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Their projects range from autonomous robots to voter opinions on immigration and border policy in the U.S. This year, 195 �鶹��ý students have received a total of just over $1 million in grant funding through the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). It provides an opportunity to get hands-on, practical experience while still in college. For many, it is a chance to explore a career or graduate-study direction or get a head start on their senior thesis. “Thanks to the generosity of our donors, SURP experiences provide opportunities to learn about doing research for many students who would otherwise not have that chance,” says Stephen V. Marks, associate dean of the College.

Students accepted as research assistants gain experience as part of a faculty member’s research program. Other students design their own projects that involve research or a creative endeavor endorsed by a Pomona professor. Projects are funded for a period of four to 10 weeks and may be done on campus or at another location.

During an Intensive Summer Experience Poster Conference to be held on campus on September 26, students funded for SURP projects will share with the college community a report of what they learned, created or achieved through their work. These reports may take a variety of forms, such as research posters or reports, recordings of performances and multimedia presentations.

Here is a look at some 2024 SURP projects.

Setting Math to Music

For years, Melinda Yang ’25 has been interested in both math and music, and she is double majoring in the disciplines at Pomona. Composition classes have whetted her appetite for writing music. And in math she sees “a thing of beauty in its own right, as well as a powerful way of looking at underlying structures and patterns in the world.” Her SURP project, “Setting Math to Music,” allows her to dig deep in both fields while “diving into” her senior exercise in music. Her project is supervised by C. Joti Rockwell, associate professor and chair of the music department.

“I knew I wanted to write some sort of musical piece for this project,” Yang says. Her goal is to write a song cycle “united by commonalities, such as a central theme or recurring musical motif, that expresses mathematical concepts through music.” She aims for a public performance incorporating other musicians as part of her senior exercise.

This summer, Yang has been researching ways in which math has been used to analyze music. She has found mathematical diagrams showing how musical chords relate to one another. “I’ve also been looking into musical compositions that have been composed with mathematics in mind,” she says, “such as several different pieces based on the digits of pi.” She has found the music library in Thatcher to be a beautiful place to study, she says, and is now sitting down at the piano putting musical notes on paper.

The Adolescent Brain

Aiste Abeciunaite ’25, a psychological science major from Vilnius, Lithuania, was doing an independent study course on adolescent neural development during her junior year when she became convinced that adolescence was getting a bad rap. Her reading led her to see adolescence often portrayed as mainly “a period of negative risk-taking, reckless and irresponsible behavior,” she says. “I found this view very upsetting. There is so much beauty, novelty, exploration and learning that adolescence brings us. I kept wondering why our society (and the body of research) is so fixated on the negative aspects of adolescent development.”

Abeciunaite discovered that Eva Telzer, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was among those pioneering a new approach to understanding the adolescent brain, focusing on adolescence as a time of opportunity and prosocial, other-orientation. Abeciunaite contacted Telzer and was invited to join her lab for eight weeks this summer. She is helping with the SUPER Brain project which explores how young people’s brains interact with peer social experiences. She is also doing her own research which she describes as “track[ing] participants’ neural representations of themselves, their best friends and their parents over the span of three years.” Abeciunaite is learning to analyze fMRI and longitudinal data for her individual project, which is endorsed by Pomona Professor Richard Lewis.

A significant benefit of Abeciunaite’s summer research is the certainty she is finding about a career direction. “I had been torn between medical school or a psychology Ph.D. route post-college,” she says. Now, she has caught the excitement of research. “This experience has given me the opportunity to work closely with current psychology Ph.D. students and postdocs, as well as to experience what graduate school feels like,” she says. It has “assured me that a psychology Ph.D. route is something I would really enjoy and feel passionate about.”

The History and Future of Care Robots

Miyu Owada ’26, a double major in Asian studies and anthropology, is combining her knowledge of both fields with her fluency in Japanese in her SURP project as a research assistant with Angelina Chin, professor of history. Owada is interested in East Asian contemporary relationships. She learned about Chin’s work on care robots, which are helping to alleviate the shortage of workers available to care for an elderly population in some East Asian nations, and looked into research opportunities with her.

“Being involved on this project for the past year and over this summer has been truly an eye-opening experience,” Owada says. During the school year she translated and transcribed interviews Chin conducted in Japan. She also assisted with a symposium on “” held at Pomona last spring. During the symposium, Owada served as translator for Japanese researchers in attendance. This summer, she is editing videos and translating PowerPoint presentations so that the symposium can be more widely accessible to the public.

Being involved in Chin’s research “has provided me the opportunity to have practical experience working with researchers on the topic of care robots, an emerging and crucial topic across cultures,” says Owada. She is “applying my previous knowledge of cross-cultural relations to further my understanding and contribute to the conversation.”

Molecular Drug Design to Study Degenerative Diseases

The pursuit of new drugs to fight disease doesn’t always take place in the lab. At Pomona, research assistants with Roberto Garza-López, professor of chemistry, are using tools of computational chemistry to hunt for cures. And this summer, chemistry majors Liam Kwak ’26, James Luu ’26 and neuroscience major Ethan Markel ’25 are not only aiding Garza-López’s research program—they are mentoring four high school rising seniors in the �鶹��ý Academy for Youth Success (PAYS) who are also learning the research techniques.

Each of Garza-López’s research assistants is using in silico methods—computer simulations of molecular dynamics—to test what compounds might be effective in treating specific diseases. “We run all kinds of simulations,” says Kwak, “which helps us predict new kinds of drugs or therapeutic modalities that can target diseases we’re particularly interested in.”

“One of the advantages of the work we do is that we minimize the time that experimentalists take to actually develop a drug,” says Garza-López. Markel’s research is using simulations to find possible compounds to target multiple sclerosis. Luu is working on gliomas, a type of brain cancer, while Kwak is exploring cervical cancer. Luu and Markel are also working to add to the understanding of COVID.

All three have enjoyed their role as mentors for the PAYS students. “Any research in high school is hard to come by,” says Markel, who says he was fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with college professors while in secondary school. It helped him decide to aim for a career in medicine.

Luu has found the PAYS scholars he’s helped to mentor to be both hard-working and kind. “Giving back and helping people—it’s such an amazing thing to do,” he says. “If the experience for them is great, it’s also great for me.”

"The SURP stipends generously provided by �鶹��ý, along with the support of Professor Chuck Taylor, chair of the chemistry department, have been instrumental in enabling me to work with excellent students and undertake these research endeavors,” says Garza-López.

Local Irish Elections

Grace Zheng ’26, a politics and economics major, has developed a keen interest in democracy, having seen firsthand its erosion in her home city of Hong Kong. This summer, Zheng and politics majors Bianca McNeely ’25 and Elias Diwan ’25 are working with Erica Dobbs, assistant professor of politics, on a SURP project to study results of the Irish local elections held in June. Until now, Ireland has been one of only two European countries to have no elected far-right politicians. This year it was predicted that for the first time, some far-right, anti-immigrant parties might achieve a political breakthrough.

“I did not know much about Irish politics before and was interested in exploring how much immigration would impact the local elections, as immigration is a big issue in the rest of Western Europe and the U.S.,” says McNeely.

The students are creating a database that includes information on all 2,172 Irish election candidates. They analyzed candidate and political party social media posts. Diwan also examined anti-immigration protests in the six months before the election.

Zheng says that in this election, “people’s disapproval of the existing parties translated into support for independent candidates.” Housing and cost of living were major motivators. Diwan says that some anti-immigration, far-right candidates won seats in the election, but fewer than media had feared.

“This was my first taste of research in a formal setting, and it has solidified my desire to pursue graduate school,” says Zheng. “I would be interested to learn more about the intersections between electoral politics, constitutional law and contemporary authoritarianism.”