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gathered samples and expertly interpreted the amassed data. This research project was part of the Natural Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Program (NSSURP). NSSURP allows student researchers to work directly with PLU faculty mentors to experience a learning dimension rarely accessible from the academic-year textbook and laboratory assignments. Research projects reflect the natural sciences fields of biology, chemistry, computer science, environmental studies, geosciences, mathematics, physics

, and deconstruct them and analyze them on a computer to quantify differences in the songs of the different call types.  This is technical, dry work. But Grossberg is thrilled at the opportunity. “I just love being outdoors, and this gives you an appreciation for the overall research we’re doing and how all the pieces connect, how they all fit together,” he said. Scientific research, he’s learned, is 95 percent failure and 5 percent success. So there is a lot of slogging through data that may not

Stockholm. Infants heard either Swedish or English vowels and they could control how many times they heard the vowels by sucking on a pacifier connected to a computer. Co-authors for the study were Hugo Lagercrantz, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden as well as a member of the Nobel Assembly and Patricia Kuhl, endowed chair for the Bezos Family Foundation for Early Childhood Learning and co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. The study

variables in the equations Fortuner has been exploring. His findings show the amount of expansion and energy in the universe over time, and give insight into what parameters affect the physics of the very early universe. Entering numerical codes into a computer program and running simulations for hours day after day wasn’t glamorous, but it’s been an invaluable experience for Fortuner – a physics major who almost failed his first physics class. “When I took Intro to Physics class, the first college

relationship between human communities and between people and the Earth. “As a black person, I have been living it my entire life,” Finney said. “Even though I’ve been fortunate enough to do work around these issues, I may leave my computer in my office at night, but I can’t take my skin off at night and put it away.” Finney is a professor in Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the College of Natural Resources at the University of California-Berkeley. Her book, Black Faces, White Spaces

wrote Geometry Playground, a computer program for playing with ideas in geometries “other than plain vanilla.” When testing his program, Heath said, he noticed something strange about constructions in spherical geometry, and he tried to write about that to motivate others, especially his students, to explore the ideas, too. That led him to the ideas in the paper that won the award. “I have never considered myself an ‘excellent expositor,’” Heath said.  “I just wrote the paper to try to encourage