USU hosts undergraduate research conference

Hundreds of undergraduate students and research staff from universities and colleges across the state visited Utah State University on Friday for the seventh-annual Utah Conference of Undergraduate Research.

Scott Bates, the director of undergraduate and graduate research at Utah State, said the event was a great opportunity to showcase students, faculty and the USU campus.

“It is designed to be multidisciplinary,” Bates said. “There will be people presenting on linguistics and DNA, there are a bunch of psych projects and biology projects and a lot of students doing health-related projects. There is a ton of variability here.”

Students presented their findings on posters in the Taggart Student Center International Lounge and delivered oral presentations in the Eccles Conference Center.

For USU students and some 400 visitors, Bates said, UCUR isn't a competition, but rather "an opportunity for students who would never have a chance of presenting to do a poster session or oral presentation of their research.”

Brigham Young University researcher Hannah Winzenried attended UCUR for the first time Friday. Her presentation, “Perceptions of Red Hair Through Time,” analyzed sexual stigmatization among redheads.

“Quite a lot of BYU students have come up for this. I think there are more BYU students presenting than Utah State students, actually,” Winzenried said. “Weber State and Utah Valley University and the University of Utah are all up here too.”

USU senior Deborah Teuscher’s research centers on hospice and in-home health care.

“I love the conference because we have the opportunity to mingle with students from different universities,” Teuscher said. “It’s a chance to see what they’re studying and also relate to those who are in our field. I had lunch with students from BYU who are studying the social sciences as well, so it was fun to talk about what we were studying and relating to one another.”

Biology major Thomas Anderson and bio-engineering major Whitney Morgan have worked for years to perfect the pharmaceutical compound pradimicin.

“As a developed therapeutic it could be effective against both AIDS and fungal infections at once, which would be tremendous,” Anderson said. “But right now, it’s not very soluble and it can be toxic.”

Anderson and Morgan said while their research required them to collaborate with other departments on campus, there were also benefits of attending inter-collegiate conferences.

“By presenting at events like UCUR,” Morgan said, “you let other people know what research is being done and maybe you might get other ideas from other peoples' projects that can influence yours.”

Anderson sees undergraduate conferences as a chance to practice future appeals for funding and research grants.

“It's important to be able to present this information effectively and simply. In funding settings for example, when we're appealing for funding, it's good for us to understand our own work more thoroughly and be able to explain it more simply,” Anderson said.

Morgan, Anderson and other presenters run Utah’s undergraduate research conference circuit as a warm-up for larger, more prestigious conferences. Having attended several of these other conferences, such as January’s Utah Research Summit, Morgan said she and Anderson saw a lot of familiar faces at UCUR.

“We expect to see a lot of these presentations at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research in April,” Anderson said.

For biology major David Gage, presenting “Building New N-Oxide Bonds with Fungi” — a look at using metabolic properties of different fungi or bacteria to produce pharmaceutical compounds — at UCUR affirmed his decision to study at Utah State, where research is not solely open to upperclassmen.

“I've heard from students at other schools that you have to be a junior or senior before you start going into serious research, but here at Utah State, I started working in the lab my first semester,” Gage said. “Utah State can hold its own as a research school.”

Gage credited USU’s professors for creating a positive research environment for undergraduate students.

“The professors care a lot about the students in their labs, they're very quick. And my professor always pushes me to do more,” he said.

While Friday was the first time Utah State had hosted UCUR, Bates said the honor of hosting the conference is well-earned.

“We are sort of the preeminent undergraduate program in the state. Ours is the oldest program. We are the one that is most well-known around the state,” Bates said. “Being able to showcase that here at UCUR and to be able to say ‘This is well deserved’ is really something.”

Mary Taggart, Sam Bennion, Landon Kohler, Hannah Heninger and Amanda Ahlman contributed to this article.