Better Prepared for Graduate School and Life
“The concept of student-faculty collaborative research is not unique, but at Rollins we’ve taken it to a different level. We engage more students, we involve all aspects of liberal arts, and most importantly, we spend more time collaborating with our students,” said program director Thomas Moore, A. G. Bush Professor of Science.
The Student-Faculty Collaborative Scholarship Program offers students the opportunity to participate in high-level scholarly research that is typically only available at the graduate-school level. The anticipated outcome of every project is a peer-reviewed publication or the professional equivalent for scholarship in the arts, co-authored by the students and faculty member.
By the program’s 10th anniversary in 2009, a total of 307 students, (many of whom participated for more than one year) had taken part in the Student-Faculty Collaborative Scholarship Program.
In its first year, eight faculty members from five departments worked with 29 students. That year, only one project was funded from outside of the Division of Science and Mathematics. However, since then 71 faculty members representing 25 disciplines have collaborated in research with students. By the end of 2009, Rollins had invested nearly $1.5 million in this program, with most of the funded projects being in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Student-faculty collaboration begins with a proposal
Students and faculty work together to develop their proposal for a unique research or scholarship project in the faculty member’s field. Each year a faculty committee reviews the proposals, and funding is awarded based on the quality of the proposal. Students are eligible to participate after their freshman year.
The research program is funded for eight weeks in the summer and student and faculty participants are each given a stipend so that they can pursue scholarly work as partners. Students also have the option of living on campus during the summer. High quality scholarship can rarely be completed in only eight weeks, so students are expected to continue their research, write papers and present at conferences throughout the year.
Current projects
In spring 2009, 46 students were selected to collaborate in summer research with 22 faculty members on research projects in anthropology, art history, biology, chemistry, computer science, history, modern languages, music, physics, politics, religion and theater.
One particularly successful project centered on the detection of buried land mines by speckle imaging.
Partnered with fellow physics major Nicholas Horton ’09 and in collaboration with Professor of Physics Thomas Moore, Ashley Cannaday ’11 spent her first year at Rollins researching the use of lasers to detect land mines. During the summer of 2008, Cannaday and Horton built an apparatus that could be used to find buried land mines. Since it was just a prototype and not made to withstand the elements, they brought a sandbox into the laboratory and buried a tin can, rocks and sticks in the sand. They then tested their method of detecting land mines by attempting to find the tin can, which vibrated much like an antipersonnel mine. They had a success rate of 100 percent, finding the “mine” every time.
Throughout the summer of 2009, Cannaday continued her research using lasers to locate buried land mines, focusing on a new method of finding buried objects that can be made to vibrate. The process she is using was invented at Rollins and is called Speckle Subtraction Imaging.
“Our preliminary results showed that our new method could indeed detect buried man-made objects and discriminate between them and natural objects such as rocks and roots,” said Moore “We are continuing our work trying to understand the issues involved in applying this technique outside of the laboratory.”
Joining Cannaday in the laboratory is her former high school physics teacher and Rollins alumna Sarah Zietlow ’06. Zietlow is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Although she has never specifically studied the problem of detecting land mines, she did complete extensive research with Moore using lasers to study the vibrations of piano soundboards and crash cymbals while she was a student at Rollins.
Pleased with the progress made in their research, the trio has submitted grant proposals to several agencies for grants to purchase of new materials and employ more researchers in the laboratory.
Other 2009 Projects included:
It’s All Greek to Me:
An Aristophane-Slapping Comedy of Tragic Proportions
Dustin Scwab ’10, Chelsea Dygan ’10, Maxwell Hilend ’10, Robert Yoho ’10, Amanda Leakey ’10, Jonathan Keebler ’10, Shannon Singley ’11, and Tracey Hirst ’10. Faculty mentor: David Charles, Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts & Dance. Students are reading all 32 Greek tragedies and hope to present their own long-form, improvised Greek tragedy during the 2010-11 Rollins’ theater season.
Love and desire in exile:
yearning for the divine in medieval Jewish and Sufi poetry
Annie Schmalstig ’10. Faculty mentor: Yudit Greenberg, Cornell Professor of Philosophy and Religion. Golden personalities; leading citizens of Rollins and Winter Park- Alia Alli ’11, Angelica Garcia ’10, David Irvin’ 10, Kerem Rivera ’10. Faculty mentors: Wenxian Zhang, Professor and Head of Archives & Special Collections and Julian Chambliss, Assistant Professor of History.
Morphological classifications of galaxies
Aditya Mahara ’11. Faculty mentor: Christopher Fuse, Assistant Professor of Physics.