Research with a side of sushi

Yesterday I went to the summer research poster conference here on Mudd's campus. Most Mudders make an appearance at the conference -- not surprising when you figure that nearly half the student body had a poster in the conference. And in addition, there was food, and the students were enthusiastically applying themselves to the raspberry cheesecake and the chicken cornucopias. Even a safe distance away from the sushi table, the conference was packed, so I didn't get a good glimpse of every poster, but a few that looked interesting were Development of an Aquatic Robot, Optimization of Renewable Energy, and Social Science Games. And like a dutiful blogger, I snagged a couple of photos.



This is Tselil standing in front of "Adventures in Coevolution with Jane." (You can see Anak, another student involved with this project, standing second from the left.) This was a crossover project using computers to compare evolutionary trees of different species with symbiotic relationships, to see if the species may have evolved together. I hope I got that right. The project has a website, so you can check my synopsis if you'd like. Even though the project certainly has biology overtones, Anak is a computer science major and Tselil is doing a joint major in math & CS, which is one of the cool things about Mudd -- because of the Core, students have opportunities to do projects that don't fit neatly into one discipline.

Please note the specially designed lizard catching pole being demonstrated in this photograph.

Speaking of crossover projects, here is Johnson Qu (far left), an engineer, talking about his biology summer research with Prof. Steve Adolph. I've mentioned lizards and Johnson a time or two on this blog already, but hey, I really like both of them. The team was using equipment from Prof. Nancy Lape's engineering lab, trying to figure out what it is about the composition of particular types of reptile eggs that allows them to expand to up to three times their original size.

The research posters were all very interesting, but seriously, those chicken cornucopias were delicious.