Through these past few months, I’ve spent time getting to know my diverse cohort and also investing more time in my research project. I’ve found it super interesting to learn more about my group’s projects and how they mesh science into their non-STEM research fields.
I’m really looking forward to learning about what got my other fellow members interested in their area of research and how they even went about conducting research on their idea. Since I have been exclusively within the biology and engineering research scene, I know little about how research is done within the humanities. So far, I’ve spoken to one of my group members Chris Perrone about how he got into his project of addressing how changes to climate influence changes in the timing of life cycle events in plants with a specific focus on Lindera benzoin, a PA native, commonly known as Spicebush. He will be gathering data on the sex ratios of other local and nonlocal herbariums to determine whether this issue is localized or is more widespread. This study hopes to provide insight as to how the future of this species and many others like it could be threatened by these changes and potentially encourage action against these changes.
As I talked to the rest of our group members, I realized that despite our projects not being in the same realm of STEM, we all use similar research techniques when it comes to pursuing our question. I think its interesting to see how we all use the basics of research of things we learned during our Brackenridge lectures. I think some of the biggest benefits that come from learning about interdisplianry studies is it augments how I look at news and other studies about humanities studies. An issue with it is that explaining my science-heavy research to those who haven’t taken certain biology and engineering courses can be very difficult.
Below is an image to my analysis of the brain signals of monkeys. I’m currently learning this software by Plexon to analyze the signals from each channel in the electrode and put different types of waveforms into areas of the brain.
