A life long passion…

I have always been interested by the physical world. As a child, I remember running outside and playing in the grass, playing with animals and bugs while pulling at leaves and trees to see what made them tick. As I became older, this curiosity took more practical approaches, from volunteering at animal shelters to touring my great-uncle’s vet clinic, I was enthralled by the science of all things living. I went on to study biology in high school, scoring top of my class in the AP Biology exam and passing the AP Physics exam. I knew then that science was something that would be a part of my life.

When I entered college, I took up Biology because I had a passion and interest for it. I found that Biology was trying, with some answers not as forthcoming and the trials of repeated experiments gone awry. Some of the classes were built to challenge the students and some were dissuaded. However, my love for Biology evolved, and I looked into research questions that I wanted answers, looking at human behavior and how it affects how we see the world, as well as pursued my interests in conservation science. I worked with renowned scientists, traveled the world, and pursued my own studies and experiments as well as published a thesis.

Here is a collection of some of my works. 

Research at CSU

I began researching at CSU as a Honors Undergraduate Research Scholar (HURS), and was placed in the Medford Lab under the tutelage of Dr. June Medford and her research team. For the first semester, I helped with their DNA splicing by helping with the processing of their DNA as well as the electrophoresis gel work. During my second semester, with a team of senior students, we helped run recreation experiments from a retired colleague to help collect more data on former methods to see if they were still viable.

My second research experience was under Dr. Graham Peers and Dr. Shane Kanatous, who took us on an excursion to Baja California Sur. We visited Todos Santos, Magdalena Bay, and other diverse biomes to study a variety of biological subjects, including algae, water salinity and conductivity and their effects on sea life, seal behavior, coral health, and fish diversity and density, to name a few. There were some projects that allowed us to draft our own experiments and research questions, where other projects were collecting data for ongoing experiments and drawing conclusions based on current and previous data. Throughout the trip, we had to make power points and write up project and data summaries, which we would present to our classmates and professors for critique. This allowed me to understand the rigorous time tables many experiments are conducted at, and that science is always updating and evolving, even over a few days.

Conducting Studies

Studying Sustainability on Campus through Behavior and Implementation

After helping with studies for professors on campus, I was itching to study subjects that I had a personal interest in.  The first study I conducted on my own was in the Spring of 2015. I had realized that the dining halls served to go food on compostable plates and silverware, but that the only place to compost them was back at the dining hall, which resulted in the compostable goods going to waste. When I approached Housing and Dining Services (HDS) with this query, they said there was not enough interest in the halls to expand the bins to the halls. I sought to corroborate their claims by doing a scientific survey, asking a model number of students from a variety of different ages, majors and living circumstance if they were interested in composting and would support the expansion of composting at CSU. The results were overwhelmingly positive and presented the findings to HDS. Below is a research poster illustrating our results.

This survey got enough success and interest that in the Summer of 2015 I was approached to turn my proposal into a pilot program in Piñon hall for the Spring of 2016. I applied for and was granted the CSU Sustainability Fund grant for the project, which allowed us to purchase two types of receptacles, one with carbon filters and one without. The goal was to find out if there was a large amount of waste diverted without contamination of non-compostable items, if students stayed engaged, if the types of the bin made a difference in engagement, and if there were any negative side effects like bugs or rodents attracted to the collection project.

Over almost a full semester of collection, we found the pilot to be a success. It was found that with the education from the RA in the area and the access to the bins in the common area for disposal as well as receptacles in their room, the students were likely to participate, enjoy the impact, and divert a substantial amount of waste without contamination. They preferred bins with the carbon filters, and we found that the filters also prevented fruit flies and rodents, although neither were a large factor for either. Upon presentation of this, I was entered into and won the Green Student Champion award from NACUFS in 2016. Below is my proposal for the grant, the research poster with the pilot results and my certificate for winning NACUFS.

The pilot continued with other EcoLeaders in the following years, and over the Fall 2018 semester, they have announced that composting bins have been added to all the residents halls and some of the off campus CSU-owned apartments, so all students on campus and some off campus have access to composting.

Studying Media Literacy in College Students

For my thesis, I decided to combine the two fields I was studying, Biology and Journalism, to tackle a question that had been widely publicized at the time due to politics and social concern. Fake news was ruling the news cycle and throwing doubt on our agencies of truth, the media. College students and “millennial” as well as younger generations were being blamed for consuming and spreading misinformation through allowing false reports to circulate and not fact-checking articles before believing them or sharing them with others.

To test this myth, I put together a survey based on a study done by Stanford that found that college, high school and middle school students could not appropriately point out the difference between fake and real news based on information given to them. I found their study to be problematic, due to the researchers self-sorting students into groups of varying levels of media literacy based on written responses only, their vague rubrics that allowed the interpretation of the answers to be left to individual reviewers, the fact that they did not count people who were unsure as media literate, despite showing critical thinking about their answers, and they did not include actual articles, just headlines, which did not give individuals enough context clues to make rational decisions.

For my experiment, I used their primary foundation, including a website entry page and a viral photo with a caption to see if, based on the limited information given, the students could tell what was real news, what was sponsored content, what was an advertisement, and what was fake news. I also expanded on their original idea to add two full articles, both of which were fabricated by me based on either a real event or a fake news event, to see if they could tell the difference with more context. We also wrote negative and positive comment sections that switched places for every viewer to be matched with an article at random to see if positive or negative feedback to an article changed their mind on it’s validity, independent of the article content itself. We then collected the data from over 300 participants and used them to compare overall whether the general population was right or wrong in their assumptions, as well as compared Liberal Arts to STEM majors to see if discipline played a factor in media literacy.

Our results were that colleges students can correctly identify real news from fake news the majority of the time, and that they can also correctly identify which paid-content, such as advertising and sponsored articles, from legitimate news. We also found that the comment sections did not sway students the majority of the time. When looking at disciplines, there is not a statistically significant difference between STEM and Liberal Arts students when it comes to media literacy, though minor trends could be identified depending on the type of media, and students with both degrees often fared better than their single-discipline counterparts. Below you will find my written thesis, as well as my findings in presentation format.

Scientific Reporting