NYU - New York University

10/31/2024 | News release | Distributed by Public on 10/31/2024 11:53

7 Ambitious Undergrads on Why Their Research Can’t Wait

A quick conversation following a guest lecturer's presentation. Office hours to talk about continuing a class project after the semester's end. A web search and then a shot in the dark email to a professor about any openings in their lab.

Few of the students profiled below started college with the idea that they'd soon be working side by side with professors and PhD candidates. But where their academic curiosity led, opportunities followed-and many were surprised to find what doors opened to them when they took initiative and expressed an interest in deeper exploration of what they were learning in the classroom.

For NYU undergraduates interested in research, gaining this kind of experience-in the field, the lab, or the studio-can take several forms, ranging from assisting a faculty or grad student mentor to embarking on independent projects and even co-authoring publications along the way. The Office of the Provost connected NYU News with the following students-just a tiny sampling of undergraduate researchers with impressive work underway this semester. They represent a range of schools, disciplines, and experiences, but many expressed similar sentiments about that journey.

Their efforts focused on VR, biochemistry, economics, engineering, and educational theater, and their tasks stretched from conducting interviews to constructing nanoparticles. Some are contemplating advanced degrees and career trajectories inspired by what they've discovered about themselves through this work. Here are their stories.

Aya Amine (NYUAD '25) Majors: Interactive Media and Legal Studies
and Nourhane Sekkat (NYUAD '25)

Major:Interactive Media
Project: "How Does Realism Impact Human Emotions in Virtual Reality?"
Mentor: Domna Banakou, Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice of Interactive Media, NYU Abu Dhabi

Aya: Imagine you're playing a virtual reality game or using a VR app for therapy. Does the environment look realistic, or cartoonish? Our research centers around figuring out how much the level of realism in VR settings impacts human emotions. We look at it through a mental health lens, focused on two states: calmness and anxiety. We built four different VR worlds for 10 participants to experience, then we collected data about their emotional reactions to each.

Nourhane: In both the realistic and cartoonish simulations, the calm environment is a sunny forest with hills and trees, and you hear birds singing. The spooky environment is a cemetery with eerie sounds and graves and skeletons that pop out. We tried to make both the realistic and cartoonish versions of each as similar as possible.

Aya: We hypothesized that people would react similarly, but were surprised to find that people reacted quite differently. Some people felt calmer in the more realistic settings, and others felt calmer in the more cartoonish ones.

Nourhane: We also found that the immersive sound influenced their reactions heavily, which was interesting because the sound was a control, not a variable-it was the same across the realistic and cartoonish worlds for each of the four VR environments we tested. It was surprising how immersed people were. Some screamed when a skeleton got close to them, or were completely in awe while walking around the forest.

Aya: The best advice we received while working on this project came from our professor Domna Banakou, who told us to always keep the human experience top of mind. It's easy to get excited about making VR look super cool with features like 3D models, but at the end of the day, what matters most is how it makes a person feel.

Nourhane: Working on this makes me excited about the possibilities for VR. I'm from Morocco, and I'd like to take what I've learned back home. VR is not a big thing there yet, and I feel like it's an untapped market with so many opportunities, from education to therapy to entertainment to marketing.

Aya: This project started as a class assignment, but then after we presented in a showcase at the end of the course, we were approached by someone from Zayed University about entering their Undergraduate Conference for Applied Computing in Dubai. We ended up winning fourth place! I want to pursue a PhD in this field to see how much I can push the boundaries of what VR can do. By working in academia, I hope I can inspire others to discover the field of virtual reality while keeping the human experience a priority.

Olivia Qian (Steinhardt '25)

Major:Educational Theater
Project:That's Not a Partisan Feeling, That's Patriotic
Mentor:Joe Salvatore, Clinical Professor of Educational Theatre, Vice Chair for Academic Affairs, and Founder and Director of Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL), Steinhardt

Photo by Jonathan King

In the VPL, we create documentary theater performances that disrupt political, cultural, and social narratives through dialogic and participatory experiences. We have different projects each semester, with research questions that we want to answer through the performances.

Often that involves interviewing people. During the interview, we do not interrupt isrupt the subjects-we respect the full answers because we want their organic response. Then we study their words and gestures and create a transcript that replicates them exactly. For example, when we hear a pause, we use a hard return on the keyboard. When we bring in actors to perform the transcripts, sometimes we will flip the race or the gender or the person speaking, to see how that impacts audiences' perceptions of their words.

Our main project this semester, That's Not a Partisan Feeling-That's Patriotic, is an interview-based work focusing on the 2024 presidential election. It's meant to lead audiences to a better understanding of what people living and working in the United States expect from a president.

I did interviews for it and have also been working within our database to classify the transcripts into different categories. The theme for one of our performances is states, so we let the audience select which states they want to hear from. Another performance focuses on age-we have a large age range represented, from 17 to 89 years old, and it's interesting to hear their differing opinions about political parties.

One thing I find fascinating is that we hear a lot of news coverage on data about voters' opinions of the candidates' positions on major issues-the economy, foreign policy, anything. But when I was doing interviews and reading transcripts, I found that most people are talking about their rent or their loans and other things that influence their day-to-day lives. Maybe they don't care as much about the presidential election as about local government and the leaders who will do something about those smaller, everyday things. If you don't talk to people and you're only thinking about the big issues, you don't hear that.

Since I was young, I loved theater, even though I didn't have much of an opportunity to perform in my rural village in China. At some point, I decided I wanted to be a teacher, and volunteered with a local school. I had planned to teach math and literature, but the principal told me that the children there were at risk of getting hit by cars because they didn't know how to read traffic lights. So I used theater games as a tool to help them learn to recognize the traffic lights. That's when I realized I wanted to combine education and theater together for a career.

Since working with Professor Salvatore in the VPL, I've grown as a critical thinker. Previously I didn't share my opinions, because I thought people wouldn't have any use for them. But in this lab, we sit at a round table, and everybody is asked to share their ideas. My opinions are respected and used. I've also been thinking differently about my career. I had thought that what I wanted to do was to teach theater, but I've been thinking more about how theater itself has teaching power, depending on how we structure a performance and what tools we use to prompt audience reactions.

Sue Li (Tandon '25) and Zaq Ponce (Tandon '27)

Sue Li and Zaq Ponce. Photo by Jonathan King.

Zaq: Growing up, I loved science and learning about both the natural and physical world, but I also loved analyzing processes, both within a cell and in more complex chemical reactions. Chemical and biomolecular engineering does both. I emailed professor Pinkerton during my freshman year to ask if there were any opportunities in her lab, and that's how Sue and I ended up working together. I like that I'm able to contribute to work that has a significant impact on health.

Sue: My inspiration largely comes from my parents who are both chemical engineers. I loved doing experiments at home when I was little. My other relatives are doctors or nurses, so that's how I ended up combining chemistry and medicine.

Zaq: We create these very, very tiny materials called polymeric core shell nanoparticles. Each one is about one thousandth the size of a strand of hair. They're mainly used to deliver medicines to the body as well as in bioimaging and diagnosis. My work in the lab is focused on how to improve the manufacturing process of nanoparticles.

Photo by Jonathan King

Sue: My work centers around improving drug delivery efficiency through novel polymer design and observing the nano-bio interactions. For example, this would help with precision medicine in things like chemotherapy. Instead of the chemo going everywhere and making patients weak, the nanoparticles would be designed specifically to target the tumor. So, patients would be able to consume less medication with better results.

Zaq: It's important work but it's not always glamorous. A lot of tasks in research mean doing the same thing over and over again, maybe with slight variations. I love going to the lab and making my nanoparticles. It's a way to de-stress, which might sound so nerdy. I went into it thinking the research was a way to build my scholarly skills needed to become a doctor. But after about nine months in the lab, I'm now actively considering a research career because I can see myself doing it for the rest of my life.

Sue: It's satisfying when I can apply things that I learned from class to our research, like the encapsulation of nanoparticles and understanding how they assemble. It's amazing, and it's such a friendly atmosphere in the lab. We're all collaborating and encouraging each other. I was pre-med, but now I'm thinking of getting a PhD and maybe having my own project and my own lab. If I had to give some advice to a student looking for the same experience, I would say don't be afraid to make mistakes, and know that imposter syndrome is real. My mentor told me that, and it encouraged me to take more risks even when I messed something up.

Leon Xu (CAS '24)

Major: Mathematics and Economics
Project: "From Effort to Free: The Zero-Price Effect in Non-Monetary Contexts"
Mentor:Yisroel Cahn, Professor of Economics, Arts and Science

Leon Xu. Photo by Jonathan King

I'm studying the Zero-Price Effect. It's a behavioral economics theory that says when something is offered for free compared to at a lower or normal price, people associate it with extra benefits because it's free. Hypothetically, if I offer two choices-I'll give you a $10 Amazon gift card for free, or I'll give you a $20 Amazon gift card for the cost of $7-traditional economics theory says everybody should pick the second one because it has a higher utility. But based on behavioral economics, a lot of people will pick the first option even though it's a worse deal simply because it's free.

We're basically using the same model, but we're offering chocolates instead of the Amazon gift card. We have two types of chocolate: a cheaper brand, and then a more expensive, fancy alternative. Instead of offering the chocolates at the cost of money, we're measuring if the effect still exists when you're offering them at the cost of time and effort, in the form of filling out shorter or longer surveys. Will people put in more time and effort for the higher quality chocolate? We modeled this after a famous economics experiment and recreated it outside Bobst Library over the summer. It was interesting being on the street, getting to interact with a lot of different people-some a lot more talkative than others. I also had to figure out what to do when it was hot and the chocolate started to melt!

We found that participants disproportionately chose the free option even when some effort was required. We also saw that the quality of non-free alternatives-in this case, the fancy chocolate-significantly influenced decisions when effort was involved. Professor Cahn, who was our mentor and co-author on this study, guided us through each step of the process: getting funding, approval, and revising draft after draft.

I want to pursue a PhD in economics, but traditional economics can be theoretical and abstract. This project involved microeconomics and behavior economics, which is what I hope to study. Both of those fields tie directly into our daily lives and help us understand ourselves better and learn how to make better decisions.

Madonna Hanna (CAS '26)

Major:Chemistry
Mentor:Michelle Krogsgaard, Associate Professor of Pathology, Grossman School of Medicine

Madonna Hanna. Photo by David Song

My older sister is a veterinarian, and she instilled in me a love of science at a young age. Once I got to college and started taking chemistry and other science courses, I realized that I enjoy working in a lab and that I don't want to do something theoretical-I want to be hands-on. In professor Krogsgaard's lab, we work with actual cancer tissue from patients.

The main type of cancer we work on is melanoma, which is an aggressive skin cancer. Melanomas produce a protein called GP 100. We are working to create a T cell receptor (TCR) that recognizes GP 100. The challenge is that T cells-part of the body's immune system-don't recognize cancer cells as foreign. We're manipulating TCR to be able to identify cancer cells as something that needs to be attacked.

You must have patience with lab work. These are long processes; sometimes we conduct experiments seven or eight times, and only one of those attempts is successful, which can be disappointing.

Photo by David Song

For our work on melanoma, we start by inserting a gene of interest-in this case a specific TCR-into a plasmid, which is a circular piece of DNA that replicates quickly. We put that on a plate with bacteria and let the bacteria replicate overnight. The next day, if there are little dots, or colonies, that's great because it means the plasmid has taken up that DNA.

The next step in the process is called maxiprep. We use different reagents to get a pure sample of the DNA that we want to insert into the immune cells.

After the cells incubate in a solution for about two days, we check if the cells took up the plasmid using cytometry- fluorescent labeling that detects a specific protein. That tells us if that whole, long process worked.

I'm a pre-med student, but I'm considering getting an MD/PhD and working at that intersection of scientific inquiry and clinical experience. There's been a rise in people getting certain types of cancers, including melanoma and colorectal, and to make real progress on a treatment, you need that collaboration of research and practice. There is still a lot of experimentation to do.