WSU Honors College sends 8 students, 2 faculty to present at national honors conference in October
PULLMAN, Wash.—With poster topics from parallel computing to the Nipah virus, eight students and two faculty members from the Honors College at Washington State University will travel to Seattle Oct. 12-16 as invited presenters at the annual meeting of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC).
The submission process for this 51st NCHC conference was highly selective, with hundreds of students and faculty submitting proposals, according to its website. The WSU Honors students’ posters will be available to the nearly 2,000 students and faculty who are expected to attend.
Representing WSU
“Our students are presenting on a very wide range of fields and each one will be a fantastic representative for WSU,” said Robin Bond, Honors assistant dean.
“The number chosen to present research posters at this nationwide conference is quite a tribute to both the high quality of our students and of our programming,” said M. Grant Norton, Honors College dean.
Bond and Honors Clinical Associate Professor Kim Andersen will present their own posters at a special poster session for faculty, focused on innovation and best practices in honors education. The will also deliver a joint 50-minute presentation titled “The Honors Thesis as an Undergraduate Research Component.”
Students’ topics
Student presenters and the titles of their research are:
Chloe Erickson, a senior neuroscience major from Monroe, on “Maladaptive behavioral regulation in alcohol dependence: role of dynorphin/kappa-opioid receptor neuroadaptations in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis”
Alice Hiemstra, a junior music/oboe performance major from Zillah, on “Beauty in the biographies: An analysis of beauty in Exemplary women of early China, by Liu Xiang”
Kendra Kendall, a sophomore management information systems major from Cheney, on “Hamlet and the Visconti-Sforza Tarot;”
Keesha Matz, a junior microbiology major from Chehalis, on “Roles of Nipah virus attachment, fusion, and matrix proteins on viral assembly and budding”
Angela Rocchi, a senior neuroscience major from Elk, Wash., on “Chronic Dihexa exposure reveals secondary mechanism of action in muscle”
Ryan Summers, a junior computer engineering major from Stanwood, on “Accelerating genome-wide association studies utilizing parallel computation and compression on graphics processing units”
Matthew Waldrip, a senior physics major from Joyce, on “Time delayed collection field experiments on organic solar cells”
Connor Wolcott, a senior kinesiology/pre-med major from Pullman, on “Gestational Lordosis and its effect on dynamic balance control.”
MEDIA: M. Grant Norton, Honors College Dean, Washington State University, 509-335-4505, m_g_norton@wsu.edu
Robin Bond, Honors College Assistant Dean, Washington State University, 509-335-7803, rbond@wsu.edu