What kind of research do you do?

Out of curiosity I'd like to get a feel for what you are working on. Just give me a brief description. (or a lengthy one) And then you can comment on each others research topic with questions and/or suggestions. (like a new approach or idea)

ex.
I create visual models of various articular joint workspaces using gathered data to improve and develop knee treatment techniques.

Hey there!

I recently joined LSU IMSD, and, while the program usually focuses more on the hard sciences, I managed to weasel my way in with psychology research. I am probably an anomaly in this group but just the same my work is considered to fall under the 'biomedical sciences' category probably because the research I'm conducting involves cognitive psychology rather than the more social psychology research (i.e. industrial psych, developmental psych, etc.)
To be brief, I am exploring the memory limitations in study and test environments, namely the effects of context dependency on item and source memory in the presence of either silent or noisy conditions at both encoding and retrieval. Past studies have shown that we encode the information from our current environment along with the information we're learning, and then use the encoded information about the environment to a cue memory trace for the particular information we were studying at the time. In other words, if we study and test in the same environment we should have greater memory retrieval than if we were to study and test in different environments. However, the presence of noise interferes with encoding and negatively affects source memory retrieval--not memory for information itself item memory but memory of the source of the information (i.e. where on the page studied material was located or in what color it was coded). I have combined these two concepts to test whether or not noise will serve as a context cue to enhance source memory or disrupt it. This type of study could have important implications for work environments, military training, and test administration among other things.
It gets a bit more complicated if I go into further detail, but in a nutshell that's what I'm researching through the LSU Psychology Department and thanks to the generous funding of the LSU IMSD Program!

--Alejandra

Hello! I joined the IMSD program this spring, and actually started my new research this past summer. So far it's been a blast! This summer, I learned the technique of gravimetric determination using fertilizer as a sample. Gravimetric Determination is basically finding out the chemical and physical properties of an element or substance. In my case, I was searching for the iron content in fertilizer, to see if this particular product would be a possible sample for later experiments.

At the moment, I am using atomic absorption spectroscopy to analyze and synthesize nanoparticles on iron samples. From this, I'll probably begin analyzing using AFM (atomic force microscopes), and hopefully start a process called nanografting, which I can't wait to do!

And I agree, hooray for generous funding!

I am currently involved in sequencing proteins from bacterial DNA.I'm still continuing the same research I did this summer with the REU, but my new project is slightly modified. Lab has been a little slow on work because alot of our sequences that we need to insert into E. coli for further study, all look really bad. I think this is a good thing though because I get a more realistic view of how conducting research can be at times. I usually work in labs were everything went successfully and i rarely got any errors or misreadings...that was nice to start off in a lab like that but i'm glad to see that research can be very frustrating! But I'm so happy to be apart of this program!! and i hope there is continual funding for this program in the future because research matters!

I work in Microbiology in an E.coli lab. E.coli is an indicator of water quality. The samples that we get have been tracked and we've labeled which ones we think will be able to survive or not survive based on certain characteristics. My project that I started earlier this year has gotten some interesting results and other students in the lab have been working to see if it can be replicated. Hopefully it all works out. It would be really great to be able to publish. I've put in a lot of work into this project.

This semester, I am working with the Yeast Two Hybrid System in order to investigate physical protein-protein interactions in Dr. Craig Hart's lab. The protein that we are interested in is called BEAF (Boundary Element Associated Factor). BEAF has known insulator functions, meaning that it blocks promoter-regulatory factor interactions, seperates independently functional chromatin domains. Insulators, then, actively participate in chromatin order and gene expression. Genetically, several proteins have been found to interact with BEAF. So this semester I have been compiling cDNAs to be tested in the Yeast Two Hybrid System for physical interactions with BEAF.

I have been working on designing a bioreactor system capable of culturing bioscaffolds. This system is designed to efficiently cultivate anterior cruciate ligament bioscaffolds that go through chondorgenic cell differentiation. The main components of the system include a media reservoir which provides surface to air space in order to promote gas exchange throughout the system, two chambers which are used to house the scaffolds that are to be cultured and a peristaltic pump that consistently perfuses the stromal media throughout the system.

I conduct research under the supervision of Dr. Robert Cook. My research focuses on the interactions of metal nanoparticles with humic acid.

I work with mgalea1 on the knee project. This project is in the engineering field of kinematics which is the study of motions of rigid bodies. Are main focus is on the concept of a workspace. A workspace is basically the volume that a moving coordinated system is free to move and occupy relative to a fixed coordinate system. In our study the moving coordinate system is the tibia and the fixed is the femur. We are trying to calculate the workspace of the human knee joint from data acquisition and compare it to the workspace measured from the geometry of the joint.

Hi everyone. I joined IMSD late in my undergraduate career, specifically, in my last semester (Spring 2012). My research focused on the synthesis of fluorescent BODIPY dyes in Dr. Vicente's lab. BODIPY (boron-dipyrromethene)is formed by complexing a disubstituted boron group (i.e. BF2) with a dipyrromethene group. We were able to synthesize dipyrromethane through reaction of a benzaldehyde derivative and a pyrrole in the presence of TFA (trifluoroacetic acid). The ultimate goal was to synthesize both the mono- and di-substituted BODIPY dyes, but only the mono compound was able to be synthesized and purified by column chromatography.