Celebrating new ideas
Research is built into the core of UNC Asheville’s teaching. It’s part of the UNC Asheville student experience every semester to work on preparing posters, finishing speeches, or polishing up a short film to present at the Undergraduate Research Symposium, and to know a couple dozen students across the campus doing the same. Calls for research and the opportunity to present at the Symposium are constantly posted on bulletin boards and department doors. In fact, about 70% of students participate in undergraduate research projects.
Out of all the students who took on undergrad research projects this semester, just over 30 projects are being recognized by the Outstanding Achievement in Creative Activity & Research Award on April 14, at the Student Creative Activity and Research Forum. This forum, which is acting as a more intimate version of Undergrad Research Day, will feature presentations from theater productions, studies on Western North Carolina ecology, original music and film, amongst many others. For a deeper look into a few presentations, keep on reading.
THEATER OF PLAY: EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN DRAMA AND ROLEPLAY GAMING
MJ GAMELIN
DRAMA MAJOR
Emerging a few years past quarantine, MJ Gamelin, a senior drama major, reflected on their experience in theater, isolation, and the community around roleplaying games (RPGs) for their research at UNC Asheville. Gamelin has always loved games like Dungeons and Dragons, which center around players acting as their characters. They noticed during the height of COVID, RPGs were a booming sector of entertainment, as they didn’t necessitate in-person play. With the growing popularity of RPGs, Gamelin knew there was a potential for combining theater with the typical structures of RPGs.
“I knew that there was really an untapped potential to use this in the theater world,” Gamelin said. “There's been a really big interest in interactive theater and immersive theater—anything where the audience is brought into the story. While what I'm doing doesn't necessarily have an audience, I think it merges a lot of those same principles.”
This project, which started as his senior competency project, has grown into undergraduate research, and has morphed and changed over the past year. Typically, senior theater projects look like a final production, with seniors acting, directing and producing the show in its entirety. Yet, in the wake of COVID, many felt it wouldn’t be possible to do a big production like years past. Gamblin considered creating workshops or performing a series of monologues, all of which they weren’t fully passionate about. Eventually, Gamelin realized that they wanted to work with actors and performers without the structure of a script or text, and the inklings of their project began.
In the early stages, Gamelin tried to fit this event into a typical research paper. The analysis and theory that comes with most research topics wasn’t a driving factor for Gamblin, but they aimed for a more scholarly project at first.
“It's not really about the data,” he explained. “It's about the people and the connections and the experiences. So it went through a little bit of process of, ‘How do I make this project fit that world of academia and research, but still focus on the adventure of the event?’ Luckily I’m doing a poster presentation, so I can talk with people about the experiences that players are going to have, and the experiences I've had with it, so it's much more human centered now.”
As for the event itself, Gamelin kept most of the details under wraps, but said it was a 1920s murder mystery with a sci-fi twist, with eight players and Gamelin serving as both another actor and an immersive director. They explained that the experience is like “improv in an escape room”, where the actors will have character sheets similar to most RPGs, and they’ll have secrets related to the plot. The acting comes in to fill in the gaps of the nonexistent script. The actors get to build out their own personalities in relation to the provided information, and they make choices during the performance how they believe their characters would behave.
“I hope my players get to play and have fun,” said Gamelin. “I think so often, we are so focused on results and producing things that we don't often give ourselves a chance to enjoy it. A big part of why I'm doing this is because of that interpersonal connection. I really wanted this one last chance at UNC Asheville to really dig into a form of theater that would be focused around building connections between people.”
"It’s about the people and the connections and the experiences."
MJ Gamelin
TWO-TIERED APPROACH TO COMBATING ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE
CASEY KELLOGG
CHEMISTRY
Senior chemistry major Casey Kellogg has been working on two projects to uncover certain mysteries and solutions for the medical conundrum of combating different elements of antibiotic resistance. The first of the two research projects is working on new drug development for antibiotics, mentored by Amanda Wolfe, associate professor of chemistry.
“The amount of antibiotics, rather, new antibiotics that are being put out is really, really low, so we need some sort of new scaffold for future antibiotics,” explains Kellogg. “I'm focusing on natural product isolation. And so what I'm doing is I'm taking two non-pathogenic rhizosphere soil bacteria and I'm growing them together in co-culture.”
Kellogg went on to explain the process of growing the bacteria in co-culture, and why it was important to the antibiotic development process: “When they grow in co-culture, they're competing for a minimal amount of resources, nutrients. It’s predicted a secondary metabolic pathway is being triggered and that's resulting in the production of this natural product, which has been shown to inhibit the growth of staph and E. coli.”
By working through this process of growth, the team is hoping to be able to separate the chemical structure and the compound produced, and create the needed scaffold out of it.
The second project is confronting the efficacy problem in current antibiotics, and hoping to find a solution to some aspects of the greater problem. Kellogg and the larger team are looking at what current versions of antibiotics are good at, and where they’re lacking.
“The drugs on the market are really good at targeting gram positive infections, but aren't as effective against gram negative,” said Kellogg. “That's because gram negative bacteria have an extra outer membrane, which is very fatty. It's negatively charged. It's really hard for current antibiotics to get through, they're having a permeability issue.”
Aside from the importance of Kellogg’s research, they spoke to the reason they found herself in this community of students, and the chemistry department as a whole.
“Dr. Wolfe, one of my mentors, is queer, and that gave me a push to get into research, as another queer person,” they said. “To have that sort of representation and see myself represented in science and see myself being successful in science was a big reason I became interested in this research. Also I want to go into the medical field, and work with infectious diseases and cancer. So doing this research is putting me on that path.”
One of the most difficult parts of the research process, according to Kellogg, has been the constant trial and error. Kellogg remarks that despite all the failures, and the tests of patience, they're ultimately grateful for the students and faculty they've been able to work with on these projects.
“I know that I would not have had the same experience had I gone to any other department, or any other program. Our presence is so strong because everyone in the department wants everyone else to succeed. Coming at it with that kind of love and coming at it with an approach that our department head, Dr. Wasileski has cultivated intentionally, that's what sets us apart, and that's what makes us be able to do good science, because we're coming at it from such a different, more profound, approach. So I just feel so loved by everyone in the department. And I think it's a universal feeling.”
A REDDIT POST IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS: CONSPIRATORIAL AND MAGICAL BELIEFS
ALEXANDRIA LAHM
PSYCHOLOGY
Voluntarily breaching the waters of Reddit, Alexandria Lahm, a senior psychology major, set out to determine how posters speak about their chosen topics. While there’s a flood of information across the platform, Lahm chose to focus on what she described as conspiratorial beliefs and magical beliefs. Splitting the posts into the two categories, Lahm compiled posts from Flat Earthers (people who believe the Earth is a disk instead of a globe) and UFO believers for conspiracies, and posts from crystal healers and psychics for magical thinking.
“I find it intriguing why people believe things to do, especially when they're not evidence based,” Lahm explained. “And they're pseudo-scientific. And I do find it surprising that we have such a wealth of scientific research and evidence out there, but we still have such a large part of the population endorsing one of these beliefs in some way or another. So I honestly have a large fascination with that area of thinking.”
Lahm also notes that she doesn’t personally believe in any of the topics she researched, but found herself drawn to the pseudoscience communities because of how they’ve broached our larger culture.
"You see a lot of it in Asheville. But it's everywhere, honestly, look at our media, how much astrology has just taken hold. It's concerning, because it's not just a little fun activity for people, it's real life,” Lahm said. “A common theme I saw was that so many people in these posts would mention they have anxiety or depression or trauma and that they were trying to heal it through healing crystals or things like that. And it was sad, because that's not going to get rid of those. I mean, they need actual repair evidence based care. So it's kind of hard to watch.”
Outside of Lahm’s personal fascination with the topic, she found it surprisingly difficult to properly name and categorize certain emotions and tones found in the Reddit posts. She broke posts down depending on their reliance on scientific beliefs, like UFO believers pulling from evidence or theory. Lahm was focused on finding which groups actually claimed their belief was scientific and factual evidence.
"By and large people that believed in the crystals and psychic abilities, they never actually claimed it was science,” said Lahm. “But most of the Flat Earthers would. That was a majority of their posts, trying to convince others it was science.”
Yet, she notes, that while the basis of many posts weren’t scientific, that did not have an impact on the quality or phraseology on the posts. Lahm was most surprised by how articulate many of the posts were, forcing her to change her idea that lower education levels correlated with belief in pseudoscience.
Lahm also recognized differences between the importance of the topics to the posters. For the magical beliefs category, they tended to post more positive or non-confrontational posts, a direct contrast to the anger and rants from the Flat Earthers and UFO spaces. She noted that for the conspiracy believers, it seemed to be their entire identity, and they were always trying to prove their version of the facts.
“It was eye opening, just how intelligible some of these posts were; they were obviously educated and smart. It made me realize that educational attainment alone is not going to solve the rampant belief in pseudoscience in our society. And that, frankly, was the most fascinating thing I've discovered.”
"I know that I would not have had the same experience had I gone to any other department, or any other program."
Casey Kellogg
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT SCARF AND THE STUDENT PRESENTATIONS, VISIT HTTPS://URP.UNCA.EDU/HOME/SCARF/
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