Day 2 of ReSEARCH Dialogues 2022 featured projects by graduate and doctoral students.
Check out more presentations here.
Some people who’ve come close to dying, or have died and been resuscitated, report “seeing the light.”
Very little science exists to explain the phenomena, but Jonathan Dinsmore, a first-year graduate psychology student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is on a mission to change that. He’s trying to develop a scale to measure the intensity of “light” experiences that evoke a sense of spirituality or religiosity.
His research details were on display Wednesday during the second day of ReSEARCH Dialogues 2022, which focused on projects by graduate and doctoral students. The two-day event featured 250 presentations and 575 presenters and is the first time it has taken place on the UTC campus since 2019.
For students who highlight their work at ReSEARCH Dialogues, it’s not enough to simply stand in front of a poster presentation and point at its data. They not only have to do the research, they must talk about it in clear terms, said Lisa Piazza, director of the Department of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavor.
“It’s really powerful to be able to speak with the public about the impact of your work, especially for graduate and Ph.D. students who want to get and sustain research grants,” she said. “They’re really complex projects, but they break them down very artfully.”
There are no judges and no prizes at ReSEARCH Dialogues, which alleviates stress for presenters and lets them develop a more relaxed approach to explaining their work, Piazza said.
“It allows them to experiment more with various formats for presenting at conferences, which they will do if they haven’t already,” she said.
In his research, much of Dinsmore’s data comes from people who’ve had a powerful experience during a brush with death or during a state of deep meditation. A majority of them say it has profoundly changed their lives for the better, he said.
“The fact that it has such an influence on people’s lives and seemingly a positive influence, once we understand it better by knowing how to measure it, we might be able to encourage or facilitate this type of experience,” said Dinsmore, who came to UTC specifically to study the phenomenon with psychology professor Ralph Hood, who specializes in the psychology of religion.
Evan Gildernew, a Ph.D. student in computational engineering, is researching materials to extract water from thin air.
His work builds upon the Warka Tower, a structure that harvests potable water from fog and dew. He’s trying to figure out how to tweak the materials used in the tower—invented by Italian industrial designer Arturo Vittori in 2015—to extract water directly from vapor in the atmosphere.
Gildernew’s complex experiments rely on physics, chemistry, engineering and theoretical math, but his end goal is simple: Provide water in a world with increasing water scarcity.
“It’s a growing problem because of climate change,” said Gildernew, who earned his master’s degree in chemical engineering from UTC in 2018. “We’re seeing a dramatic decline in water resources everywhere. It’s a serious problem now.”
ReSEARCH Dialogues 2022 wrapped up Wednesday at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Mapp Building with the Student Fly Pitch Competition.
Sponsored by the Gary W. Rollins College of Business, the competition was open to UTC students from all majors interested in pitching a business idea.
Taking home first place and $2,000 was Kaitlyn Cavin, a doctoral student studying occupational therapy, for BabyFlex. Second place and $1,000 went to undergraduate marketing major Jesyah White, and his teammates RJ Price, an undergraduate majoring in art and minoring ni environmental science, and Ben Wuller, a biology major, for their Chattanooga Gourmet Mushroom Company concept.
Both Cavin and White’s team will also receive free accounting and legal consulting to help launch their ideas.
