Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

Senior Alex Nemiroski, right, explains his research poster on light penetration in opaque solution to senior Puja Gupta at the Presidential Research Scholars' poster session in the atrium of the Biotechnology Building.

ITHACA, N.Y. -- What can you do in four years? How about finding a lifelong passion and researching it with feverish intensity -- just as members of the graduating class of Cornell Presidential Research Scholars (CPRS) have done.

This year, about 65 students are graduating from the CPRS program, which targets academically gifted students who want to pursue undergraduate research. Each scholar works with a faculty mentor to develop an individualized research plan, which can be in any discipline, and receives financial support for research and loans of up to $24,000 over four years.

This year's graduating members of the CPRS program discussed their research at a poster session as one of the Cornell Days events April 15. The session was both a chance to showcase their undergraduate research efforts and to persuade prospective students who may tread similar paths in the future.

Andrew Riesenberg, CALS '05, is no stranger to poster presentations. In his research on the communication and visualization of risk, Riesenberg has studied how adding text or graphics to a photo can lead to different levels of concern. "In one scenario, there were pictures of a happy family added to photos of a car accident," explained Riesenberg on one of his findings. "I found that females tended to respond more strongly, whereas there was nearly no difference in the male response." Their work was presented at the 2003 Society of Risk Analysis annual meeting in Baltimore.

Previous Presidential scholars have gone on to win Goldwater scholarships and the prestigious Rhodes scholarship. But the CPRS program also opens other doors, scholars concurred. Among graduating scholars, for example, one plans to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at Harvard University, another is going to be an agriculture extension volunteer in the Peace Corps, and another, an aspiring conservationist, is going to study macaque monkeys in Indonesia.

In a short presentation, Presidential scholar Sarah Lee, A&S '05, spoke about how she found her research topic during a semester abroad. "I want to know how a country can recover from inequality," said Lee, who drew from her experience with four host families in South America. She credited part of her success to the CPRS program. "It gives me an opportunity to investigate curiosity," said Lee. "And more importantly, it encouraged me to do research even when goings were rough."

Gali Porat, a senior in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, echoed Lee's sentiments. "It makes this big university much smaller for us," Porat said. Her research focuses on alcohol abuse and related issues. Porat is also the president of the Cornell Undergraduate Research Board, a student organization aimed at bringing undergraduate research into the spotlight.

While Porat thinks of the university as a family, Jerry Carter, CALS '05, a natural resources major, uses the CPRS program as a chance to see the world. Carter works with Irby Lovette, a professor in Cornell's Laboratory of Ornithology, to develop a noninvasive method for identifying vampire bat hosts by looking at the contents of their diet. To look at DNA differences, Carter collected vampire bats in Trinidad and compared their feces with that of chicken-fed bats. His study showed evidence that it is possible to distinguish between wild and chicken-fed bats, despite initial concerns that the fragile genetic materials in a blood meal would be destroyed during digestion. The research could eventually lead to a better understanding of why vampire bats have been proliferating in Latin America.

Outside of research, scholars engage in regular events, such as CPRS freshman colloquia, research-in-progress forums and meetings with A.D. White visiting professors. The CPRS program is run by the Office of the Cornell Commitment.

Alex Kwan is a science writer intern with the Cornell News Service.

Cornell Presidential Research Scholars and their projects:

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Camille Barchers, "Conservation based enterprise and working landscapes: The Finger Lakes wine industry"
Gerald Carter, "Noninvasive DNA-based identification of vampire bat prey"
Rebecca Cohen, "The effect of Maple (Acer sp.) on equine erythrocytes"
Jessica Eng, "How language draws boundaries for social events"
Jonathan Lake, "Resistance to transgene germline silencing C. Alegans"
Daniel Lane, "Developing a climate record for a glacial lake valley in Svallbard, Norway"
Colby Neuman, "Do males with long tails really have more sex? A study of male ornaments and paternity in barn swallows"
Jessica Oesterling, "Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) for identifying and differentiating among salmonella strains"
Mary Ann Pohl, "Listeria monocytogenes genotypes are associated with distinct clinical manifestations of listeriosis"
Brian Powell, "Visual acuity and spatial cognition in Gerrhonotus infernalis, the Texas Alligator Lizard"
Andrew Riesenberg, "The visualization of risk"
Latoya Schultz, "Formite transmission of mycoplasma gallisepticeen in the house finch (carpodaceus mexicanus)
Niraj Shanbhag, "The development of cell lines constitutively and conditionally expressing AKT2"
Laura Siemers, "Isolation of picocyanobacteria from Lake Maggiore Orta and Garda (N. Italy)
Alex Swanson, "Population structure in the Passlid beetle Odontotaeniue disjunctus"
Emily Vollmer, "Apples organically grown versus integrated fruit production (IFP)
Rachel Walsh, "Kin discrimination in a subsocial arachnid"
Katherine Weber, "Spatial price linkages in North American milled rice markets"
Sabrina Welsh, "Activity and substrate specificity of phytochelation synthase (PCS) from Arabidopsis thaliana"
Jessica Yorzinski, "The inflected alarm caw of the American crow (corvus brachrhynchos): Differences in the acoustic structure between individuals and genders

College of Architecture, Art and Planning

Kenneth Cheung, "The natural environment and human well-being: Insights from fractal composition analysis"

College of Arts and Sciences

Ivan Canales Saldana, "Understanding hyperspherical gaussian distributions"
William Chang, "High throughput protein expression of streptococcus pneumonia genes in Escherichia coli"
Michael Covelli, "Predicting the stock market using the leading indicators"
Kathleen Crucet, "The characterization of E-cadherin expression in the laure zebrafish mutant"
Shawn Drenning, "Outer boundaries of self similar tiles"
Zek Gemici, "RANA recombination analysis software"
William Hsu, "Isolation of explicit and implicit memory in memory intact participants"
Sarah Lee, "Racial and gender inequality in South Africa"
Andrew Marks, "Codimension-2 taut foliations of four manifolds"
Alex Nemiroski, "Light penetration in opaque solutions"
Byron Pappas, "Magnerotational instability in a rotating liquid metal disk"
Carissa Perez, "Using Drosophila Melanogaster to study Human Laminopathy diseases"
Ch-Yuan Kaiy Quek, "Rationalistic measure of conflict"

College of Engineering

Maurice Ayache, "Monte Carlo modeling of electron interactions in a scanning electron microscope"
Ryan Beresky, "Turbulent flame structure"
Darrick Chyu, "The effect of a naturally occurring growth factor on ligament healing"
Leo D'Espaux, "Nucleic acid engineering"
Douglas Hughes, "The ultimate drinking experience"
Shankar Iyer, "Studying divergence between strains of corn borer through the analysis of gene genealogies"
Benson Lee, "Blast-like analog for pairwise comparison of protein structure"

College of Human Ecology

Caprice Cadacio, "The functional role of MCM10 in Drosophila Melanogaster
Darleen Chien, "Memory talk in family dinner conversations"
Allison Lipitz, "Child protective services use of precautionary measures against false allegations"

School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Puja Gupta, "Monitoring labor standards"
Galia Porat, "Constructing trouble in college setting: The micropolitics of alcohol problems"