RC Research

Reach out to [email protected] with any questions!

Repost: MCSP Blog

Earlier this month, Dr. Roland Minton and three Roanoke students competed in an online sports analytics championship! Read further to learn all about it:

The Roanoke College team of James Rowe, Selam Mekonnen, and Cyrus Pace earned second place at the National Collegiate Sports Analytics Championship in Dallas, Texas, on February 1-2! Syracuse University won the team championship and Jacob Kauffman of Rice University won the individual national championship. The event was organized by Baylor University and hosted by the Dallas Mavericks.

None of the above paragraph is inaccurate, but it could be misleading. If you follow the weather, you may remember that Dallas was shut down February 1-2 by a winter storm. Reluctantly, the RC group canceled our flight and stayed home. With travel to Dallas shut down, the organizers shifted to a remote event. Although the Roanoke team finished second, the competition was entirely individual work analyzing a massive basketball data set. Team standings were compiled by average scores of schools with three or more competitors.

All four of Roanoke’s original team members can claim “Sweet Sixteen” status. In the qualifying round held in November, James Rowe placed 14th and Lilly Blair 16th. Lilly was unable to be in the finals because of commitments with her women’s lacrosse team. In the finals “in Dallas” contestants were seeded into seven groups, with the top two in each group advancing to round two. Selam and Cyrus gave excellent presentations to advance to the second round, while James was a close third in a highly competitive group. These are great results!

Each competitor was given five hours to take a large spreadsheet of play-by-play basketball data, isolate a team or player or type of play, distill the data into a small number of insights, and highlight those insights in a five-minute PowerPoint presentation. Cyrus, for example, pulled all plays involving Jaxson Hayes and identified strengths (e.g., pick and rolls, plays designed for him after time outs) and weaknesses (e.g., shooting from the left side of the court). After giving their presentations, they answered questions from a panel of judges drawn from professional sports teams around the country. The judges rated presentations in a variety of categories such as use of statistics, graphics, clarity of results, and responses to questions.

The biggest casualty from the winter storm was the loss of unstructured networking time with the judges, who would have been in recruiting mode. All three RC competitors have an interest in pursuing careers in sports. James and Cyrus have interned with the Roanoke RailYard Dawgs hockey team, and Selam has worked with Stat Crew. Despite being limited to zoom discussions, useful connections were made and the team gained valuable experience in the sports analytics field. However, it’s too bad that our Tex-Mex dinner wasn’t in Texas!

Congratulations to James, Selam, and Cyrus for their outstanding performance and representation of Roanoke College!

Irene Ryan Acting semifinals were today for our very own Kennedy Swineford !

During the first week of October, Sydney Wagner attended the Southeastern Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences 2022 conference. Working with Dr. Sweet, she presented "Introducing Corporate Psychological Responsibility (CPR)." Sydney has been working with Dr. Sweet since the Spring of 2021 when she began conducting a literature review of multiple different motivational theories, including, but not limited to, Maslow's Hierarchy and Alderfer's E.R.G. Theory. After review, they landed on thirteen or so theories to code for common themes to pull out as key factors in human motivation, and the abstract of the paper that came from this was the topic of the presentation at the conference. The current topic is how motivational theory can be applied in the organizational workplace setting.

This was Sydney's second research conference, and both times she had wonderful experiences. Not only did she learn more about public speaking and presenting her work, but she has also learned a lot more about how to help present feedback to others on their work. She has learned that having multiple perspectives on a project is so important because sometimes there is an easy answer to the question, just through someone else's expertise and experience.

This past weekend Megan Reynolds traveled to Dallas, Texas to present at the Q***r History South Conference. She presented on the topic "The Internal Lavender Menace: Le***an Feminist Challenges in Southwest Virginia" alongside only one other poster presenter due to complications with the hurricane. Despite this, Megan presented her research and findings to many archivists and public historians from across the south. This research stems from her work this summer as one of the thirteen Summer Scholars, as she looked at the Le***an Feminist movement in a national view. Le***an feminism is a strand of feminism that has been a part of the larger women’s movement since the 1970s. This cultural movement emboldened le****ns to concentrate on constructing camaraderie between women with a focus on rejecting heteronormativity and men. The way le***an feminists handled race and gender differences, however, ultimately led to the exclusion of bisexual women, transgender women, and q***r women of color within movement spaces. This project examined le***an feminism through the lens of exclusion to show how a movement meant to bring women closer together created a legacy of division within LGBTQ+ communities. Megan discovered that despite how progressive we think we are as a country, we haven't really moved along as far as we have and bi women, trans women, and q***r women of color are still marginalized within le***an and women-only spaces today.

At this conference, Megan learned that everyone who is there with you at a conference is there for the same reasons and is just as interested in your research as you are. People want to know what your research is about, especially if it is a topic that they relate to and have other connections with.

This past weekend, we had an amazing turnout at the Family Weekend Research Showcase! There were so many wonderful topics that people presented. Congratulations to the first-place winner, Lydia Turner-Little, who presented on the topic of LGBTQ+ Experiences of Religion. For second place, we had a tie between David Adams (Intermittent Fasting Combats Diet-Induced Obesity in Zebrafish) and Alexander Palmer (Neural Dynamics Encode Valence in the Mouse Auditory Cortex).

This Friday, head over to Fintel Library and see what our research students have been up to! A wide variety of research projects were undertaken this summer, from across all majors. Hope to see you there!

Fintel Library: September 23, 6-8pm

Kavya Iyer is a recent alum of Roanoke College, having graduated this past spring. This summer, she had the opportunity to work in a research lab as part of the Diversity Summer Internship Program at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Kavya worked specifically in the Population, Family, and Reproductive Health Department where she studied some of the metrics or tools, used to assess the quality of care amongst patients receiving contraceptive family planning counseling services globally. This department aimed to compile all these resources by undertaking a systematic review to understand whether some of the common themes from these metrics aligned with the standardized quality of care frameworks used in the field.

Kavya's research was presented at both the Leadership Alliance National Conference in Connecticut in late July and in front of other professionals at the School of Public Health in Baltimore. There, she was able to meet students, faculty, and researchers from all backgrounds that conducted amazing research in the sciences and social sciences from a wide variety of incredible schools across the country. Kavya wishes to ease others' worries about presenting at conferences, as it is intimidating at first but to remember that everyone else in attendance is there to cheer you on. Remember, you are the expert on your study and that's what matters!

Q: What did you love about Research at Roanoke College?

A: The rigor of the classes and ample opportunities to conduct research really increased my abilities to navigate the complex field of research as a graduate student. The professors at Roanoke are there to make sure you learn, succeed, and have fun, and I can't thank them enough for it! I'm looking forward to continuing my passion of advocating and learning about pediatric health and development into my graduate school years.

https://www.roanoke.edu/about/news/summer_scholars_2022

Roanoke Summer Scholars Dive into Research Roanoke College’s competitive Summer Scholar Program gives students hands-on research experience and poises them for post-graduation success.

Ahmed Abusultan attended the 14th Annual Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium during the last week of July. His research revolved around understanding how humans develop the coordination patterns we use when walking, focusing on the relationship between the arms and the legs. For his project, he looked at the utilization of trekking poles to simulate having four limbs to walk rather than two. The main question Ahmed focused on was what the chances are of having the same coordination pattern when walking without trekking poles versus with the trekking poles. The results came out to be that there is a 1/12th chance of having the same coordination pattern after not receiving instruction. This research serves biomechanical engineers in their work to construct more coordinated artificial limbs or robotics with similar functions. Physical therapists can also use this research to assist those who have lost their ability to walk and are relearning how to be mobile again.

James is currently assisting Dr. Ball with her project that focuses on the partners of formerly incarcerated people. There is very little research in this area, so James and Dr. Ball are conducting in-depth interviews with the partners of former prisoners in order to chronicle their experiences. They have completed almost sixty interviews with people across many different classes, cultures, and regions. At this point in his project, James has worked on compiling an annotated bibliography, responding to inquiries, conducting and transcribing interviews, and entering their data into spreadsheets.

The future of this project will consist of more interviews, more transcribing, and James will begin coding the data collected. Eventually, they hope to publish multiple articles about their findings. James hopes to present at a Criminal Justice conference in the future!

Shane Saunders spent the month of June with Dr. Collins, alongside other colleagues, conducting research on the Smooth Coneflower populations at Denhill Preserve. This research is a continuation of a research project Dr. Collins has been working on for almost a decade. Located south of Roanoke College, Denhill Preserve is home to a major population of Smooth Coneflowers. The Smooth Coneflower is an endangered variety of the Coneflower species. The decline of this variety has been due to forest fires and commercial developments threatening their habitats. With this research, Shane and his colleagues aim to seek the core issues that cause the decline of the Smooth Coneflower and promote the preservation of this beautiful and essential species. This preservation process includes counting, marking, and measuring every individual Smooth Coneflower within small plots.

Shane hopes to attend a conference by the end of the year in order to bring awareness to this important species to help it recover in its natural habitats.