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SDSU Undergraduate Research Program Projects for 2024

 

College of Arts & Letters

Timothy Boyd is working with Ming-Hsiang Tsou from the Department of Geography's Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age. Together with one Ph.D. student, they will analyze and visualize anonymized phone location data to compare human movement change patterns between regions in San Diego where COVID-19 cases were high and low.

Jessica Barlow will mentor Devina Naik to create ArcGIS storymaps documenting research and community engagement activities of the Center for Regional Sustainability.

Political science students Senait Hagos and Kaisly Moreno, with guidance from Kristen Maher, will analyze interviews of Cape Town, South Africa residents about the lingering urban divides created by apartheid.

Cassie Lapham will work with Daniel Davis to assess undergraduate student career choice and the factors that influence student perceptions of career confidence and preparation.

 

College of Education

With mentorship from Marissa Vasquez in the Department of Administration, Rehabilitation and Postsecondary Education, Jahaziel Sanchez will help evaluate the effectiveness of components of an equity-centered program for community college students transferring to a bachelor's degree-granting institution.

Felicia Black will mentor Skye Pooler and Alena Chavez to systematically gather literature on domestic childcare work in Black and Afro-Diasporic communities and analyze data using poetry-making and first-person narratives as arts-based inquiry methods.

 

College of Engineering

Gloria Faraone (Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering) will advise Ashley Funk and Jefferson Young to measure the force capacity of different types of connections in mass timber structures, providing more information about their earthquake performance.
Everett Richards and Robert Ashe will work alongside Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering professor Reza Akhavian to create a virtual reality simulation of high-risk industrial settings to test robot perception and worker trust.
Mechanical engineer Sara Adibi will mentor Praneel Singla and Oscar Osuna to develop and test artificial intelligence and machine learning models to design new materials.
Matthew Chang and Kyler Brown are working with John Kang (Mechanical Engineering) to leverage real-time defect-monitoring sensors and machine learning to improve powder-based additive manufacturing.
Ansel Flanagan will assist George Youssef in developing multifunctional inks that have magnetic and electroactive properties for additive manufacturing and biomedical applications.
Mentored by Marta Miletic, Ava Halkola and Selin Childs will test the structural and thermal performance of tiles designed for lunar rocket landings.

 

College of Health and Human Services

Mentee Mia Mangney will work with Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences professor Giang Pham to study overarching structure and sentence-level grammar in kids' storytelling in Spanish and English. This will inform researchers' understanding of how skills in one language might be used to learn another.
Exercise and Nutritional Sciences professor Sara Gombatto will mentor Sarah Konig and Ella Yarrow to identify potentially risky movements and other behaviors to design better strength, conditioning and rehabilitation programs for male baseball players.
Public health professors Jennifer Felner and Jerel Calzo, through the Action for Research on Community Health and Stigma (ARCHES) Lab, will advise Irishrhea Edusada as they develop and evaluate arts-based interventions to address risk factors for smoking and human trafficking among housing-insecure youth in San Diego.
Henrike Blumenfeld and Emily Mu will adapt and validate a Mandarin translation of a language proficiency tool used by speech language pathologists to assess bilingual language skills and disorders.
Noelle Villegas and Lluvia Vazquez will contribute to Laura Coco's project evaluating differences between self-fitted hearing aid settings and professionally prescribed settings among older adults by administering hearing tests.

 

College of Professional Studies & Fine Arts

Rachel Franklin and Jaclyn Reed will work with Television, Film and New Media mentor Mary Posatko, therapists at a Los Angeles youth center, and teens to collaboratively produce a short film related to mental health. 
Public Affairs and City Planning professor Valerie Stahl will mentor Charles Kanelopoulous to construct a geospatial dataset of housing insecurity and housing quality markers at eight public housing projects in San Francisco.
Sean Burt will assist Jessica McGaugh in the production of a short fictional comedy film about menstruation, partnering with organizations that fight period poverty and period shaming.
Tereza Trejbalova's student Fallon Butterfield will analyze data on the factors that predict how likely death row prisoners are to engage in misconduct within maximum security facilities in Arizona and North Carolina.
Yea-Wen Chen will mentor Sophia Yu-Chen Chang Chien to understand Taiwanese international students' experiences and identity development in U.S. higher education contexts.

 

College of Sciences

In Computer Science, Hyunjong Choi will mentor Pascal Reich to integrate multiple self-driving technologies within a resource-constrained context by leveraging cloud-based processing of Lidar data.
Psychology professor Lisa Kath and graduate students will mentor Vivian Magahis to study possible psychological effects that pediatric healthcare workers experience when patients are aggressive toward them.
Using metagenomics and microbiology techniques, Yesenia Rodriguez will study bacteria in nematodes that cause these animals to lose their heads as part of Robert Luallen's lab.
Michidmaa (Miche) Maral and Mary Becker, with mentorship from Physics professor Sanjay Behura, will characterize the structural and electronic properties of quantum materials using machine learning for data analysis.
Jessica Baker will advise Maya Rusnak and Dorsa Naderpour as they examine the effectiveness of combining nutritional and exercise-based interventions to treat fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.
Sam Stenzel will work under the guidance of Cat Schrankel to characterize gut epithelia in wild and experimental sea urchin larvae to assess the role of a protein in the organisms' defense against environmental toxins.
Kylie Neubauer will join Marina Kalyuzhnaya's lab to further elucidate the photosynthetic machinery used by methane-eating bacteria using bioinformatics and microbiology techniques.

 

Fowler College of Business

Cesar Lopez, with Management mentor Ami Doshi, will investigate how wine producers in the U.S. and Mexico adapt to shifting climate patterns and water governance practices through problem-solving and economic decision-making.
Tonni Xia will advise Daniela Cecena to analyze characteristics of and stock market consequences of child labor law violations, including investor pressure and reactions.

 

Imperial Valley

Alexia Reyes, Neyda Jimenez, Adrian Guzman Herrera and Perla Soto-Urzua will explore their own and others' stories as transfronterizx students to characterize how a sense of belonging contributes to well-being and academic success. Vanessa Falcón Orta will be their mentor.

Jonathan Angulo will mentor Desiree Alexis Ortiz and Estephanie Esmeralda Palomares Fernandez to preserve oral histories in the borderland region. They will create a digital collections website of interviews with students, faculty and community residents.

Caleb Molina will assist Tingting Tang in developing a mathematical framework for evaluating the impact of different types of human disturbances on ecosystems and species life cycles.

Linda Abarbanell will mentor Linda Diaz to analyze interviews with Imperial Valley adults' experiences with cancer and cancer care in the United States and Mexico.