Celebrating the Research Process

The awards ceremony featured criminal justice and sociology double major Kaylin Coe ’20 as the keynote speaker, who shared how the undergraduate research process at MBU has been instrumental to her continuing success in graduate school at the University of Cincinnati. 

“Going through the research process at Mary Baldwin, I learned that asking a ton of questions was perfectly OK,” Coe said. “Messing up was perfectly OK. I learned to utilize my support system to get advice when I was unsure … I believe wholeheartedly in the phrase ‘trust the process.’ I think that it is important to keep in mind the journey you take will teach you how to get better.”

Co-chairs of the Capstone Festival Calvin Chung, assistant professor of business, and Beth Easterling, associate professor of criminal justice and sociology, introduced the faculty judges to announce and congratulate the following recipients of top honors. Several judges mentioned the competitiveness of the categories this year and the difficulty of making the final choice.

Two Awards: Papers I and Quantitative 

Elyse Levens, A Mass Cytometry Application of a Community Structure Generating Algorithm Derived from a Combination of Leiden and Girvan-Newman Methods

Papers II

Kylie Stottlemyer, Understanding the Complexity of Community Policing and the Implementation when Assisting Victims

Posters

Jessica Balough, Photocatalytic Degradation of Bisphenol-F by Hydrogen Peroxide

Artistic Portfolio

Felicia Maziarz, There’s an Armadillo in my Living Room

Award recipient in two top honors categories Elyse Levens ’21 knew she wanted to explore three areas of research for her thesis: applied math, physics, and biology. It was just a matter of finding a way to connect them all.

“It feels amazing to have my work appreciated after all of the time and effort I’ve put into it,” Levens said. “I’m incredibly happy that I was able to construct and design my thesis in a way that satisfied my intellectual curiosity — it was a lot of fun once I got going.” 

Levens will continue to build her abilities in relaying complex concepts and advocating for the importance of research as she enters a PhD program in biomedical engineering at the University of Oxford this fall.

Looking forward to the next academic year at MBU, the ABV Capstone Fellowship awards support juniors who will embark upon 2021-22 research projects, and those recipients are:

• Haley Schwarz, biology
• Madison Kelly, biology
• Brionny Brown, biology with a biomedical emphasis
• Stella Maris Remigio, biology with a biomedical emphasis
• Katherine Keegan, applied mathematics 

The faculty judges for Capstone were: William Cundiff, David Black, Peter Ruiz-Haas, Molly Serement, Pam Stevenson, Ellen Lucius, Lise Keiter, Christina Harris, Janet Ewing, and Robin Hopkins. 

Thank you to the members of MBU’s Advisory Board of Visitors for their generous sponsorship of this year’s festival: Cynthia Burnett, Dr. Leigh Frame, Chuck Henck, Mark Journell, Mark LaRosa, Brian McReynolds, Kathryn Gravely Melo, Daniel O. Connor, Mary Satterfield, and Glenda Western.