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More than 100 University of Maine graduate students submitted posters and multimedia projects, or gave short talks about the work they have been doing on campus for the Graduate Research Expo this past week.
The expo, which has been held for the last six years, drew public audiences and graduate students alike this past Monday and Tuesday as the research work to the Buchanan Alumni House.
“The event was organized as a way to bring together graduate students across the campus,” said Scott Delcourt, associate director of the graduate school.
Delcourt, who issued an open invitation to all graduate departments for their students to participate in the expo, said that the event is a good way for graduate students to find out what their peers are working on.
“I think it’s a very good community-building event,” Delcourt said. “It’s partly social-we had a reception [Monday] night with food and graduate students got to informally wander around and look at all the projects. It’s a good way to get the graduate students we have to come together.”
“It’s kind of nice to show other people what I’m doing,” graduate student Crystal Carr said. Carr, who is working towards her master’s degree in electrical engineering, made a poster on integrated magnetic sensors for hearing aid applications for the expo.
“It’s interesting to see what other people are doing, too,” Carr said.
“I chose to do this to honor the art department and my adviser,” graduate student Jane Forrester-Winne said. “I decided that I had something that was interesting and quite different from the usual and I would support the graduate program. ”
Forrester-Winne’s project, called “Mixed Media Art Project in Thesis ‘Mapping’ in Systems Theory,” was an art project to “map” her thesis. She incorporated her own artwork and images that depicted “maps” representing systems in an illustrated narrative book. Also there was an ongoing Powerpoint presentation, and a clip from the movie “Cutthroat Island” into another Powerpoint during her talk.
“This covers several areas I studied in large in systems-the great religions of the world, ancient governmental systems, ancient healing systems as in ayurvedic and the World Wide Web,” Forrester-Winne said. “I used all the components available in the various departments [around campus] to accomplish the technical aspects of new media.”
Forrester-Winne said she chose to do mixed/new media for her project for the expo because she felt it was important to have that discipline represented, as it is a new category for the expo this year. Four other graduate students also chose to do mixed media projects.
“Essentially what I’m trying to do is bridge the gap between science, art and humanities with my thesis work,” she said.
Another positive factor of the expo, Forrester-Winne said, was being able to share her work with other graduate students and being able to see what research they were doing as well.
“Peers teaching peers-particularly in such an interdisciplinary area like new media-is a great way to facilitate work study,” Forrester-Winne said. “We must change and adapt. Often students entering the university, having used computers since the age of nine or 10, have skills to offer the university in this area.”
The Graduate Research Expo also awarded prizes to the top projects at a public viewing Tuesday afternoon. For the new media category, first place went to Benjamin Hooks’ project entitled “Imaging Lagrangian Fluid Dynamics in Low Reynolds Number Flows.” In the poster category, first place went to Diogo Baptista, Lech Muszynski and Douglas Gardner’s project “A Simple Model to Predict the Dynamic Behavior of Spherical Sessile Droplets on an Impermeable Surface.” Second place went to Kate DeGoosh, Cynthia Loftin and Katherine Webster for their “Is Chaoborus americanus an indicator of fishless ponds in Maine?” project, and third place was awarded to Melinda Diehl, Steve Kahl, Steve Norton and Ivan Fernandez’s project titled “Acidification and Recovery at the Bear Brook Watershed in Maine: A Mass Balance Approach.”
