SOFIA Application

Faculty Lead: Art Professor Brian Baugh

Geometric principles combined with freehand drawing techniques enable artists, engineers, architects, designers and other creators to quickly generate and clearly communicate ideas. Participants in this project will study a variety of geometric approaches to design, like the golden ratio and dynamic symmetry, as well as geometric drawing techniques, like isometric projection & linear perspective. 2D visualizations that combine loose sketching techniques with geometric concepts will be created in drawing and painting media. 3D models from these visualizations will be created using architectural model-making techniques.

A student of any major could benefit from developing these creative visualization skills, but students focused on art, design, engineering, mathematics, and stage design will most clearly benefit from this project.

Faculty Lead: Art professor Janis Wunderlich

Activists use art as an expressive tool to create social change. Projects such as murals, mosaics, and installations address social and political issues, celebrate cultural identity, promote inclusivity, or highlight injustice and inequality. The recent BLACK LIVES MATTER movement inspired many artists across the nation to create artwork that educates the public and activates positive social change within local communities.

Art professor Janis Mars Wunderlich will lead a group of motivated students through the process of envisioning and creating impactful art projects that promote social change in the local community. The project will encompass:

1. Understanding the cultural identity and demographic diversity of Monmouth (both the campus and local community)
2. Identifying local issues (both to celebrate and scrutinize) and target audiences
3. Imagining potential projects with high visual impact and low economic cost
4. Building strategies (including sources for funding, accessing equipment and donations, and securing permissions)
5. Engaging in a local art activism project from start to finish

The goal of this SOFIA group is to understand and engage in the process of creating social change through art, and to create a pool of potential projects that students could engage in to promote meaningful change within our local community.

Faculty Lead: Physics & Engineering Professor Ashwani Kumar

The Monmouth campus has a very rich history and we would like to be able to easily share it with campus community members and visitors alike. For this project, we will be gathering accurate information about the landmarks and buildings on campus, the community, and the people who made significant impact on the College. The information will be converted into digital format and will be made available through a mobile app “My Campus”. The app is in developmental stage; a fully developed app will integrate location base content thus enabling it as a campus tour-guide. It will help prospective students and families to navigate the campus and learn about our unique programs, history and culture through self-guided tours. The ultimate aim is to develop a campus tour app with “Augmented Reality” to enhance visitor’s experience of the campus visit.

For this project, I am looking for students with good communication skills and a variety of skills or interests including: photography and knowledge of photo editing software (Adobe or any editor), history, or knowledge of computer programing languages such as JAVA, HTML, Kotli, Dart, and c#.

Faculty Lead: Biology professor James Godde

Invertebrate-derived DNA (iDNA) has been used to measure the biodiversity of a region by amplifying the bloodmeals of organisms such as mosquitoes using PCR, the polymerase chain reaction. Two years ago, our group traveled to the west side of Isle Royale, a large island in Lake Superior, and was able to detect multiple wolves in that location. Pending the resumption of faculty-student travel, we will travel back to this island in order to complete our analysis by focusing on the east end of the 50-mile long island.

Isle Royale was closed to visitors during last year’s visitation season (April-Oct.) and was even closed to scientific personnel over this winter for the first time since 1959, when this longest running study into predator-prey relationships began (the >2000 moose resident on this island make up the wolves’ main food source). It will be interesting to find out how the absence of people from this island has affected its wolf distribution. If circumstances beyond our control prevent us from traveling to Isle Royale in August, we will perform a campus-based project which measures biodiversity using iDNA techniques.

I am looking for a student who is interested in biology and who is willing to camp under primitive conditions in a remote area for an extended period of time. Data collection will also involve approximately 75 miles of hiking over a two week period in addition to a week’s worth of lab work at Monmouth College.

Faculty Lead: Biology and Neuroscience Professor Janet Ugolino

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects 1 to 1.5 million people in the United States. Although classified as a movement disorder, one early symptom that Parkinson’s disease patients often report is an impaired sense of smell. During this SOFIA project, we will use the small roundworm C. elegans to investigate this non-movement symptom of Parkinson’s disease. Using a C. elegans model of the disease, students will analyze the worm’s attraction to and avoidance of specific odorants. During this project students will gain experience using a dissecting microscope as well as working with an organism commonly used in neuroscience research. Students interested in neuroscience or biology are encouraged to apply.

Faculty Lead: Chemistry professor Laura Moore

How are pizza dough and bread dough different? Can you use bread dough to make a pretzel? Why is a cupcake soft and tender whereas a pound cake is moist and dense? How does yeast affect the flavor and aroma of bread. In this SOfIA project, we will spend a significant amount of our time in the “food chemistry lab,” also known as the nutrition lab, exploring these questions. We will make different recipes and adapt some to become our own. We will also examine different components of foods (starch, proteins, fats, and molecules that produce specific flavors) in the chemistry laboratory. All of our experiments (both edible and non-edible) will provide a basis of how scientific research is conducted. Students should have an interest in chemistry or biochemistry. Additionally, they should be interested in working in the lab and trying new things.

Faculty Lead: Engineering Professor John Iselin

A wind tunnel is a device that allows engineers the effects of air flow over objects in a controlled environment. Air is pulled through a varying area duct with an integrated fan. In this project we will build a wind tunnel that will is approximately 5 feet long. It will be constructed from fiberglass, Plexiglas, and plywood. In this project you will be exposed to engineering design tools like SolidWorks computer aided design software, Star-CCM+ fluid dynamics software, 3-D printers, a CNC router, among other tools. You will learn about how engineers work from an initial concept to a final design and then ultimately construction of the final system. This wind tunnel will be used in support of the engineering program in classes like fluid dynamics, heat transfer and thermal systems design.

Faculty Lead: Kinesiology Professor Jeffrey Montes

This SOFIA project will consist of three interwoven matters relating to wearable technology. First, current and future uses will be researched in regards to the personal, sport, medical, occupational, and military applications. Suggestions for future developments in each category will brainstormed. Secondly, the pro and cons as to how data is collected, transferred, stored, accessed, and the potential use for either good or bad intentions will be examined. Lastly, there are no current, standard protocols for the evaluation of wearable technology.

We will look at the various methods used to physically measure different data categories (heart rate, steps, etc.) and what previous testing protocols have been utilized. We will replicate certain protocols to give the participants an idea of what is involved with field research in this subject and the potential issues that may arise. Suggestions as to how to improve these protocols (if needed) will be discussed along with the potential to create new, improved ones altogether. Students interested in kinesiology, wellness, sports coaching, and computers would enjoy this project. They should be interested in reading science literature, promoting healthy lifestyles, collaborating on group based discussion, and participating in hands on research.

Faculty Lead: Modern Languages, Literature and Cultures Professor Francisco Ángeles 

So you know nothing about Latin America but you like to eat? This project is for you. Do you know some (or a lot of) Latin American culture, but struggle to name Hispanic food beyond burritos and quesadillas? This is for you as well. In this project we will learn, discuss, and experience Latin American food by road tripping the Midwest in search of good (and “real”) Latin American restaurants. And we will tell the story by social media: not only the cultural history behind the dishes, but also the personal experiences of the immigrants we will encounter along the way. What´s the personal story of the owner of a Salvadorian pupuseria in Des Moines, the Cuban waitress serving ropa vieja in Cincinnati, or the Peruvian chef cooking lomo saltado in Indianapolis?

We will learn basics of food analysis, and draft restaurant reviews, and travel writing. The days we spend on campus, you can even try to cook your favorite recipe! Individuals interested in traveling, exploring new habits, and encountering new experiences, will definitely enjoy this project. Some related disciplines are: Sociology, Anthropology, Spanish, History, English, Creative Writing, Journalism, Photography, Communication Studies, Latin American Studies, and Food Studies. Prior knowledge is not required. No dietary restrictions preferred (but not a requirement).

Faculty Lead: Political Science Professor Andre Audette

Politics seems to affect everything we do: where we shop, where we live, and even the types of dogs we like. In the current media environment, the lifestyles of political candidates are on full display for voters to judge. This project explores how the lifestyle choices of political candidates – whether they are vegan, smokers, enjoy running or comic book collecting, etc. – affect their electability. We will collect and analyze the results of a survey experiment to try to answer this question. Along the way, you’ll learn some basic statistical analysis and how to analyze political questions with a scientific perspective. We’ll also have some fun learning about the quirky lives of politicians. Students interested in politics, history, sociology, or psychology will enjoy this project the most. Exposure to statistics is helpful but not necessary; we’ll learn as we go.

Faculty Lead: Psychology Professor Sydney Greenwalt

The “bathroom debate”, sparked by the 2016 North Carolina House Bill 2, brought transgender inclusion in the public domain to societal discourse. Those engaged in this discourse have been arguing for both trans inclusive spaces and explicitly trans exclusive spaces despite previous research finding detrimental psychological outcomes relate to transgender and gender non-conforming college students being denied access to bathrooms (Seelman, 2016).

This SOFIA project will explore what drives opinion on transgender rights. Students will employ an experimental design to understand the role bathroom signage (e.g., boy/girl; family restroom; explicitly gender inclusive sign) plays in individuals expressed acceptability of transgender inclusive bathrooms. Students will have the opportunity to engage in survey development, data collection and interpretation, and exploration of potential impacts of these findings (i.e., policy change, advocacy). The goal of this project is to introduce students to psychological research design and implementation by exploring a controversial topic that influences us regularly – going to the bathroom. Students should have an interest in psychology, sociology, or gender studies to participate in this project.

Faculty Lead: Sociology, Anthropology and Human Services Professor Jialin Lin

Autopsies have long been a source of breakthroughs in understanding new diseases, from HIV/AIDS and Ebola to Lassa fever- and the medical community is counting on them to do the same for covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. By contrast, social autopsy was coined by American sociologist Eric Klinenberg in his research of the heat wave disaster in 1995 in Chicago to excavate the hidden social problems and social inequalities (e.g., racial inequality, misguided notion of masculinity, social production of isolation) that got exacerbated during the heat wave and contributed to the uneven distribution of deaths.

In this three-week SOFIA program, we will use multiple social science research methods (e.g., secondary data from state and county public health departments, survey questionnaires, community mapping, interviews) to a) get an overall timeline of Monmouth community experience during the COVID-19 after the first positive case was announced; b) explore and analyze which groups of population were most vulnerable during the pandemic and how they navigated social distancing and mourning; c) visit local public agencies (e.g., Warren County public library, Jamieson Community Center, local small shops and restaurants) and investigate how they survived during the COVID-19 and also offered help to local vulnerable populations. Students who are interested in social problems, public health, rural community, and social science research methods are highly encouraged to apply!