College of Arts and Science
The Contested Meaning of Abortion (DSI-SRP)
Sep. 8, 2022—This DSI-SRP fellowship funded Rebecca Rossi to work in the laboratory of Dr. Sophie Bjork-James in the Department of Anthropology during the summer of 2022. Rebecca is a senior with a major Mathematics. This project examines how individuals and organizations discuss the topic of abortion on social media. By examining Twitter data related to abortion...
DSI – SRP Poster Winner Announcement – Joseph Sexton
Oct. 27, 2021—Outstanding DSI – SRP Presentation Award 2021 Joseph Sexton, a junior with majors in Psychology and Medicine, Health, and Society and minors in Quantitative Methods, Mathematics, and Scientific Computing, presented his poster at the Undergraduate Research Fair and was selected as the winner of the Outstanding DSI – SRP Presentation Award (7 other DSI-SRP students...
Pieces of the Puzzle: Deep Learning for Classifying Moche Themes from Fragments
Sep. 16, 2021—The Moche or Mochica culture of the North Coast of Peru (250-900CE) are celebrated as having developed one of the richest artistic traditions in the Andean region of South America. The Moche are famed for their depictions of every imaginable facet of daily life in ceramic artifacts known as “Stirrup Vessels”, bottle-like objects that were...
Building Family Trees: Identifying Enslaved People in Ecclesiastical Records
Aug. 25, 2021—The Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA) preserves the oldest serial records for slave societies in the Americas. The records contain handwritten text in collections of books by ecclesiastical (religious) and notaries (other government officials) for the purposes of recording births, marriages, and deaths. The text are written in ecclesiastical Spanish and Portuguese. Through efforts of...
Escaping Despair: Understanding the Decline in US Life Expectancy
Aug. 25, 2021—The rise in midlife mortality in the United States has been attributed to causes of death including suicide, poisoning/overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease. These cluster of causes, regarded as the deaths of despair, are postulated to reflect an underlying feeling of hopelessness and resulting self-destructive behaviors. However, there is limited research testing whether individual feelings...
Exploring Trends of Executive Dysfunction in ICU Survivors (DSI-SRP)
Aug. 15, 2021—This DSI-SRP fellowship funded Aidan Wells to work within the research team of Dr. Jim Jackson in the VUMC Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, and Survivorship (CIBS) Center during the summer of 2021. Aidan is a senior with majors in Neuroscience and English. The project funded by this fellowship aims to identify the level of diversity...
Predicting Suicidal Ideation in Patients with Huntington’s Disease (DSI-SRP)
Aug. 15, 2021—This DSI-SRP fellowship funded Joseph Sexton to work in the laboratory of David Isaacs, MD, MPH in the Department of Neurology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center during the summer of 2021. Joseph is a junior with majors in Psychology and Medicine, Health, and Society and minors in Quantitative Methods, Mathematics, and Scientific Computing. Huntington’s disease (HD) is...
Demographics of Multi-Messenger Supermassive Black-Hole Binaries from the Illustris Cosmological Simulation (DSI-SRP)
Aug. 15, 2021—This DSI-SRP fellowship funded Katharine (Katie) Cella to work in the laboratory of Professor Stephen Taylor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy during the summer of 2021. Katie is a senior with majors in Computer Science and Physics and a minors in Mathematics. The project funded by this fellowship aimed to determine the properties...