Game On!
PURA grants in hand, 51 JHU undergrads take on the great
unknown
There's nothing like a challenge to get the juices
going — whether it's a matchup with an athletic
rival, a "dare you" from a buddy or, in the case of
would-be researchers, a steep and possibly
treacherous cliff that begs to be scaled.
At Johns Hopkins, undergraduates are encouraged to
take on what others might consider the
impossible: an electrode-conrolled prosthetic hand that
grips and grabs, room-mapping robots that
make their moves with $8 worth of equipment and some
computer code, finding the key to how
irregular heartbeats can lead to death.
Those are just three of the 48 projects carried out in
summer and fall 2008 by 51 students
who received Provost's Undergraduate Research Awards to
support their work.
On Thursday, April 9, Scott Zeger, acting provost and
senior vice president for academic
affairs, will host the 16th annual PURA ceremony to honor
their achievements.
Since 1993, scores of students or student teams each
year have received PURA grants to
conduct original research, some results of which have been
published in professional journals or
presented at academic conferences. The awards, funded
through a donation from the Hodson Trust,
are an important part of the university's mission and its
commitment to research opportunities for
undergraduates. For 2009, grants will be given in amounts
up to $2,500.
The awards are open to students in each of the
university's four schools with full-time
undergraduates: the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences,
the Whiting School of Engineering, the
Peabody Conservatory and the School of Nursing.
The 2009 ceremony will be held in the Glass Pavilion
at Homewood. The entire Johns Hopkins
community is invited to the event, which begins at 3 p.m.
with an informal poster session allowing
students to display and talk about their projects. A
recognition ceremony hosted by Zeger will begin
at 4:30 p.m. and will include performances by two
recipients, Rebecca Orchard and Lisa Rosinsky. A
reception follows at approximately 5:15 p.m.
Here, 11 students and their faculty sponsors talk
about what they learned from their PURA
experiences. A complete list of recipients appears on page
11.

The goal: See if stimulating activities improve
cognition

Yoonah Chi and Jill Lasak,
photographed in Charles Commons, traveled to Seoul to
determine whether elderly Koreans who often play Baduk, a
challenging board game, have better cognitive function than
peers who don't play as often.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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Seniors Jill Lasak and Yoonah Chi are playing an
important role in determining whether elderly
Koreans who frequently play a challenging board game called
Baduk have better cognitive function than
do older people who don't play the game as often.
Supported by a PURA, Lasak, a psychology major from
Broomall, Pa., and Chi, a
neuroscience
major from Bethel, Conn., hypothesized that the more a
participant played the ancient Chinese game
(also called Go), the better that participant's processing
speed, short-term memory and executive
cognitive functions would be.
To find out if they were right, the pair traveled last
summer to Seoul, South Korea, to test 100
Korean male elders at senior daytime recreational centers,
which are popular destinations for fans of
the game. (The duo took care to ensure that their test
subjects came from geographically and
economically diverse areas, in order to control for
education and wealth.)
Before heading out, they consulted Sung Jin Cho, a
South Korean clinical researcher visiting
Johns Hopkins, about the study's cultural appropriateness,
and once they arrived in Korea, they had in-country
assistance from Dae-guen Jeon, a physician at the Korea
Cancer Center Hospital in Seoul.
"We wanted to make absolutely sure that the questions
and tasks we were asking the elders to
perform were culturally sensitive and appropriate," Lasak
said. Also, Chi's Korean background and
ability to speak the language were an asset, the pair said,
especially when administering the verbal
part of the test.
Once they analyzed their data, the research team
concluded that at least part of its hypothesis
was correct: Elderly Korean men who played Baduk and other
games had better working memories than
those who did not engage in those brain-stimulating
activities.
"We can't say that one causes the other, but we can
say that there is a correlation," Chi said.
"We also didn't find any correlation between what we call
'greater engagement' — higher frequency of
playing Baduk, doing crossword puzzles and card games, and
reading — and processing speed and
executive function. This was a bit of a surprise, as most
of us would think that greater engagement
would improve all aspects of cognitive function. But that
doesn't seem to be the case."
Lasak said that the next step will be to conduct an
experimental study introducing people to
cognitively stimulating activities, having them engage in
them for a period of time and then seeing if
their cognitive test scores increase. "That would tell us
more about the ability of stimulating activities
to affect cognitive function, which we really don't know
now," she said.
The team's faculty mentor, Justin Halberda, assistant
professor of psychological and brain
sciences, said the study has important implications.
"This is an interesting topic which has a high
probability of revealing important differences
between individuals who regularly engage in cognitively
challenging games and those who do not,"
Halberda said.
George Rebok of the Bloomberg School of Public Health
also served as a mentor to Lasak and
Chi.
— Lisa De Nike

The goal: Use low-cost robots to map their
environment

Avik De has devised a navigation
program that could allow low-cost robots to use simple
sensing equipment to map a building or better clean a
room.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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Avik De, a
mechanical engineering major from Kolkata, India, has
devised a navigation program
that could allow low-cost robots to use simple sensing
equipment to figure out their own location and
assemble a landmark-based map of their environment, without
help from a human operator.
The software was described in a paper presented at the
Workshop on the Algorithmic
Foundation of Robots, a conference held recently in Mexico.
De's program is slated to be tested this
summer in an autonomous robot that relies on an insect-type
antenna to "feel" its way along walls.
If the technology operates as expected, De and his
faculty adviser say it could lead to cheap
robots that can create simple maps of the interior of
buildings. It could also lead to "smarter" robotic
cleaning equipment, such as an autonomous vacuum that could
remember a room's layout well enough to
avoid retracing its footsteps.
"This is a relatively inexpensive way for a robot to
make a rudimentary map of the perimeter of
its environment," said De, a 20-year-old junior who
developed his program with support from his PURA.
"As the robot is moving around the room with a feeler-type
antenna or some other simple sensor, it's
building a graph. The walls are represented by lines, and
when the robot bumps into a corner, it
records a node. It knows the distance between these nodes
and remembers the route between these
points."
This program would not yield the detailed pictures
provided by more elaborate robots that use
high-resolution cameras or laser light, De said, but the
mapping machines he envisions would be much
cheaper and far simpler to deploy.
His faculty sponsor, Noah Cowan, estimated that
equipping a basic robot with De's system would
require only a $5 microprocessor, a $3 antenna sensor and a
couple of hundred lines of software code.
Cowan, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering who
studies robots inspired by biological
models, said he suggested that De develop a navigation
program based on a probabilistic approach, one
that produces answers that are not "exact" but rather that
take into account inherent uncertainties
to create maps that are highly probable.
"It's not my primary field of expertise," Cowan said.
"I provided the basic structure, and he did
all the work. Avik is an exceptional student. He's
mathematically brilliant and easy to work with."
Before De's paper could be presented at the recent
robotics conference, it had to undergo a
review by experts in the field. "The reviews were quite
positive," Cowan said, "and the paper was quite
well-received at the conference. Many people commented on
how poised Avik was in presenting it. It's
actually quite unusual for an undergraduate to be able to
present a paper at a prestigious conference
like this."
De said he has enjoyed the opportunity to do hands-on
research. "I think I've definitely learned
more from doing research here than I have from any of my
classes," he said. "When you're doing
homework for a class and you make a mistake, it's not a big
deal. But when you're doing research and
presenting it at a conference, it has to be right."
— Phil Sneiderman

The goal: Prevent workplace violence for
nurses

Callie Vincent's findings weren't
what she expected--but they could lead to greater focus on
overall mental health services for nurses.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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Nursing student Callie Vincent expected her research
to confirm what seemed like a logical
connection: Nurses who are bullied and verbally abused at
work are more likely later to suffer
depression.
But her results weren't quite what she expected.
Instead, Vincent's findings revealed a very
different relationship between depression and psychological
violence that could lead to more mental
health services for nurses.
"I was disappointed at first," Vincent said of the
realization that her hypothesis was proving
incorrect. "Then I realized that's how research works, and
it's interesting to look at what you do have and figure out
what is really going on."
Vincent, whose research was funded through her
Provost's Undergraduate Research Award,
became interested in the connection between depression and
psychological workplace violence while
working as a research assistant on the Safe At Work study
being conducted at the School of Nursing.
The ongoing study, led by Jacquelyn Campbell, looks at both
physical and psychological violence against
nursing staff.
Using that available data, Vincent wanted to take a
closer look at the mental health outcomes of
psychological violence with the hopes that her findings
could add to the conversation about preventing
workplace violence.
As her adviser, Campbell helped Vincent formulate her
questions and expectations for her
research.
"One thing that makes a good nursing researcher is
being able to take your clinical knowledge
and course work information and help it to both inform your
research questions and help you know
what to do with the results," said Campbell, who called
Vincent an "outstanding student with unlimited
research potential."
Vincent analyzed data from questionnaires completed in
summer 2007 by 1,623 nursing staff at
The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Bayview Medical Center and
Howard County General Hospital. The
questionnaires examined the type of violence experienced
and measured depression.
Rather than determining that depression was an outcome
of the psychological violence, Vincent
found that it was instead a possible predictor for the
violence.
Those who were depressed at the time of the baseline
study were nine times more likely to be
depressed at a follow-up survey. Of the 20 participants who
were depressed at the time of the
follow-up survey, 65 percent were already depressed.
This could mean that the depressed staff is more at
risk of being a target for psychological
violence, or that those who are depressed view certain
situations more negatively, Vincent said.
Although more research must be done, Vincent said the
results could lead to greater focus on
overall mental health services.
"The point of intervention may not necessarily be at
the final step of workplace violence
occurring but looking back to make sure employees have good
mental health to begin with," she said.
Campbell said that it's just as important for Vincent
to find out why her hypothesis wasn't
accurate, and that "her findings can really change the
kinds of services nurses get."
The findings also gave Vincent a chance to experience
the challenges and joys of research,
which Campbell hopes will compel Vincent, who graduates in
May, to pursue her doctoral degree.
"It's not as easy as it appears," Vincent said. "You
have to sit back and let your project show you
what is actually happening."
— Sara Michael

The goal: Add dexterity to prosthetic
hands

To build a better prosthetic hand,
David Huberdeau uses a "cyberglove" to help his computer
program learn which muscular signals operate particular
motions.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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Supported by a PURA, David Huberdeau is developing a
control system that could enable some
amputees to regain hand and finger motions in high-tech
prosthetic limbs.
Huberdeau, a junior
biomedical engineering major from Woodbridge, Va., has
teamed up with a
graduate student to devise a computer program that turns
electrical activity in an amputee's remaining
arm muscles into instructions to move the wrist and fingers
of a prosthetic limb.
"This approach is less invasive than a system that
requires major surgery to have a microchip
implanted to pick up signals from the brain or the nervous
system," Huberdeau said. "Our system uses
surface electrodes to pick up signals from muscles. We
envision a routine in which an amputee would
wake up each day and have a new set of electrodes attached
to control the prosthetic arm and hand."
Significant work still remains. The system, developed
by Huberdeau and Ryan Smith, a doctoral
candidate in Biomedical Engineering, now exists only in a
computer. It is being tested on a prosthetic
arm computer simulation, not an actual limb. Recently, the
students have shown that the program can
produce dexterous finger movements in the simulated
prosthetic limb. The next step is to work with a
real multifingered dexterous hand and equip it as a
prosthesis for trans-radial amputees, meaning
those who retain a portion of their arm below the elbow.
Huberdeau got his first research experience as a
sophomore in the laboratory of Nitish Thakor,
a professor of biomedical engineering, where he worked with
graduate students to learn about the
field of brain-computer interfaces. Last summer, while
working as an intern at the university's Applied
Physics Laboratory, Huberdeau became involved in a
major federally funded project to develop the
next generation of prosthetic arms and hands. When he
returned to school in the fall, he joined Smith
in fine-tuning their own control system for a prosthetic
limb in Thakor's lab. The students presented a
live demonstration of their muscle-controlled prosthesis
system at a Control Society Conference in
Cancun, Mexico.
Huberdeau and Smith's system is specifically designed
to help trans-radial amputees. The
students used a "cyberglove" to enable their program to
learn which muscular signals are associated
with particular wrist and finger motions. With the
students' system, amputees use their remaining
muscles to control their prosthetic hands.
Other researchers are working on implanted systems
that tap into signals from the brain or the
nervous system. "It's not that one approach is better than
the other," Huberdeau said. "It's just that
different systems might be better suited to people with
different types of injuries."
Huberdeau said the opportunity to work on the
prosthetic limb project with leading researchers
in Thakor's lab has been a highlight of his education at
Johns Hopkins. "I've learned a lot of important
things in my classes," he said, "but it's here in the lab
that I've had a chance to see how it all comes
together, how the research and design process actually
works."
— Phil Sneiderman

The goal: Shed light on lethal
heartbeats

Working with adviser Natalia
Trayanova, Grace Tan is using a computer model that mimics
the behavior of cardiac cells to study irregular
heartbeats.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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Using a computer model that mimics the behavior of
cardiac cells, Grace Tan is studying life-threatening
irregular beats in patients with a common condition called
heart failure. In such patients,
the heart is weakened and cannot pump efficiently.
Tan, a junior from Singapore majoring in biomedical engineering
and
mathematics, conducted her
study with support from a PURA. In February, she presented
her findings at the Gordon Research
Conference on Cardiac Arrhythmias Mechanisms, held in
Italy. Of the 160 participants at the
conference, Tan was the only undergraduate. Competing
against graduate students and postdoctoral
and clinical fellows, Tan presented a poster that received
the first-place award in its category.
"The entries were all so outstanding, so I really
didn't expect it," Tan said.
When she received her research grant last year, Tan
followed up on a 2003 study conducted by
scientists at Case Western Reserve University. That team
tested canine organs and determined that
having the condition of heart failure increased the risk of
cardiac arrhythmia — abnormal electrical
activity that leads to irregular heartbeats. Without prompt
intervention, these irregular heartbeats
can lead to death. Tan's goals were to replicate this work
in a computer model and identify the
mechanism by which the cardiac arrhythmias arose.
Using a Johns Hopkins-developed computer model of
canine heart cells, Tan was able to perform
the same experiments digitally and obtain the same results.
Canine hearts have been found to behave
very much like human organs, so these findings have
implications for humans with heart failure. Having
a computer model of the abnormal electrical activity
allowed Tan to take a closer look at what might
be causing the heightened risk of deadly heartbeats,
without the need to sacrifice lab animals.
"With a living heart, it's hard to study how the
electrical waves spread throughout the heart
and form a dangerous pattern. You can only study the cells
near the surface," she said. "But with the
computer model, we can slow down the movement of the
electrical wave so that we can look at it in
greater detail. We can also look at what's happening below
the cells on the surface."
Tan's original project was based on a two-dimensional
heart model, which allowed her to identify
certain cells in the heart's middle layer that appear to
play a key role in causing the deadly
heartbeats. She is now trying to assemble a
three-dimensional model that could yield even more
insights. By using these models to study the cellular,
molecular and structural changes that contribute
to heart failure-induced arrhythmias, Tan hopes to find a
target for medications that could prevent
this ailment.
Natalia Trayanova, a professor of biomedical
engineering who focuses on computational cardiac
electromechanics and electrophysiology, served as Tan's
faculty sponsor in the research projects. Tan
also has received guidance from Raimond Winslow, director
of the Institute for Computational
Medicine at Johns Hopkins.
After taking courses taught by Trayanova and Winslow
in 2007, Tan decided to move from
traditional biological lab research to computational
biology. "The computational work was more
appealing to me," she said. "With traditional lab
experiments, when something goes wrong, you don't
always know why because there are so many factors you can't
control very well. But when you're
working with computer code and something goes wrong, it's
easier to figure it out and correct it."
— Phil Sneiderman

The goal: Bring music to cochlear
implantees

Joseph Heng surprisingly learned
to play the piano after a cochlear implant. Working with
Charles Limb, he's trying to determine how implantees
perceive music.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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Born profoundly deaf, Joseph Heng remembers sitting
down at the piano in his family's
Singapore living room one day when he was 13 and pressing
the keys. Heng, now a sophomore studying
biomedical
engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering, could
discern the sounds of various notes
because he had just been surgically fitted with a cochlear
implant, a device designed to process and
deliver sounds to the auditory nerve, allowing deaf people
to hear.
Within days, the teenager — working his way
through his younger sister's discarded piano books —
had taught himself to play various songs, and his amazed
mother signed him up for piano lessons. Ten
years later, Heng is an accomplished pianist who has
performed in several concerts, making him one of
the very few people worldwide who has learned to play a
musical instrument after receiving a cochlear
implant.
So it's not surprising that Heng spent several months
last summer researching how other
cochlear implant recipients perceive musical timbre, a term
used to describe the tone color of a
musical instrument that allows a listener to distinguish
different instruments, such as a trumpet and
flute, from one another. Heng's research was funded by a
Provost's Undergraduate Research Award.
Based on his personal experience with deafness and
cochlear implants, Heng knew that timbre
recognition is extremely difficult for an implant user
— the challenge was to figure out exactly why this
is the case. Heng hypothesized that cochlear implantees did
not have access to a component of sound
known as its fine structure (a property that relates to
extremely high-frequency temporal content)
but could access a sound's envelope (a property that
relates to low-frequency temporal content).
To study this hypothesis, Heng worked under the
supervision of faculty mentor Charles Limb of
the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to synthesize 150
different musical "chimeras," instrumental
hybrids that combine the acoustic fine structure and
envelope of distinct instruments, such as a piano
or violin.
Heng then asked his study subjects — 12 cochlear
implant users and 14 people with normal
hearing — to spend 45 minutes each day listening to
the music and identifying the instruments involved.
"It's a pretty demanding test that requires a lot of
concentration, and all of the subjects came
out looking more than a little haggard!" Heng joked.
The results revealed that the study subjects with
cochlear implants relied heavily (and more
heavily than their counterparts without cochlear implants)
on envelope cues — the "shape" of the
sound — while being largely unable to utilize fine
structure information.
"But revealingly, we also learned that when we reduced
the value of the envelope as a cue,
cochlear implantees are actually able to extract some
degree of fine structure information even
though their devices are unable to process fine structure,"
Heng said.
That's quite a remarkable conclusion because it
suggests that the auditory systems of people
with cochlear implants are somehow — and the
researchers don't know how, exactly — able to
reconstruct the missing fine structure cues from the
limited information produced by the cochlear
implants, Heng said.
"Our next step will be to explore how this happens,
how the cochlear implantees can do this,
even when their devices do not transmit that kind of
information. It's a mystery," Heng said.
Limb, an
otolaryngologist and cochlear implant specialist who
studies music perception in
cochlear implant users, calls his young student and his
research nothing short of remarkable.
"Joseph's study is both fascinating and important,"
Limb said. "Cochlear implants have
revolutionized the medical care of individuals with hearing
loss, but music perception remains
extremely poor in these individuals, particularly the
ability to distinguish between musical instruments.
Joseph's work is a step toward understanding, and
eventually overcoming, the limitations that people
with cochlear implants face."
— Lisa DeNike

The goal: Correlate education and earning
potential

To determine whether more costly
private higher education secured a better financial future,
Lucas Kelly-Clyne surveyed JHU and University of Maryland
alums.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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Lucas Kelly-Clyne's project was sparked by a
conversation with his father about the value of
private education. Playing the role of devil's advocate,
Kelly-Clyne's dad wondered whether it would be
worth it to send Luke's younger siblings to a private high
school and university like their older brother.
He wondered, Does a more expensive private education secure
a better future?
Kelly-Clyne, a junior majoring in
political
science with a minor in the Whiting School's W.P. Carey
Program in Entrepreneurship & Management, decided to apply
for a PURA grant for fall 2008 to settle
their friendly debate. Under the guidance of his PURA
adviser, Karl Alexander, professor in the
Department of Sociology, Kelly-Clyne planned to poll the
classes of 1997 from Johns Hopkins and the
University of Maryland to compare their socioeconomic
backgrounds, educational history, career paths
and current financial situations to find out whether a
private education gives students a leg up or
whether other factors are more influential.
After reviewing 300 responses from an online survey
sent to alumni of both schools, Kelly-Clyne
found that the Johns Hopkins alumni made more money than
their counterparts who graduated from
the University of Maryland, and that attending a private
high school didn't appear to make a
difference in determining future financial success because
many of those surveyed graduated from
public high schools. A likely explanation for the higher
salaries, Kelly-Cline said, is that more Johns
Hopkins alumni go on to earn advanced degrees than do
Maryland alumni.
Kelly-Clyne then went beyond the simple question posed
by his dad to look deeper into the data
he had gathered. Beyond the question of public versus
private education, the survey results suggest
that the level of parental education might be a better
indicator of a student's future financial
success.
"A factor that did not change across comparisons of
Johns Hopkins and the University of
Maryland populations was a higher degree of JHU graduates'
parental education, no matter what the
parental income level," Kelly-Clyne said. "This may mean
that JHU graduates hailed from families that
looked at education in a different way than UMD graduates'
families," he said. "JHU's family
population may have viewed college as a starting point on a
long road of educational experiences rather
than the final destination. Johns Hopkins may attract a
population of specific students who are
motivated toward extended graduate education in preparation
for careers as professionals, as
evidenced by very high rates of graduates who became
professionals."
He also looked at family income. Even if his or her
household had less money, a Johns Hopkins
alum is likely to earn more than a comparable student at
the University of Maryland. "Johns Hopkins
graduates whose parents made under $70,000 per year still
proved to attend graduate school at
higher rates and earn higher incomes — from their
first job to their present position — than their UMD
counterparts," Kelly-Clyne said. "On the other hand,
wealthier University of Maryland graduates —
those whose families made over $90,000 per year or who had
paid higher out-of-state tuition — still
attended graduate school at lower rates and earned lower
salaries."
All of those factors aside, Kelly-Clyne noted that one
that's hard to quantify might carry the
most weight: the power of peer influence among Johns
Hopkins students, many of whom are involved in
multiple extracurricular activities and academic endeavors
like PURA projects, and doing them all
really well.
"Twenty percent of JHU graduates [surveyed] currently
make over $140,000 per year, while
only 2 percent of UMD graduates [surveyed] make that much,"
he said. "JHU parents achieved
graduate education at a rate that is about 8 percent higher
than UMD parents. It is unlikely that such
a large income disparity is totally attributable to an 8
percent edge in parents' graduate education," he
said. "In this case, it is not unreasonable to consider the
power of peer influence. High-achieving
students, whether wealthy or not, set in a school with a
large number of wealthy students from highly
educated families may very well channel talents in
different, more profitable directions."
— Amy Lunday

The goal: Compose a 21st-century
opera

William Hays took an
interdisciplinary approach to studying opera under the
guidance of Hollis Robbins, who teaches in Peabody's
Humanities Department.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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On the way to writing a 21st-century opera, one young
composer's path has led, so far, from
Georgia to Maryland to East Anglia.
William Hays, of Flintstone, Ga. (on the Tennessee
border), came to the
Peabody Conservatory
in 2006 as an undergraduate composition major. During his
first two years, he studied with
Christopher Theofanidis, writing a piece for chorus and
several works of chamber music. Toward the
end of his sophomore year, he began to wonder if there
might be an opera in his future.
The title of the project for which Hays received a
PURA grant is "The State of Modern Opera:
A Technical Examination and Cultural Investigation." His
faculty sponsor is Hollis Robbins, who teaches
in the Humanities Department at Peabody. His main
composition teacher is now Michael Hersch.
(Theofanidis joined Yale's composition faculty last
fall.)
Hays' research had several goals, one being to serve
as a springboard for his first opera.
Another was, as he wrote in the proposal, "To familiarize
myself with the relationship of opera to
society, which includes the function of opera in culture,
opera's impact on culture, and culture's
evolving expectation and reception of opera."
This interdisciplinary approach is what Peabody
humanities classes are meant to encourage, says
Robbins, a Johns Hopkins alumna who earned a master's
degree in public policy at Harvard and a
doctorate in English at Princeton. Hays took her class
20th-Century Aesthetics and Politics in his
freshman year.
Robbins says she has been pleased to find that Peabody
students "are really interested in the
larger political questions of their lives as musicians." In
connection with Hays' project, she points out,
"Simplicity as an economic aesthetic is the story of the
20th century, not just in opera but in
everything else."
Hays says that his historical research gave him a new
appreciation for the chamber operas of
British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), who
essentially invented the genre. "Opera had grown
to a point where it was just blocked," he said. Until
Britten, "no one had considered how to tell a story
with as few people as possible."
Last summer, instead of traveling to the Glyndebourne
Festival in England to hear the premiere
of Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos' Love and Other Demons,
Hays decided to visit the archive at the
Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh, East Anglia, where
Britten started the Aldeburgh Festival in
1948. (Britten's chamber opera Albert Herring, which
was premiered at Glyndebourne in 1947, will be
performed by Baltimore's Opera Vivente next month.)
Hays also studied scores and recordings of more recent
operas, such as Powder Her Face by
Thomas Ades (b. 1971), about the scandalous behavior of
Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, in the
early 1960s, and Little Women by Mark Adamo (b.
1962), inspired by the Louisa May Alcott novel. Both
were written in the 1990s.
He credits Roger Brunyate, director of Opera Programs,
with making a home at Peabody for
modern opera, including new works. Hays attended Peabody
Chamber Opera's spring productions at
Theatre Project in 2007 (The Rape of Lucretia by
Britten) and 2008 (The Yellow Wallpaper by
Catherine Reid). This year's production, Dora by
Melissa Shiflett and Nancy Fales Garrett, based on
one of Freud's famous cases, will be presented April 23 to
26.
These days, Hays often asks himself, Would that make a
good opera? Choosing a subject will be
the next major step on the multiyear journey that his PURA
grant has helped to advance.
— Richard Selden

The goal: Find out why chemo fails in some melanoma
patients

Jaeyoon Chung worked with faculty
sponsor Rhoda Alani to help researchers better understand
why traditional chemotherapies fail in some melanoma
patients.
Photo by Will Kirk / HIPS
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Jaeyoon Chung, a senior from Okemos, Mich., is
conducting research that promises to help
clinicians and researchers better understand why
traditional chemotherapies fail in some patients
with melanoma, a disease that kills about 8,000 Americans
each year.
Chung, a molecular
and cellular biology major, used a PURA to work under
the tutelage of Rhoda
Alani of the School of Medicine to investigate the role
that a gene called TRB3 may play in that
scenario.
"In the lab, I noticed that this gene was expressed in
a much lower amount during the
metastatic phase of melanoma, when the cancer is spreading
and becoming more deadly," said Chung,
who plans a career in some aspect of medicine. "This
suggested to us that the gene might provide an
important protective function to the normal human cells
that become malignant in melanoma."
To test his hypothesis, Chung and Alani created a
metastatic melanoma cell line that expressed
elevated levels of TRB3. They found that adding TRB3 to
melanoma cells did, indeed, slow down the
cancer's growth. "Though this doesn't necessarily prove
that TRB3 inhibits the proliferation of
melanoma," Chung cautioned.
But it's a good start, according to Alani, his
mentor.
"The expectation is that these studies will eventually
help us to better understand why
traditional chemotherapies fail in patients with melanoma
and what the molecular pathways are that
may be manipulated in order to achieve better responses to
treatment in patients with advanced
melanoma," she said. "Jae is extremely dedicated to this
important project and is passionate about his
work."
— Lisa De Nike

The goal: Understand the Fifth Amendment's 'takings
clause'

Wesley Sudduth, who's now studying
abroad and was photographed in Spain, took a Constitutional
Law class at Homewood that led to research on eminent
domain.
Photo courtesy of Wesley
Sudduth
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Wesley Sudduth didn't know much about eminent domain
or the Fifth Amendment's "takings
clause" until he took Joel Grossman's two-semester
Constitutional Law class. His interest piqued, and
with Grossman on board as his faculty sponsor, Sudduth
applied for PURA funding for an in-depth
study on the history of such cases in the American courts
since the 19th century.
The project unexpectedly led him to a familiar place:
Michigan, where his family moved in 2001.
"I started researching the topic and realized that one
of the most important fronts in the legal
interpretation of eminent domain had taken place not only
in my home state but in an adjacent county
to mine," said Sudduth, a junior majoring in international
relations and
economics. "So one way to look
at this project was as a chance to learn more about
something pertinent nationwide that took place in
my own backyard."
In 2004, the Michigan Supreme Court, in the case of
County of Wayne v. Hathcock, ruled in
favor of private property owners.
A similar case in Connecticut, Kelo v. City of New
London, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court in 2005. In that case, the court went in the opposite
direction, deciding in favor of the city's
plan to rejuvenate an aging area by seizing private
properties, ruling that it amounted to a permissible
public purpose and was valid under the public use
requirement of the Fifth Amendment.
Studied side by side, the cases illustrate how the
"takings clause" has been broadly interpreted
and reinterpreted since its creation, Sudduth said.
"Put very simply, Kelo was a U.S. Supreme Court case
in which the majority made a ruling based
on a relatively broad interpretation of eminent domain
powers," Sudduth said. "At the same time, this
majority stated that it made its ruling based on legal
precedent, and that individual states have the
freedom to tighten controls on eminent domain powers if
they desired.
"My research question was to figure out where one such
state supreme court ruling fit into all
of this — in this case, the Michigan Supreme Court's
decision in Hathcock, which had taken place
shortly before Kelo," he said. "My analysis was that,
despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court did
not follow the strict interpretation of Hathcock, Hathcock
retained its importance in the current
debate over eminent domain powers because it became in
effect a template that other state courts
could use if they, too, wanted to strictly interpret the
eminent domain clauses found in their own
state constitutions rather than follow Kelo's line of
reasoning."
Based on his research, Sudduth said he thinks that the
era of municipalities' broad
interpretation of the takings clause could be waning after
its heyday in the early 20th century with a
boom in development zoning laws.
"It is quite possible that this sort of broad
interpretation has hit its high-water mark on a
state-to-state basis," Sudduth said. "Many state
legislatures have created or are creating new laws
that narrow their government's eminent domain powers. In
tandem, many state supreme courts are
reinterpreting eminent domain powers more strictly. Most of
this tendency, especially on the part of
lawmakers, has occurred as a direct result of the
high-profile controversy that surrounded Kelo and
increasing public awareness of the issue."
Sudduth learned about the PURA program as a freshman,
when it was presented as one of the
many research opportunities on campus, "especially for
undergraduates in the social sciences and
humanities, who might sometimes feel like their majors get
the short end of the stick when it comes
to research."
He said that he had always planned on doing research
during his time here, "but it took some
time to discover my interests and develop my research
skills — and I think that that is a good thing,"
Sudduth said. For future PURA scholars, his advice from the
field is to "perhaps look for something of
nationwide interest that took place where you are currently
residing. That way, you learn more about
your area or your 'roots.' More practically, you already
have a system set up that makes doing research
easier, like a place to stay, a local phone number and,
most important, contacts with local researchers
and scholars and experts in the topic."
— Amy Lunday

The 16th Annual PURA Ceremony
See What They Found Out...
To recognize the recipients of the 2008 Provost's Undergraduate Research Awards,
an event
will be held on Thursday, April 9, in Homewood's Glass
Pavilion.
A poster session in which students will have an
opportunity to display the results of their
research begins at 3 p.m.
At the 4:30 p.m. recognition ceremony hosted by Scott
Zeger, acting provost and senior vice
president for academic affairs, the honorees will be
introduced by Theodore Poehler, chair of the
selection committee.
Zeger will present the students' certificates, and
PURA recipients Rebecca Orchard and Lisa
Rosinsky will perform. Orchard will play a short piece by
Gliere on the horn, and Rosinsky will read
poetry in a range of styles and play recordings by a
variety of poets, from W.B. Yeats to Robert Frost.
A reception will follow at approximately 5:15 p.m. The
entire Johns Hopkins community is
invited.
GO TO
PROVOST'S UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AWARDS RECIPIENTS
GO TO APRIL 6, 2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
GO TO THE GAZETTE
FRONT PAGE.
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