Research and creativity flourish at 2024 Spring Research and Arts Conference

More than 650 presenters participated in the 2024 Research and Arts Conference at UTC. Photo by Angela Foster.

Mushrooms, artificial intelligence, state policy, stroke rehabilitation, television shows and medieval magic were some of the 290 unique presentation topics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s annual Spring Research and Arts Conference.

On Wednesday, April 10, students, faculty, staff and community members from various disciplines came together to share their research and creative works.

Presenters utilized every room in the University Center for their projects—including posters, panels, oral presentations and performances.

“It’s very exciting,” said Dr. Lisa Piazza, executive director of the UTC Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavor (URaCE). “In a lot of cases, we’ll meet students at orientation who want to get into research. Many of them are here presenting today.

“It’s really the best outcome that we can have for high-impact practices here like engagement and student success.”

Piazza expressed the importance of opportunities for students to share their research.

“The pride on everybody’s face as they’re standing there actually presenting their work,” she said, “it’s pretty amazing.”

Chancellor Steven R. Angle spoke to many of the presenters while visiting their displays.

“It’s so fun to see students excited about learning, their projects, what they’ve researched and the questions that have come up that they want to answer,” Angle said. “The common theme is the excitement for the students. They’re actively engaged. This isn’t sitting in a class; it’s discovery.”

A look back at some of the presentations from this year’s conference.

Medieval Magic and Medicine: Tools of the Trade

Freshman Collin Jackson’s model of a curse tablet was one of the “Tools of the Trade” displayed by Dr. Kira Robison’s “Medieval Magic and Medicine” course.

In the Chickamauga Room, 27 of Dr. Kira Robison’s history students in her “Medieval Magic and Medicine” class presented museum-style exhibits related to the topic, “Tools of the Trade.”

“The task was to do a research project,” Robinson said, “and I asked them to find a discipline they were interested in and to find a tool––a physical object–– and research it. Instead of writing a paper, I told them to make an exhibit.”

Bailey Bashore, a junior majoring in history, made her exhibit on medieval fertility. The tool she incorporated was a Latin fertility potion, which included ingredients such as raw egg yolks, dog’s mercury, bird’s tongue and a bull’s penis.

She displayed a fake bowl of the potion.

“Fertility is something that affects every single person no matter the time or location,” Bashore said. “I thought that was always interesting, especially during the medieval era.”

Junior Karen Cruz, a double major in international studies and Spanish, said the idea behind her project on smudging stemmed from her Hispanic heritage and Catholic background. Smudging is a ceremony for cleansing the soul of negative thoughts.

Some of the items she displayed included sage and palo santo smudging sticks. The connotations around smudging have changed throughout time, she said.

“During medieval times,” Cruz explained, “smudging was used a lot because witchcraft was prevalent during that time. They started using smudging to scare people and to connect with spirits.”

Freshman communication student Collin Jackson displayed a model of a curse tablet.

He explained that in medieval times, practitioners would create a thin, lead tablet engraved with a curse—and then break it with a nail near the victim.

“They would drive a nail through it to invoke spirits, deities and gods,” Jackson said.

Jackson’s model was made of clay instead of lead.

“They are normally made of lead,” he said, “but I didn’t want to accidentally curse someone.”

Senior Hayden Hunley

Hayden Hunley, “Poisonous or Edible? A Mushroom Classification Challenge”

Hailing from the tiny town of Santa Fe, Tennessee, senior computer science student Hayden Hunley loves going into the woods to forage for mushrooms.

“I wanted to know just on a list of mushroom features if I would be able to tell if it’s poisonous or edible,” he said.

Hunley used an old field guide with over 8,000 instances of positive mushroom identifications. For each identification, 22 features were recorded, including cap shape, cap color, odor and stalk shape.

He then created the random forest model and the logistic regression model to distinguish between poisonous and edible mushrooms.

The random forest model had 100% accuracy over all 8,000 mushrooms, while the logistic regression model was 97% accurate.

“This was right up my alley,” he said. “It’s data science and mushrooms.”

Chancellor Steve Angle and senior Juan Pena.

Camron Rockwell, Juan Peña, Noah Leiker and Dr. Erkan Kaplanoglu, “Finger Rehabilitation System”

According to mechatronics engineering senior Noah Leiker, this project doesn’t fix broken bones—but instead, neurological damage.

The finger rehabilitation system attaches to a stroke patient’s finger and uses motors to help it perform all necessary movements, allowing the user to repair muscle memory.

“The big thing about our design was making it adjustable,” Leiker said. “We have Velcro and you can increase the size or shrink it to fit anybody’s finger so multiple people can use it. So if we were to sell this, you could roll out a bunch of them instead of having to make each one custom.”

The motivation for this project, Leiker said, was to improve the lives of patients who are deeply affected by their long-term stroke symptoms.

“There’s a lot of people that struggle,” he said. “They lose a lot of things in their life that they just can’t do anymore. It was an idea to help those people out and try to give them a chance to get their life back again.”

AI for Real panelists Laurel Rhyne, left, Nagwan Zahry and Shane Ward.

AI for Real

UTC’s AI Initiative hosted its first-ever panel discussion on AI applications for the classroom and in research. Chief Information Officer and AI Initiative Program Coordinator Vicki Farnsworth moderated the discussion.

Panelists included:

Laurel Rhyne, lecturer, School of Nursing: Current use of AI applications within areas of the field of nursing
Nagwan Zahry, associate professor of communication: Incorporating AI in messaging development by students in Spring 2024 strategic communication and social media classes
Shane Ward, assistant professor of art (sculpture): Incorporating AI into spring sculpture classes, resulting in student artwork titled, “Convergence: Technological Singularity, Societal Collapse, and the Loss of Human Agency”
Maneesha Vanga, master’s student, College of Engineering and Computer Science: Fraud Detection in Financial Transactions Using Machine Learning
Narfiseh Ghaffar Nia, Ph.D. student, College of Engineering and Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence Applications in Upper Extremity Prostheses
Amin Amiri, Ph.D. student, College of Engineering and Computer Science: Harmonizing Brainwaves: An EEG-Based Approach to Music Therapy

Zahry shared her approach to integrating AI into her social and strategic communication classes focused on crisis communications.

Students used AI to develop messaging outlines and created lists of questions that stakeholders would have about the crisis scenarios given. Zahry taught them a no-code method of creating chatbots for online crisis communications.

At the end of the course, students had to analyze and criticize the AI outputs (messaging outlines) and add their input.

Ward’s sculpture class did not start out involving AI, he said. When class discussions about AI emerged, students felt the future was murky and unstable due to the rapid technological advances.

Ward developed an assignment prompt for the students, asking students to respond to AI as an idea; to use AI as a tool for helping understand the environment around them. He said the more they used it, the more comfortable the students became—though some were a little overwhelmed from seeing “too many deep fakes.”

Rhyne predicted that AI would be “highly disruptive” in nursing within as soon as the next five years.

“If, within the next five years, we can figure out the data security situation, this field will be phenomenally different,” Rhyne said. “Some of what is today—the shotgun approach in which multiple tests are ordered, we wait a couple days for results to come back—if patient information is hooked to a device that has seen not a hundred but a million cases, and then what can be done is based on a patient’s individual, unique profile, then clearly, that’s a gamechanger.”

Senior Kayla Edney presents her research titled “Commodifying Euphoria: Representations of online victimization of girls in a television drama.”

Kayla Edney and Dr. Tammy S. Garland, “Commodifying Euphoria: Representations of online victimization of girls in a television drama”

If you mention the show “Euphoria,” chances are that most college-aged people at least know of the television series.

The HBO show, according to its website, “follows a group of high school students as they navigate love and friendships in a world of drugs, sex, trauma and social media.”

Kayla Edney, a work-study student in URaCE and senior criminal justice major, used “Euphoria” to explore the representation of online victimization of teen girls.

Edney explained the many different characters and their experiences with online harassment like catfishing and revenge porn.

“It’s definitely an important conversation to have with children because they have to know internet safety and the harms of it,” she said, “because they are getting phones younger and younger.”

Dr. Tammy Garland, professor of criminal justice, worked on this research alongside Edney. They performed a content analysis of “Euphoria” to identify patterns, themes and relationships within the content.

“When you look at the commodification of ‘Euphoria,’ I think it does a great job,” Garland said. “Sometimes our audience sees this and believes it’s OK, but I think they were really trying to show the dangers of what happens to kids living in a digital world.”

Graduate student Shyla Khan and senior LC Marlatt.

Shyla Khan and LC Marlatt, “Understanding LGBTQ+ Inclusivity in State Policies, Politics, and Public Universities”

The question guiding Shyla Khan and LC Marlatt’s research was: How do state policies really look at LGBTQ+ communities and how did the public universities in those states organize themselves?

Khan, a first-year psychological science graduate student, said they did background research on states such as Florida, where the “Don’t Say Gay” bill prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity.

“With this information,” Khan said, “we know there are these differences between Democratic and Republican states and federal policies. We really wanted to focus on what we can recommend universities to do.”

Some of those recommendations included prioritizing education to enhance inclusivity and support for LGBTQ+ students; utilizing social media for LGBTQ+ posts, marches and rallies to reach students, faculty and staff; and offering support through faculty advocates, campus psychologists and sensitivity training for health centers.

“One of the big things we found is that the party that controls the state doesn’t really matter when it comes to schools implementing friendly policies or not,” said Marlatt, a senior double majoring in psychology and humanities: women, gender and sexuality studies. “It seems like if the school wants to, they’re going to put forth the effort regardless of where they are.”

Chattanooga School for the Arts & Sciences sophomore Ashton Biggs.

Ashton Biggs and Kate Hankins, “Designing Airbags on LS-Dyna”

Ashton Biggs and Kate Hankins are high school sophomores at the Chattanooga School for the Arts & Sciences.

When deciding on a research project, Biggs thought of his dad, who was severely injured in a motorcycle accident. This prompted the research question: What is the best design for motorcycle airbags?

“It wasn’t until the ’70s and ’80s that motorcycles became more prevalent in our society,” Biggs said. “That called into question the safety of riders.”

He explained that their design would be improving airbag sensors that detect acceleration or deceleration rates to determine when airbags should deploy around the body, protecting vital organs and extremities.

They used a software program called LS-Dyna, which was introduced to them by Dr. Kidambi Sreenivas, a UTC mechanical engineering professor.

“We started off by creating a circular model that was just a basic airbag model,” Hankins explained. “Then we changed it to actually fit with the arms and legs.”

The future of the design, Biggs said, would include a helmet design to protect riders’ heads so that severe injuries “don’t happen to other people, too.”