It’s hard to believe that September is over and I am presenting on the work I did this summer tomorrow.  Taking a step back to look at the bigger picture with my research to put a poster together has been a nice break from the nitty-gritty lab work I have been inundated with since getting…
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This month has been a productive one in terms of getting a routine established with Dr. Aday (my advisor) and figuring out a schoolwork-thesis work balance. I meet with Dr. Aday every Thursday, and submit my work for the week to him the night before, so we can spend each meeting going over recent findings…
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Almost as soon as I arrived back in Williamsburg at the end of August, I returned to my research on photochemistry of a nickel catalyst.  My primary goal has been to optimize our system of photochemistry to get as high a turnover number (TON) as possible.  To do this, I have run several experiments varying…
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So the semester is in full swing with midterms, HPLC, and data analysis. Just in time for the summer research symposium (which I will be presenting for tomorrow!) I finished going through the data for latex for milkweeds in the greenhouse. I found no correlation between density and latex exudation, as well as no significant…
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My last post was from Tahiti, where I worked this summer to add botanical specimens from the Island of Mo‘orea to the Department of Anthropology’s Oceania Archaeological Laboratory (OAL) wood reference collection. The wood reference collection specimens collected this summer can be used to help identify wood charcoal collected from archaeological sites in cooking features, postholes, […]

Senior year is in full swing which means research is in full swing! We finally received a new computer that actually works and turns on unlike the first one we received from Apple and I have gotten all the programs I need downloaded. After a few setbacks with Psychopy, I’ve decided to re-program my experiment…
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Last month I wrote a blog entry about why I chose to focus on White teachers in my study, instead of teachers of all races.  I argued that White teachers are generally less comfortable in diverse classrooms because they don’t have the same backgrounds as their students and don’t relate to them as well. As…
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Hi Everyone! Great news: the rats have made their way through the practice trials and we are now about to collect useable data! After looking through the preliminary data, it was determined the rats are ready to move on to the next step of testing.  We added new codes into the computer’s macro program and […]

Throughout the course of this summer and into this fall, I had the chance to engage with data that I really felt was relevant to present day, and my generation in particular. Sociological Research in the form of “Bowling Alone” and other works really emphasizes the fear that the sense of community that Americans once […]

It was a great summer of research. While I am excited for my classes this fall, I am a bit nostalgic for the hot days of summer when I could devote more time to my research. Over the course of the next few weeks I am going to crank out a 10-20 page summary of…
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