who is a woman, and who is nonbinary should provide not only a greater understanding of gender and the gender attribution process, but also create a foundation upon which further research can be built. The studies I am conducting focus particularly on how people perceive gender in other’s faces. The face is recognized quickly and efficiently, and individuals are quick to assume the gender identity of others based on it. Gender is particularly salient upon the face and research has found there to be various gender differences in the features of the eyes and brows, mouth/chin, and the nose. Research looking at how people perceive sexuality in other’s faces found that people could rate sexual orientation at greater than chance rates. Past research makes it clear that individuals perceive gender from the face using binary categories, but this study will explore how (and when) these binary cues fail to clearly categorize an individual’s face, something that has yet to be empirically explored.

Library Mentor:  Hailey Mooney

Jordan Dalton

The Chincha Merchants- Balancing the Past and Present” is a Public Archaeology and Community Science Project in the Chincha Valley of Peru. The project uses the rich history of the site of Las Huacas to bridge the gap between researchers and the community of the Centro Poblado Las Huacas. Excavations at the archaeological site of Las Huacas recovered multiple scales (or balance beams) that would have been used by the ancient people. The exact use of these enigmatic artifacts is not fully understood — were they used by independent traveling merchants or do they represent state control of important resources such as metals and camelid wool? Regardless of their exact use, these items were important for the ancient inhabitants of Las Huacas. This project will work with students 8-12yrs at the local school of Centro Poblado Las Huacas. Students will learn about the history of the region and the site, and get to make, use and decorate their own scales. The goal of the project is to make the cultural history of the region accessible to local inhabitants and to demonstrate the importance of preserving cultural heritage.

Library Mentor:  Justin Schell