This summer, I will be continuing on with the research that I have been doing for the past 2.5 years.  Wow.. has it been that long???  I study the anti-aging gene SIRT1, an NAD-dependent deacetylase regulates eNOS (endothelial nitric oxide synthase) activity.   Nitric oxide (NO) allows for improved vessel function and interruptions in its productions are linked to cardiovascular disease.  Two summers ago I trained rats on treadmills for different durations of time and this summer I will be looking at SIRT1 and eNOS expression across tissue types (heart, brown adipose tissue, etc.)

The two abstracts on my previous work can be seen here:

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/25/1_MeetingAbstracts/1108.14?sid=de8f682f-3ff9-40b4-aee4-7be5127bad63

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/26/1_MeetingAbstracts/853.17?sid=de8f682f-3ff9-40b4-aee4-7be5127bad63

I am so grateful to be apart of the William & Mary Honours fellowship program!!  It is going to be a fantastic summer.

Best,

Rebecka

The abstract for my research is as follows:

“The Chesapeake Bay’s native oyster (Crassostrea virginica) provides numerous critical ecological functions to the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. Unfortunately, due to over-harvesting, disease, and poor water quality, the Bay’s oyster population currently remains at <1% of its historic population size. In 2004, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) spearheaded a successful multi-million dollar oyster restoration project to aid the previously severely degraded Great Wicomico River. The USACE oyster reefs in the Great Wicomico River cover nearly 85 acres of river bottom and are considered among the largest man-made oyster reefs in the world. Currently, there is a major on-going feud between the USACE, which prefers to construct large-scale “no take” sanctuary oyster reefs, and the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC), which prefers to construct small-scale reefs that are open partially to commercial harvest. The USACE seeks to construct additional “no take” sanctuary oyster reefs in the Great Wicomico River, however, the VMRC prefers that any additional oyster reefs constructed in the Great Wicomico River be open to harvest by watermen. My research project will utilize MARXAN conservation planning software to integrate various ecological and economic factors to determine an optimal “no take” sanctuary reef reserve system that meets minimum ecological targets while minimizing relative social, economic, or ecological cost. This research could help alleviate the issue of designating suitable areas outside of the identified minimum “no take” sanctuary reef reserve system to be managed as public oyster harvest grounds.”

Over the course of this summer, I will be updating this blog with tidbits from my research journey including maps and photographs. Stay tuned, and thank you again to all of the donors!

Right now I can say I’m a mixture of excitement and nerves, as this is a bit outside my comfort zone.  I have never camped for this long, nor in a tropical habitat.  Yet, this is exactly what I want to do with my life and I have worked very hard to make this study happen.  The water crisis is a major issue in the world, and any amount of work I can do to bring awareness and progress will be an investment for the future.  As pesticides continue to flow from farm to freshwater wetland, another source of pure water (a rare commodity these days) becomes tainted.  If pesticide potency strengthens, this will have many adverse effects to the biodiversity of the region, as the Pantanal in Brazil is a home for many unique creatures.  As the greatest and largest freshwater wetland, it is crucial to protect.  With the water crisis, it is pertinent to conserve, recycle, and maintain the quality of our water.

I am so lucky to have this opportunity and am thankful for the support of Doctor Matthias Leu, my honors fellow research advisor; Doctor Charles Munn, my research advisor in Brazil; SouthWild, the agency I will be working with in the Pantanal; the Charles Center; those who have donated to my project; and of course my family and friends.  It means so much to me and I can’t wait to share my whole study with all of you.

Let’s make clean water a reality.

Aidan De Sena

Grief is a social process. Furthermore, the “hero image” of a service member sacrificing life for country brings to light how society wishes to honor surviving family members and their sacrifice.Whether it is certain institutional links, routines, or redefining perceived meanings, the history and establishment of casualty assistance programs illustrates a larger process: what it means to lose a service member in American society, how the military believes they should part with these families of the fallen, and how the community at large should receive them as they begin to adjust to life outside the military.

This process of studying transition through the institution of the military actually starts quite soon. Today, I will be departing from Williamsburg on a road trip down to Austin, TX where I will begin some of my research. I plan to interview participants involved in the transition from base to civilian life, specifically on the grounds of Ft. Hood- the largest Army installation in the United States. It is with this logic that I hope to get the most diverse sample with multiple specializations, stories of deployment, and loss all within the gates of an expansive 150,000 acres. After the trip, birthday, and memorial day celebrations, it is my goal to have an interview schedule set in stone at the beginning of June. Look out y’all.

How I see it, it’s kind of like a puzzle.  While there is a national school-feeding program in South Africa, NGOs are the primary force behind school feeding programs in urban centers like Cape Town. Very little research, if any, has focused on their work. Yet the UN has made it clear that, in other development sectors, NGOs have proved very successful in “bottom-up” development- that is, aid programs that actually incorporate and help the local people get involved and active in local development. What I want to do this summer is explore the possibility of “bottom-up” development in school-feeding programs in Cape Town.  How do the NGOs in urban centers encourage engagement in the school feeding programs? Why are people getting involved? How, if at all, are these programs developing aid in a way that is more than just handing out food?

I will be working with three different NGOs in Cape Town at several different schools in very different neighborhoods.  I will conduct interviews with the participants within the community to find out how and why they are engaging and participating with the urban school feeding programs.  At the same time, I will be observing and interviewing administrators to understand the program structure and design.  By the end of my 10 weeks, I will hopefully begin to start drawing some connections, correlating program design and community engagement.

It’s going to be an exciting summer and I look forward to blogging about it all the way!  Finally, thank you so much to the donors for supporting our Honors projects.  My fellow Honors students and I really appreciate the opportunity you have given us to take an academic passion and explore.

Until next month,

Anna

My name is Sarah Young, and I am a Geology and Environmental Science Double Major here at the College.  My Honors Thesis project that I will be working on this summer and next year revolves around the problems associated with agricultural runoff bypassing riparian buffers, allowing excess nutrients into the already unhealthy Chesapeake Bay.  I am so excited to embark on this journey and begin my research with Professor Greg Hancock of the Geology Department.  Many thanks to Professor Hancock, the Charles Center, and everyone who has contributed to my Honors research via the W&M website.  I would not have been able to do this without your generous assistance.  I’d also like to recognize Lyndsey Funkhouser, who will be graduating this weekend and successfully completed her Honors Thesis this past year on riparian buffer bypass; she has helped me in crafting a project that would expand on her own and I thank her for that.

So here is the problem I will be looking at this summer and next year: Agricultural runoff is a significant source of the excess nutrient and sediment pollution in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.  This pollution has severe consequences for the Bay, including algal blooms and creating areas of the Bay with little to no dissolved oxygen (meaning fish and other organisms can no longer live in that area of the Bay).  In an effort to alleviate the pollution, the state of Virginia requires all agricultural fields in the eastern-most part of the state alongside streams to have along the edge of the field a vegetated strip of no less than 100 feet, called a riparian buffer.  The purpose of this buffer is to trap nutrients and sediment flowing off the agricultural field in order to increase water quality of the adjacent stream flowing into the Chesapeake Bay.  Ideally, all nutrients and sediment are trapped as flow moves into the buffer, thus preventing them from ultimately traveling to the Bay.  In practice however, several studies have shown that sloped or uneven topography can cause concentrated flow off the field, resulting in significantly decreased buffer effectiveness.  Concentrated flow off the field causes channelization that bypasses the buffer, allowing much of the nutrient and sediment pollution through to the stream and eventually the Bay.  However, this phenomenon has not been widely studied and has not been documented in the literature for the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  In my research, I hope to find a way to accurately predict locations of channelization and buffer bypass using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), slope-area comparisons, and the Vegetative Filter Strip Model (VFSMOD) developed at the University of Florida.

I will be looking at fields in the Virginia Coastal Plain, Piedmont, and Valley & Ridge regions using GIS software and tools within this software to calculate flow accumulation.  Basically, the program will tell me where the most runoff goes when it exits the field.  These areas of concentrated flow can create channels through the riparian buffers bordering the field, allowing much of the nutrient and sediment pollution from the field into the stream.  Eventually, these pollutants will make their way to the Chesapeake Bay, contributing to harmful eutrophication.

I believe this project will increase our understanding of riparian buffer bypassing, allowing future policy changes to ensure the most effective buffers possible so excess nutrients do not reach the streams bordering agricultural fields.  If you would like to know more about my research or have comments/questions, please feel free to post them below!  I want my research to be as accessible as possible, so I will be updating my blog about it periodically throughout the summer.  Thank you for your interest!

This is my honors thesis in a nutshell.  Women began applying for pensions based on their own service in the Civil War as early as 1866, yet it wasn’t until 1892 that legislation was passed granting pensions to female nurses who could prove they had served for at least six months.  In the intervening thirty years, over 600 women like Ann Stokes applied for pensions.  Who were these women?  Why did they apply?  What did they hope to gain?  Were these isolated applications, or was there a concerted political force behind them?  Did Congress try to play the “voice of morality” when deciding who got pensions and who didn’t?  How did womens’ roles change as a result of their service in the war?

The pensions of these women are housed at the National Archives in D.C., so in early June I will be moving into summer housing at GW and start pulling pensions.  After five weeks in D.C. I’m going to start scouring local archives and historical societies for personal papers to flesh out the pension records and shed some light on what was going on behind the scenes when these women applied.  The list of women I’ve compiled has some very interesting and intriguing women–I can’t wait to get started!

My name is John Lovette and I am a rising senior majoring in Chemistry and Environmental Science. First and foremost, I would like to thank all of the donors to my project. Without their help, this project could have never happened. I am very excited to get started with my work as it brings together a large chunk of my studies and the college. If you are interested in reading the full abstract of my project, it can be found here.

I will begin this summer by laying out the study sites for my work. I was introduced to the Geographic Information Systems program during a class last fall and was fascinated by the capabilities of the software. I will be using this program to map the study locations and then to enter my data to find correlations between mercury concentrations in all of my samples. This will allow me to have a vivid visual representation of my work and will make it easier to present to people with less of an understanding of the work.

Leaving campus on Monday will be bittersweet, but I am excited to return in just 2 weeks to begin this work. I will continue to update this blog with information about my project and the progress that I am making throughout the summer and all of next year. Thanks for following.

John

My name is Nicole Brown and I’m  a rising a senior Sociology major and history minor at the College.  Among my wide and growing interests within sociology, I also have fostered a strong interest in African history, cultural arts and development. Not only are there various themes within this history of empires, struggles and transitions to explore, but also I’m fascinated in understanding the lives of the individuals who have lived in the incredibly varying regions and countries on this continent of the world that is most often forgotten than praised. Among the various languages and cultural identities shared by those who define themselves as “African” the complexities of these relations are ever changing along with the world as the forces of globalization are ever expanding. Having the opportunity to learn more about the far reaching influences of African culture has also furthered my interests into the contemporary lives of African immigrants and those whose lives and ideals are influenced by their compounding cultural identities.

This summer I will be starting my research exploring the transnational identities of Southern Sudanese immigrants living in the Washington DC area. More specifically I will be focusing on the forms of political action the South Sudanese Organization was engaged in before the referendum that separated Sudan and South Sudan officially on July 9th 2011. I am so excited and incredibly grateful I have received funding for the opportunity to explore this topic in more detail, especially as the conflict remains ongoing between the two now distinct countries. While the fact that to my knowledge this topic has not been written about before will be challenging, being able to essentially rely on my own research will be an interesting and enlightening experience… that I’m sure of. I will be interviewing individuals among the South Sudanese Organization that played an integral part in engaging the immigrant community in various ways to mobilize and encourage others to vote and become active in officially establishing South Sudan as a separate country from abroad. This project will explore many different sociological themes including that of  political transnationalism, social activism,  identities and I’m sure delving into many more as well. Most importantly I want to explore how while these Southern Sudanese immigrants were spatially separated from what was occurring in their homeland they remained intimately connected in various ways and how this impacted their current transnational identities.

In many ways I’m excited to return back to the States after I’ve spent this semester abroad at the University of Nottingham in England while also traveling and  exploring the many cultural intricacies of Europe… that of which I could go on writing about for ages. None the less, hopefully I’ll be bringing back with me a greater worldly understanding that will in many ways help me with this project and throughout my final year at W&M. I can’t wait to begin what I sure will be another journey all in its own.

-Nicole

Here is a brief abstract of my project:

The Sultanate of Oman is emerging as a significant, though often forgotten, player in Middle Eastern and global affairs. It has received scant attention from scholars, perhaps because the country has kept a relatively low – and closed – profile. In fact, only in recent decades has Oman welcomed tourists. Capitalizing on this new accessibility, I will analyze how Oman portrays itself to the world through its tourism and what that portrayal tells us about how Omanis see their culture, history, and position in the region. Research will include interviewing agents within the tourism industry to understand how they see the narrative developing. It will also involve analyzing Oman’s tourist sites, monuments, and paraphernalia, and asking questions such as “Why is this significant to Omani identity?” “How could the story of Oman be told differently than how it is portrayed here?” And  “Does this site set Oman apart or does it emphasize Oman’s connection to other nations or cultures?”  This study will produce valuable new insights about this understudied nation and people.