2022 Undergraduate Exhibition

Little research has explored bias associated with sex offenders. To help fill this gap in the literature, this research isolates correlates of gender-based bias in the sentencing of sexual perpetrators. Using data from a nationally representative sample of 1,000+ Americans, this study employed a vignette research design to assess potential bias in jury decision-making. This study expands our previous results from a small college pilot study and a sample of Pennsylvanian residents.

Reishi mushrooms have been esteemed by traditional Asian medicine for millennia. Clinical studies suggest they may help treat cancer and other disease. Ganoderma applanatum and G. tsugae are locally occurring relatives of reishi. Though routinely foraged, the chemical makeup of wild specimens is unknown. Mushrooms were collected from sites across Pennsylvania, and their mycochemicals were extracted. In the coming weeks, ganoderic acids A and B will be quantified for final analysis via HP-LC.

Spreading depression is a neurophysiological phenomenon characterized by abrupt changes in transmembrane ion gradients and sustained inactivation of neurons. One physiological phenomena that can initiate or result from SD is local cell swelling which is accompanied by a decrease in extracellular space (ECS). The goal is to develop and implement an impedance-based method that will enable the investigation of the causal role of ECS dynamics in initiating SD in different spontaneous seizure and SD dynamics.

Transcription in Bacillus subtilis is regulated at initiation, elongation, and termination. During elongation, activity of RNA polymerase is defined by pausing events stimulated by nucleic acid or protein signals. In antitermination regulatory mechanisms, pausing allows time for protein factors to bind and stabilize secondary structures in the nascent transcript, preventing termination of transcription elongation. In the sacX leader, a pause site mediated by protein factor NusG allows protein factor SacY to bind, allowing transcript readthrough.

My honors thesis is attempting to explain why there is variation of Medicaid eligibility limits across states, and why some states are more generous in covering economically disadvantaged citizens compared to others. My research deals with the ideas of representation and government responsiveness to the economically disadvantaged. It will look at explanatory variables of partisanship, women in the legislature, interest groups, and other factors that may explain Medicaid eligibility generosity.

Microtubules are essential for long-distance transport in neurons. Local microtubule production by nucleation particularly concentrates at dendritic branch points. To investigate why nucleation machinery concentrates at branch points, we used an RNAi knockdown approach to knock down nervous wreck (Nwk), a membrane curvature-recognizing protein, from Drosophila neurons. Nervous wreck knockdown showed no significant concentration change in clathrin nor gamma-tubulin, two proteins involved in nucleation, suggesting that nervous wreck is not essential for either protein’s localization.

Boolean satisfiability (or SAT problem) plays a key role in CS and in our many real-life applications. The most well-known algorithm of SAT problem is DPLL (Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland), and people are trying to apply various kinds of Machine learning algorithms for optimizing problems. We investigated all ML algorithms on DPLL and found that some specific ML algorithms show more efficient results. Furthermore, applying Neural-Networks to determine Literal selection gives us an insight into Formal Hardware-Verification processes.

This study seeks to understand what factors drive extremity on social media using over 500,000 tweets from members of the 117th Congress. I predict that Congress members who are not confident in their ability to be reelected will appeal to the electorate through moderate tweeting and those who are secure have the option to be extreme in their tweeting. I implement a dictionary method to construct extremity scores and regress this on various potential influences.

This presentation will be on the success of the events/products that we used our Second Year Enhancement funding for. These include a Second-Year Specific Leadership Session with PSU Alum and Motivational Speaker, Rohan Murphy, a special second-year only Penn State giveaway at a Campus Counseling Coffee Talk event, and our Winterball event.  which was ramped up in 2022 for students who may not have had a prom experience due to the pandemic

I am a faculty memeber whose program received funding from the Second-Year Enhancement Program. I will share how we used the funds this past year in the First to Second Year Forum.

Reflections and outcomes from utilizing funding from the First to Second Year Task force to create a half-day excursion to Shaver's Creek for HHD second-year students.

          Sentencing bias has been explored for a myriad of factors such as race, sex, and mental health, but not for LGBTQ+ identity. Using a series of vignettes that address different crimes, this study seeks to identify any sentencing bias against lesbian and gay individuals. Results do not support the existence of such bias but do show higher recommended punitive sanctions against male offenders and against those with female victims.

This project utilizes deep neural networks to solve the Poisson and Ginzburg-Landau equations. Results for the Poisson equation show an accurate solution is acquired using a single layer network with no activation function due to linearity. For the Ginzburg-Landau equation, two loss functions are utilized with adjustments being made for boundary conditions and derivatives. Results indicate an accurate approximation for various mesh sizes and allow for comparison of architectures to determine the optimal network parameters.

 Why are some countries more successful than others at responding to the COVID-19 pandemic? I expect that the variation in policy response is caused by both civil society and state capacity, especially the degree of involvement and activity of civil society and the state’s capacity for providing public goods, which also vary across countries. This paper seeks to analyze the effects of state capacity and civil society on the policy success: infection and death rates. 

Background: Nurses have been exposed to challenging experiences while working throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Purpose: To explore experiences of front-line nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic and feasilbility of story circles. Methods: A qualitative design using story circles and surveys to gather data. Results: Two themes were identified – navigating uncharted waters and persisting through COVID-19. Conclusions & Implications: Nurses are resilient and innovative; but, experienced changes in views of healthcare, the nursing profession, and communities. 

Studying phenotypic differences of biofilm formation can grant insight into its role close organism interactions. Biofilms have been found to allow bacterial aggregation and initiate symbiosis. This is being investigated through the characterization of eleven V. fischeri strains isolated from the light organ of a wild-caught squid, following symbiosis establishment. Coevolved bacterial strains isolated from a single host likely exhibit different levels of biofilm formation that contribute to the dynamics of multi-strain symbioses.

A numerical semigroup S is a subset of the natural numbers (with 0) that satisfy two properties: there are a finite number of natural numbers that aren't in S, and the sum of any two numbers in S is in S. The set of all numerical semigroups can be organized in a tree structure based on their fundamental properties. We study the tree structure of numerical semigroups that have 6 as the smallest non-zero element.

Photomultiplier-tubes work on the principle of the photoelectric effect and they can detect Cherenkov light.  However, PMT also produce background signals due to internal effects, called dark noise. Dark noise dominates the signal in any given PMT by several orders of magnitude, negatively affecting the ability of an array of photo-sensors to detect neutrinos. The dark noise rate is strongly dependent on the PMT's ambient temperature. A potential solution to this is thermoelectric coolers.

The goal of this project is to better understand and quantify the magnitude and frequency of surface meltwater lake drainages occurring across the grounding zone of the Amery ice shelf. Results from this project could help to define more clearly the role that meltwater plays in ice shelf stability for this and many other shelves buttressing the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

In children, behavioral inhibition (i.e. avoidance of novelty) is a strong predictor of later anxiety disorders. Resting-state brain functional connectivity has been related to both behavioral inhibition and anxiety disorders. For example, in anxiety disorder, patients have decreased default mode network (DMN) and fronto-parietal network (FPN) connectivity – two systems associated with emotion regulation and cognitive control. In this study, we examined whether a rodent model of BI shows similar altered DMN/FPN connectivity.

For decades, female patients undergoing anesthesia have commonly been subject to unrelated, unnecessary, undisclosed, and unconsented pelvic exams in teaching hospitals—violating both medical ethics and personal rights. Despite growing attention to the unethical and legally questionable nature of this practice, only a third of states have adopted legislation requiring explicit consent. Increased awareness and legal mandates necessitating explicit informed consent must be adopted to force teaching hospital compliance with the ethics they proclaim to instill.

Aphids are major pests of a variety of crops. One-way aphid populations are controlled is by using their natural predators and parasitoids. However, the mere risk of predation induces changes in behavior that influences herbivore success. Prior work has shown odor cues of predator insects influences aphid movement and reproductive capacity. In this study, we tested whether odor cues of a different natural enemy, parasitic wasps, also influences aphid host-plant selection and nymph production.

Opioid misuse is a critical public health crisis in the United States that results in over 50,000 deaths per year. Stress is considered a key risk factor for addiction developent, inspriring this review which examines how stressful experiences throughout the lifespan alter opioid use in animals. The findings suggest that neonatal or adult stress increases addiction-like behaviors in rodent models, but that adolescent social stress may protect against later opioid misuse, which contradicts human studies.

Gender equality quotas exist in most of the world's legislatures in some capacity in an effort to increase women's political representation. While representation has increased in recent years, it is unclear whether or not quotas have an effect on women's political participation in their home countries. This project attempts to analyze the relationship between quotas and political participation among women.