Researchers of Emory

Megan Withers is a Senior majoring in Environmental Science and Biology. She was awarded a Spring 2019 Conference Grant which she used to attend the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. Hello! My name is Meg and I had the pleasure of presenting at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), held at  Kennesaw State University . At the conference, I presented a poster about my honors research, which focuses on the transmission of a bacterial disease called Strep syndrome in Northern sea otters ( Enhydra lutris kenyoniI ). I used U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) data to assess population density as a possible indicator of the disease’s transmission mechanism. I didn’t find a significant relationship between population density and prevalence of the disease, but I did gain knowledge about other factors, such as gender, that could potentially affect the disease and its impact on sea otter health. Future directions in this research are aimed at further

Ashrita Satchidanand is aSenior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She was awarded a Spring 2019 Conference Grant which she used to attend the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. I began my research at the Rollins School of Public Health in the fall of junior year, as an undergrad who was interested in pursuing a Master’s in Public Health. I wanted to explore several fields within Public Health, and I found out that there was a professor of epidemiology at Rollins who were searching for some undergraduates to work on a new study. The research topic was  amblyopia  which is when someone has a difference in visual acuity between their eyes – the difference is characterized by at least 2 lines on the  Snell Chart  used at the eye doctor’s office. When I began researching for the project, I was interested in social participation of children affected by amblyopia compared to those who are not. However, I eventually became more interested in the reading