Researchers of Emory

Xinyue Tong  was awarded a Spring 2016 Conference Grant to present at the Eastern Michigan University Undergraduate Conference in Philosophy. Presenting my philosophy paper “Beyond Kindness and Malice” at Eastern Michigan University (EMU)’s 6 th Undergraduate Conference in Philosophy has been an unforgettable experience and a fond memory. I not only received instructive feedback from my commenter, but also learned from my fellow presenters. Moreover, attending other presentations and conducting further discussions enabled me to learn new perspectives of philosophy.

Ethan Morris is a recent graduate who majored in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2016 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on human recognition under Dr. Daniel Dilks. My name is Ethan Morris, and I am a senior at Emory University, studying Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. I am a member of the Dilks Lab , researching how humans recognize faces and places. We can recognize a person or a place within a fraction of a second, even if we have never seen that particular person or place before. How do we accomplish such a remarkable feat? One promising strategy for attempting to understand how we recognize faces and places is to understand the neural systems that accomplish it. The human cortex contains regions that are specialized for processing faces and independent regions that are specialized for processing places.

Xiancong Zhang  is a rising senior majoring in Chemistry and Biology. He was awarded a Spring 2016 Conference Grant which he used to present at the Experimental Biology Conference in Chicago.   I went to Experimental Biology (EB) in Chicago from 4.22-4.25 as an undergraduate poster presenter. EB is an annual international meeting of six societies, focusing on the latest research progress and cross-communication between disciplines. According to its website, it is a “multidisciplinary, scientific meeting features plenary and award lectures, workshops, oral and poster presentations, on-site career services and exhibits spotlighting equipment, supplies and publications required for research labs and experimental study.”

Alex Liu  is a rising senior majoring in Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2016 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on scene processing in the brain under Dr. Daniel Dilks. Research is the process of looking for something that evidence and theory support, but its existence has yet to be seen. Not only is this is the foundation of why we do research but it is also the reason why research is so hard. In my current research, we believe that the brain has more specialized regions for scene processing than what current research has shown us.  Instead of there being one stream for scene processing, we propose that there are actually two: one for navigation and one for categorization.  The philosophy behind a two-stream system for scene processing comes from the fact that we can categorize without navigating; however, we cannot navigate through a scene without categorizing what is in it. An example would be trying to walk through a cluttered room. If we want to g...

Jake Kang is a rising senior majoring in Business Administration. He was awarded a Spring 2016 Conference Grant which he used to attend the National Investment banking Competition and Conference in Vancouver, Canada. From March 22 nd to March 25 th , I traveled to Vancouver, Canada to participate in the 2016 National Investment Banking Competition and Conference (NIBC). In order to earn this great opportunity, I formed a team with three other BBA students and competed in the first round of the competition from October to November. We were initially tasked to understand AT&T’s business model and deliver solid ideas along with creating financial modeling works as well as pitch a book for the presentation. There were total of 335 participating teams from undergraduate and graduate schools all over the world, including Canada, the U.S., Hong Kong, Singapore, and Europe. Out of all the entries, only 24 undergraduate and 24 graduate teams were invited to the final round. This year...

Nancy Holbrook is a recent graduate who majored in Biology. She was awarded a Fall 2016 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on fascinating fungi in milkweed under Dr. Nicole Gerardo. As an undergraduate researcher in the Gerardo lab, I am not only attracted to the monarch butterfly for its bold beauty. I, and the rest of the Gerardo lab, am also interested in exploring some very unique interactions that monarchs have with their environment. A particular parasite called Ophryocystis elektroschirra often infects monarch butterflies, but interestingly enough, the food source that a monarch chooses for its young can affect how resistant its offspring are to this parasite. Monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweed plants. Several different species of milkweed can be found in the wild, and research has shown that different milkweed species contain different levels of chemicals called cardenolides. Butterflies that feed on milkweeds with higher cardenolide levels tend ...

Isabel Goddard is a Senior majoring in Cultural Anthropology and Quantitative Social Science. She was a recipient of a Spring 2017 Conference Grant and attended the Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium. I presented in the poster session of the Cornell Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium April 28 th 2017. [1] Attending this colloquium provided me with the opportunity to present my linguistic research findings  in an academic environment to students and faculty from across the world. The vast majority of the presentations reflected research students had conducted for their honors theses and these studies ranged from phonetic topics such as “Ergativity, Agreement, and the Sumerian Verbal Complex” to socio-linguistic research including “L’identité et la Frncophilie au Maroc: Examining the interplay of language perception and identity construction in the Moroccan student.” In this way, I was exposed to every form of linguistic research. The colloquium also included t...