Summer Studies

Here's a sampling of what Harvey Mudd students did this summer …

As spring semester ends and the weather heats up, the academic year gives way to summertime, and approximately 200 students and 40 faculty members dive into the College’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program: 10 weeks of full-time research across every academic department. This summer, students studied X-ray properties of magnetic materials, worked on improving robot-human interaction, sought to understand ant colony behavior, analyzed texting behavior and much more. Here are some of the projects.

Rendering of Claremont's Village South, a proposed NZE development.

Net-Zero Feasibility for Village South Specific Plan

Advisor: Richard Haskell, physics Student: Katharine Larsen ’21

In 2017, residential and commercial sectors consumed 39% of all energy in the U.S., while only 12.7% of energy was produced from renewable sources. Since buildings use most of the energy in the residential and commercial sectors, some structures are designed to achieve net-zero-energy (NZE). NZE projects use renewable energy to meet or exceed building energy demand. The City of Claremont plans to develop a 17-acre parcel of land called Village South as an NZE development. In order to determine if this is feasible, researchers used publicly available data to determine possible levels of energy consumption and production for the development if photovoltaic panels are installed. By examining completed NZE developments, Larsen learned about design tactics used to achieve NZE as well as energy use and consumption. In their plan, researchers made the case for NZE by estimating construction and energy costs and efficiency goals.

Harvey Mudd students in Cathy McFadden's lab study soft corals

Biogeography of Alcyoniid Soft Corals Across the Indo-Pacific

Advisor: Cathy McFadden, biology Students: Sabra Dunakey ’22, Theo Wismar ’22, Rafael Porto ’22

Focused on corals from the South China Sea, Reunion Island (in the Indian Ocean) and Okinawa, Japan, this research is part of a larger project to compare the biodiversity of soft corals at locations throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Soft corals belonging to the family Alcyoniidae are some of the most diverse and conspicuous members of South China Sea coral reef communities, and they are difficult to identify and distinguish from one another, so scientists have a very poor understanding of the overall diversity, geographical ranges and endemicity of species in the region. Using DNA “barcodes” that discriminate alcyoniid species fairly reliably, researchers have begun to characterize and compare soft coral communities. They extract DNA from preserved specimens, PCR-amplifying and sequencing DNA barcode markers, and run statistical analyses to compare community composition among locations in the South China Sea.

An atmospheric simulation chamber at University of Paris

Brown Carbon Aerosol Formation by Photo-oxidation of Phenolic Compounds in Nanodroplets

Advisor: Lelia Hawkins, chemistry Students: Ellie Smith ’22, Linden Conrad-Marut ’21

Students work to understand transformation in atmospheric cloud water using an atmospheric simulation chamber (CESAM) housed at the University of Paris, in Creteil, France. The chamber is unique as it can generate photochemical "smog" and multiple cloud events in the same experiment, essential to conducting research under realistic conditions. Gases and particles are introduced into a chamber, and clouds and/or sunlight can be simulated to understand the role of atmospheric variables in brown carbon formation. Brown products are light-absorbing, organic aerosol particles that have negative effects on climate and human health. Students spent one summer month living in Paris and working at the lab in Creteil, then returned to HMC to work on preparation or data analysis.

Christina Catlett SCR ’22 and Vivian Pou ’22

Green Crew Sustainable Claremont

Advisor: Julie Medero, computer science Students: Christina Catlett SCR ’22, Vivian Pou ’22, Reymon Pedroza CMC ’22, Alina Zuniga (Upward Bound high school intern)

Sustainable Claremont’s Green Crew plants hundreds of trees every year in environmentally disadvantaged communities. A major challenge is finding ways to make sure that residents understand how important it is to water new trees, even in times of drought. Last year’s team built a set of tools embedded in the Green Crew’s Google Sheets records that make it easier for the Green Crew coordinator to engage with residents who have Green Crew trees on their property and to communicate the benefits of new tree plantings. This year’s team expanded on those tools based on previous feedback, and they’ll make the tools flexible and available to organizations across the state.

Harvey Mudd biologists are studying the relationships between genes and species.

Computational Biology

Advisor: Yi-Chieh (Jessica) Wu, computer science; Students: Taeyun Lee ’21, Tatsuki Kuze ’22, Julia Qian ’22, Mia Taylor ’22

Evolution is responsible for the immense biological diversity of our planet; however, despite its central role as the most fundamental property of life, the process of evolution remains poorly understood, and current models have typically been unable to span the diversity of scales at which evolution can act. The project goal is to develop computational models and tools to help biologists better understand the relationships between groups of genes and species and thus gain insight into evolution. This work incorporates knowledge from a variety of fields, including algorithms, mathematical modeling and evolutionary biology.

Fighting Fake News

If a malicious agent wants to maximize the spread of false information (aka “fake news”), how would it do so? Harvey Mudd researchers spent this summer trying to understand such a strategy and how it might be stopped.

Directing the project is Susan Martonosi, professor of mathematics and an expert on public sector (particularly homeland security) applications of operations research and management science. “Modeling and Gaming the Propagation of Fake News in Social Media” is a collaboration with Banafsheh Behzad, assistant professor of information systems at California State University, Long Beach. It’s a new research area for both scholars. “This work will provide insights into the optimal characteristics of biased and/or ’fake’ news, which can then be used within a game theoretic framework to develop defensive strategies,” says Martonosi. The research team spent the summer developing tools of probability, optimization and game theory and learning how to assess the validity of the model against real data, among other tasks.

Mathematics students Daniela Elizondo ’21, Bhavana Bheem ’22, Deyana Marsh ’21, and Steven Witkin ’20 (Johns Hopkins University) began with a literature review, learning about how people read and interact with news, how they share it and why fake news is prevalent. They were able to obtain Twitter data focusing on political tweets during the time of the 2016 presidential election. Using a probability model developed last year by Martonosi and Behzad, the 2019 team validated the model with real data to assess if the model is representative of how people are sharing news sources on social media.

The team’s model has three main components: bias of a single article, truthfulness of a single article and belief of a single reader. Marsh explains, “In this model, we make a few assumptions about the model: If the bias of the article is closely aligned with the belief of a reader, we think the probability of propagation will increase. If the truthfulness of the article also increases, we assume the probability increases.”