Kevin Doyle, Mental Health Counseling program coordinator, gives his presentation in the Faculty Pitch Competition.
Chris Cunningham, coordinator for the industrial-organizational psychology graduate program, won the Grand Prize in the Faculty Pitch Competition.
Graduate presentation
- Sarah Kelehear — All the Things We Don’t Know about the Four-toed: Modeling the Distribution of a Cryptic, Habitat-specific Salamander”
- Tyler Perry — Crossed and Uncrossed Visuomotor Reaction Time Training
- Nasarg Hansaliya — Effects of Optically-Transparent, Thermally Insulated, Silica-Based Aerogel in a Solar Thermal Receiver
Faculty presentation
- Grand Prize Winner — Chris Cunningham
- Arts & Humanities — Andrew O’Brien
- Social Sciences — Chris Cunningham
- Biology & Environmental Sciences — Azad Hossein
- Mathematics & Computer Science — Sungwoo Yang
To see more photos of ReSEARCH Dialogues, go to: https://bit.ly/2IrNzek
Sarah Kelehear spent hours practicing, refining what she was going to say, how she was going to say it and making sure she could cram it all into three minutes.
So when she got onstage Wednesday at ReSEARCH Dialogues and gave her 180-second presentation on Tennessee’s four-toed salamander, she was cool as the other side of the pillow, right?
Nope.
“I’ve been pretty stressed this morning,” she said after her presentation. “Everyone was on their game today and did a great job, so that made me more nervous as well.”
Nervous she may have been, but she also was convincing. The 12 judges picked her presentation as the best they saw in the Graduate Student 3-minute Thesis Competition. She will receive a $2,000 grant to help with future research.
She was one of 10 graduate students who presented their research projects during the 3-Minute Thesis Competition on Wednesday, April 10, at ReSEARCH (Scholarship, Engagement, the Arts, Research, Creativity, and the Humanities) Dialogues. The event, now in its fourth year, brings together undergraduates, graduates and faculty to their research papers and proposals on posters, in part of panel discussions and in live presentations.
Andrea Lyons, UTC associate director of Alumni Affairs, emceed the presentations and said she was amazed at the courage exhibited by all the students. Breaking down their complex topics into language that anyone could understand then delivering out that information in front of an audience is an amazing feat, she said.
“Can you imagine if we were asked to do something like that?” she asked. “I take my hat off to all our presenters today.”
In her time onstage, Kelehear focused on the four-toed salamander, an amphibian that lives in East Tennessee, including the Tennessee River Gorge and Smokey Mountains. She is investigating whether the species is thriving or in danger because of pollution and urban development, saying the animal is the “canary in the coal mind” when it comes to judging the quality of local water systems.
Quoting biologist E.O. Wilson, she said, “It is the little things rule the world. So what happens if you lose one of those little things?”
Fast-paced faculty
The afternoon at ReSEARCH Dialogues also included a Faculty Pitch Competition in which instructors from UTC had four minutes to present their research. Twelves faculty members took the stage to discuss such projects as intervening with UTC students to prevent or treat alcohol abuse, how certain types of fish “talk” to each other using electricity and finding ways to predict landslides in the Chattanooga area.
The pitches were divided into four categories—Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, Biology and Environmental Sciences, Mathematics & Computer Science. Each category had a winner and there was an overall grand prize winner. The winner of each category received a $2,500 mini-grant, while the overall winner received a full-time graduate assistantship for the 2019-20 academic year.
Chris Cunningham, coordinator for the industrial-organizational psychology graduate program, swept the field, winning both the Social Sciences category and the grand prize for his project that addresses the strains of working in the medical field, how it can lead to burnout and a drop in the quality of care.
While the money is appreciated because it will help him continue his research in areas such as data collection, interview transcription and analysis, he said, “what is perhaps most personally meaningful to me about this award is that it indicates the interest and support of a large panel of influential community leaders who understood what we are trying to do and were excited enough to endorse this project. This type of support is energizing and encouraging.”
In his presentation, he noted that everyone in a medical setting—”doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals, even down to janitorial staff”—are having problems dealing with stress. In some cases, the effects are more devastating than just burnout or leaving medicine for a new career.
“Among physicians in particular, we know the statistics of higher rates of suicide at least double the rate of the general population,” he said. “In some sub-specialties this rate is four times as high as you can generally see.”
He also discussed what his research will provide to address the problem.
To start to document, not just the fact that burnout exists, because we know that. But we’re going to spend more time documenting the positive things that people are doing to make it through every day. How are they finding a sense of meaning? How are they finding joy? How are they finding purpose?”
While his project focuses on Chattanooga-area medicine, “if we can do well on this local version, we definitely know there are ways we can roll this out to a larger audience.”
