Senior Students Present at National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR)

Four seniors in the Honors Program had their abstracts selected for presentation at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR). They attended the Atlanta conference (April 11-13, 2019) at Kennesaw State University, and each presented their capstone thesis in an oral presentation that generated questions and discussions afterward. Fernanda Culichia (faculty mentor: Allison Cornell): "Clearing Up the Confusion: Best Practices for Science Communication." Brianna Hill (faculty mentor: Andre Walther): "A Recipe for You: Using Children's Books as an Early Education Science Literacy Intervention." Haley Krueger (faculty mentor: Audrey Ettinger): "Mental Illness in Historic Fiction: Perception of Mentally Ill Protagonists and Societal Response." Julianna Marotta (faculty mentor: K. Joy Karnas): "Communicating Science to the Public: Empowering the Community to Help Delay the Post-Antibiotic Era." In addition, Julianna Marotta presented a research poster ("FabI Gene Duplications and Overexpression in Enterobacter cloacae Leads to Increased Triclosan Resistance") outlining some of the current results derived from her research in the Karnas Lab. NCUR is overseen by the Council on Undergraduate Research whose mission is "to support and promote high-quality undergraduate student-faculty collaborative research and scholarship." The process for presentation selection is competitive with 80-90% of the abstracts being selected for presentation each year.