Research Findings

There isn’t much Judith Smetana doesn’t know about parenting teenagers. Her latest study in a nearly 40-year career as a professor of psychology, looks at the effect of using guilt as a parenting tool.

Chemical engineering major Tianhao Yu ’19 has a unique job this summer: testing organic light-emitting diodes that may help improve the screen displays of devices such as cell phones and televisions.

Brain research does not take a summer vacation, and neither does Magdalena Granados ’19. The McNair Scholar is working on “awake language mapping" research designed to help neurosurgeons operate with greater precision.

Chemistry major Austin Bailey ’18 (T5) has spent his summer developing a special polymer to attach other molecules to nanotubes, and his work could have significant applications for creating renewable energy sources.

A mechanical engineering student visiting from the University of Maryland, Ricardo Cardoza stretched himself—and the shape-memory polymers he worked with—in Mitchell Anthamatten's chemical engineering lab this summer.

Spectrometers are used in a variety of applications, from environmental monitoring to astronomy to healthcare diagnostics. A new design using freeform optics upends more than a century of optical design.

Two undergraduates are spending their summer analyzing a recording that was first released nearly four decades before they were born.

Why does racism play a part in motivating some students to go on to college, while it seems to deter others? Winston Scott '19 is spending his summer preparing a study into how children react when they begin to perceive racism.

Two undergraduates have joined a summer research project focused on building a machine-learning interface that generates musical scores from audio files.

Meghan Patrick '18 has spent her summer studying the use of liquid metal batteries on a scale large enough to power entire cities in conjunction with solar and wind power. Patrick is helping the lab figure out where to place ultrasound probes that can capture detailed measurements of how fluids flow in those batteries and how that affects their performance.