Graduate School Newsblog

The Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library was packed recently, but it wasn’t full of students cramming. This day, more than fifty students were presenting their research via posters in the bright sunlight streaming in from a wall of windows.

It was a poster session held as part of the University’s kickoff of its Generations of Discovery Capital Campaign, coinciding with Homecoming.

Megan Killian, a PhD student in biomedical engineering, discussed her work with arthritis in knees, especially after traumatic injuries. She was looking at what can be done to stop or delay the onset of arthritis after a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a common problem in contact sports.

“I’m looking at the changes in the meniscus,” Killian said. “Specifically, how the cells behave, how the meniscus degenerates over a short period of time. I am focusing on the molecular biology and histology, and other students in my lab, Adam Abraham and John Moyer, are looking at the mechanics.”

Her advisor, Tammy Haut Donahue (associate professor of mechanical engineering), is developing a better understanding of how the meniscus behaves mechanically and biochemically, and how it responds to injury and degenerative changes.

Together, the inquiry has Killian close to completing her PhD this semester, before she “goes on to a career in research-focused academia.”

Nearby, Carley Kratz presented her research in soils. The PhD student in forestry is comparing soil in special plots of the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts and the Ford Forestry Center in Alberta, with an eye toward the effects of warming.

“I’m studying how increased heat and moisture affect the soil microorganisms,” she said. “I’m mimicking future temperature and moisture increases to look at global warming, among other areas.”

She is focusing on the fungi and bacterial concentrations, she said, especially metabolic changes over time, including increased amounts of carbon cycling (how carbon moves through the global environment). “If more carbon in the soil cycles more rapidly, then that could lead to more carbon in the atmosphere, which could increase global warming,” she says.

Her research is sponsored by a US Department of Energy Office of Science graduate fellowship. Adjunct Professor Erik Lilleskov and Associate Professor Andrew Burton (SFRES), also worked on the research.

Kratz’s hopes include a postdoc in microbial ecology and an eventual professorship in the Midwest “or wherever life takes me.”

A senior in sound design, Nicole Kirch researched potential sound effects for the play, “I Am My Own Wife.” Set in Nazi and Soviet East Berlin, the play won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor in 2004.

“I looked at the setting of the play and tried to figure out the best sounds,” she said.

That meant using items, some old and some new, from Marlene Dietrich audio to a music box to bombs and air raid sounds to John Kennedy’s Berlin Wall speech.

“I also worked with an old phonograph, with a wax cylinder,” she said. “I didn’t want to improve the sound,” aiming instead for realistic pops and scratches from the old machine.

The setting is the bar/museum Mulack Ritze in the basement of the protagonist, and Kirch had to account for a wall of shelved memorabilia that is used in the back of the stage in the play.

“I send the sounds through speakers behind it,” she said. And she had to create pre- and post-show audio, as well as the sounds that help carry the action, all for a play that was not actually being performed here.

She did “a lot of research while bored last summer.” She wants to be a sound effects editor when she graduates.

Finally, Bryan Franklin, a PhD student in computer science, was working with common subsequences of nucleotide sequences.

“This is important because, if one is a close match with another, it can be used to study viruses and illnesses in labs and then apply the findings to humans,” he said

He had one major surprise.

“The original, published algorithm I was working with was flawed,” Franklin said. “That made it really confusing at first. It was hard to debug.”

Franklin made progress, eventually, using multiple parallel processes, to get results faster.

“I was able to get results in 1/6th the time it would have taken on a single processor,” he said. “My results are also better than the previous work I based my research on, as it always produces the longest matching subsequence.”

After leaving Tech, Franklin wants to continue working as a researcher, either in academia or industry.

by Dennis Walikainen, senior editor

Published in Tech Today