Nearly 300 posters showcasing the research of 339 students lined Stover Walk last month at the Pomona College Intensive Summer Experience Poster Conference.
Most students stood at their posters, eager to share with passersby what they’d learned over the summer. Content ranged from art to astronomy, cognitive science to philosophy, with titles such as “Monitoring Wildflower Phenology at Mt. Rainier” and “Visualizing Risk: Deploying Machine Learning to Map Avalanche Hazards.”
The annual event focused attention on projects carried out by more than 200 students who received Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) stipends for up to 10 weeks of faculty-directed or independent study. Another 92 students benefited from the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP) that supports unpaid or low-paid internship opportunities.
“The Poster Conference is a beautiful display of the creativity and diverse interests of our students,” says Stephen Marks, associate dean of the College with responsibility for faculty and student research support. “It underlines that not only is the quality of the research important, but also the ability to communicate that research and its findings—on the poster, but also orally—in ways that will be compelling to others.”
“Exploding Plants in Your Own Back Yard!”
Dwight Whitaker, professor of physics and astronomy, uses high-speed video analysis to study the biomechanics of plants, capturing how some can disperse seeds with such force that they almost appear to explode.
Leon Arreola ’29, Nimay Shankar ’28, Rosaline Ventura ’29 and Yuhang Xu ’29, all aiming for a physics major, spent eight weeks aiding Whitaker’s research and working out their own experimental approaches.
The students set up and recorded the high-speed video, then did numerical analysis to track the seeds and calculate the aerodynamic forces.
As his first research experience, Xu valued how Whitaker guided the team through every step. Shankar, meanwhile, appreciated the opportunity the students had to problem-solve, “which is a hallmark of experimental physics,” he says.
Arreola shared his colleagues’ enthusiasm. “It was very fun and exciting that we were able to do what we wanted instead of following a strict program where we weren’t able to explore,” he says.
Helping Veterans Overcome Addiction
As a neuroscience major aiming for a career in psychiatry, specifically addressing addiction, Ethan Purcell ’28 reached out to Dr. Ellen Herbst, an addiction psychiatrist with the San Francisco VA Medical Center, about assisting with her clinical research.
“I think one of the reasons they were willing to have me aboard was because I was coming in [with SURP] funding secured,” he says.
Purcell had a rare opportunity to shadow one-on-one psychiatry sessions, learning “about multiple vulnerable subsets of a population that is underserved and important,” he says.
He also helped with statistical analysis of a study showing tobacco cessation medication rates for veterans with HIV lagging the broader population. He was first author on an abstract submitted to the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT), and he is continuing his involvement with Dr. Herbst’s research during the current academic year.
Documenting a Rare Kenyan Language
In western Kenya, a region with more than five million people, only about 200,000 people speak Tiriki, a Bantu language. Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science Michael Diercks has been documenting and describing the language throughout his career.
This summer, linguistics majors Clarisse Koo ’28, Silas Mihm ’28, Rowan Norenberg ’27 and Leo Sampsell-Jones ’27 aided the ongoing research by collecting, translating and analyzing traditional literature in Tiriki, Norenberg says.
The students also “contributed to a wider project of writing a complete grammar” of the language, Koo adds.
“This was an opportunity to apply the abstract and conceptual that I learned in class,” Koo continues. “Getting to do real work with speakers and processing this firsthand data really tests our application skills and critical thinking.”
Knowing how to conduct field work is core to linguistics, Mihm says. “I want to continue doing linguistics in grad school and hopefully beyond. This was a good introduction to research methods.”
Diving Deep into Challenging German Poetry
Emmet Bolls ’28 was in eighth grade when he first read the work of Paul Celan, considered among the greatest European poets of the post-World War II era. “I come from a family with literary interests,” he says, “so I had the opportunity to read good things when I was fairly young.”
A German studies and English double major, Bolls is interested in philosophy and poetry, and he was a stand-out student in Professor Friederike von Schwerin-High’s German language and literature courses. Beyond class assignments, they talked about his idea “to look at fragmentary poetry and especially Celan and Friedrich Hölderlin, two very well-known but also very difficult poets,” von Schwerin-High says.
The outcome was a six-week independent research project during which Bolls and von Schwerin-High delved deep via Zoom into the poetry and the connection between the poets.
“She was very willing to designate a lot of time to discuss the works with me,” says Bolls. “That was an opportunity I’d never really had, to have such an extended dialogue with someone over weeks on a very difficult text.”
This summer’s research may inform his senior thesis and could help pave the way into a graduate program.