Office of Undergraduate Research and Inquiry

The purpose of this study is to determine which
United States license plate(s) are best designed for
recall. Based on what we know of human memory
in terms of numbers, letters, and their combinations,
this study aims to identify the “ideal” license plate
for citizens to remember. This study’s results will be
applicable in criminal cases, as well as in identifying
vehicles involved in AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts.
There are many studies that have examined eyewitness
memory for crimes in younger adults and older
adults. In this study, we will examine the effects of
age on memory for license plates. We want to determine
which license plates are better remembered by
younger and older adults. We hypothesize that the
organization of letters and numbers on the license plate will have a larger effect on older adults than
on younger adults because older adults need more
memory support.

The purpose of the project was to see if giving
students a structured physical activity break after a
lesson and before the intended summative assessment
would increase their scores academically and/
or decrease their test anxiety. The idea was acquired
from spending over 1,000 hours in elementary school
classrooms ranging from kindergarten to fifth grade.
It was observed that after a 30-minute math lesson,
the students were expected to take an assessment
based on the content of the lesson. It seemed as
if students were having a difficult time focusing on
the test and were getting wiggly in their seats. The
students seemed nervous to take a test directly after
instruction and some of the scores were not as high
as intended. This was the basis behind conducting
this research. There had to be a solution to this problem
and the researcher was determined to find one.

The economic future of our country is uncertain after
the most recent presidential election, and many people
are wondering if they will have enough money
to retire. There are lots of people, even proficient
economists who were stunned by the economy’s
positive trend over the past few months. While there
is a strong growth in our country’s economy, there is
no clear way to see what the future has in store. The
purpose of my research is to see how people are
preparing financially towards their future. My goal
is to see if people started saving for retirement, and
how worried they are about the future. I am interested
to see how much people saved so far. What
I found is that many people did start to put money
away for retirement, but they are worried about the
future regardless of how much they have saved so
far.

Professional sports is a large industry that reaches
millions of Americans today. Those Americans are
called fans- the ones that support the teams, fill the
seats, and cheer them on from home. Occasionally
these professional sports teams decide to relocate
to another city, state, etc. Relocation has become
increasingly prevalent in the past few seasons. This
puts the dedicated fans in a difficult situation in
which they can remain loyal to the city or the specific
team itself. In order to analyze how someone would
react to their favorite professional sports team being
relocated, we developed a survey to addresses the
underlying question of would your favorite team
remain your favorite team even if they relocated.
Our results found that the decision to remain a fan or
switch to another team depends on gender and the
level of education.

Geologic storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) into deep
saline aquifers is a promising strategy for mitigation
of global atmospheric CO2 levels-a main cause of
climate change. These aquifers have the capacity
to safely store significant amounts of CO2 and are
available worldwide. As such, reaction dynamics and
multiphase transport accompanying CO2 injection in
deep aquifers are important to understanding CO2
sequestration processes and therefore they have
been extensively studied. Despite the comprehensive
findings, there are still urgent needs for understanding
of interactions between injected CO2 and
resident fluids since these interactions could determine
the total CO2 storage rate and capacity. The
objective of this study is to investigate fundamental
physics of water evaporation at different salinities under the CO2-rich environment. Microfluidic techniques
visualize and quantify evaporation behavior
of water in real-time in a simple 1D microchannel
geometry. The detailed CO2-water interactions and
underlying physics will be discussed.

Financial literacy is the backbone of the American financial
system. As cash begins to be used less, credit
is playing a larger role in our day to day activities
such as purchasing a home, car, or online shopping.
This change can create trouble for those who do not
have knowledge about their credit and finances. To
understand the financial education of Americans, we
developed an online survey about financial literacy
and collected responses from over 200 people. Our
findings show that there is a statistically significant
difference of financial literacy based on factors such
as income level and age group.

Animal protein production systems are reaching production
capacity limits due to their associated ecological
detriments. Therefore, a global shift towards
an ecologically sustainable alternative is vital, and
hence exploring the scope of market for such alternatives.“
Cultured meat”, or ex vivo cultivated meat,
may indeed serve as a viable alternative. However,
although this method aims to lessen environmental
woes, one current drawback is the ambiguity of consumer
acceptance. This study addresses this concern
through calculus of potential markets. Indeed,
through surveying about 5,000 people worldwide,
with focused populations in the United States and
University undergraduates, statistically significant
results of positive consumer interest in cultured meat
were attained. After survey completion, over 75%
of participants expressed interest in eating cultured
meat (interested in “probably” or “definitely” eating
cultured meat). Ultimately, this novel study ought
to serve as a foundational framework for catalyzing
funding towards privatized and academic research
on cultured meat.

Medical intervention is required for positive growth
and improvement in newborns, especially preterm
infants. Premature infants often require heel-pricking
procedures, such as the Guthrie test, in order to
determine if the child has a variety of diseases such
as sickle cell anemia. The Guthrie test can have a
negative effect on the patients’ behavior and psychological
state: pain management in this procedure
is critical. There are several ways to reduce pain in
the patient including, but not limited to: swaddling,
breastfeeding, Kangaroo Mother Care method, oral
glucose, and lullaby music. The Kangaroo Mother
Care method and oral glucose are some of the more
effective pain management tools used during the
Guthrie test in preterm infants.

The interphase (littoral zone) of the Florida Everglades
and surrounding marine environments are
dominated by mangrove forests and mudflats that
transition into freshwater communities. As salinity
levels change, plant cover of the freshwater community
will be adversely affected, but perhaps more
importantly, their microbial symbionts responsible for
their tolerance to high salinity will be impacted as
well. Microbes respond quicker to changing environments
and could provide an early warning of the
loss of resiliency of the Florida coastline ecosystem.
For 10 weeks, soil samples from Biscayne National
Park will be placed in standardized mesocosms and
subject to local conditions like sunlight, tides, plants,
increased sea levels, higher salinities, and variant
inundation. Standard and variant conditions will
be employed on different mesocosms, and weekly
DNA extractions of the various soil samples will
be analyzed via metagenomic analysis, creating a
library of the 16S rRNA community structure over the
10 week period.

To fully understand the function of the elasmobranch
electrosensory system it is necessary to examine
electrosensory nerves extending from the ampullae
of Lorenzini to the central nervous system. Studies
detailing the composition of sensory axons are rare,
but they have shown that ontogenetic and sexual
dimorphism exists in the anterior lateral line nerve
(ALLN) of numerous species. This study obtained a
count of the number of axons comprising the ALLN in
male vs. female and adult vs. juvenile yellow stingrays
(Urobatis jamaicensis). We hypothesized that
males have more axons than females, and that the
number of axons is ontogenetically constant. We
expect males to have 30% more axons in their ALLN,
and that the number of axons is ontogenetically constant
for both sexes. This study will provide unique
data about the electrosensory nerves of Yellow
stingrays that can be used in future studies to make
comparisons between other species.