Rugby: A Mechanism for Global Diversification through Player Migration and the Displacement of Resources

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Heather Williams and Dr. Mikaela Dufur, Department of Sociology The purpose of our research was to discover the ethnic and racial patterns of migration in the professional levels of rugby. After collecting a sample of 1088 professional rugby players and compiling their statistics into our database, we performed cross-tabulations and ANOVA tests to identify if rugby players were […]

Millenniums and Messiahs: Literature Review in Messianic Religions in context of the Hmong Diaspora

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John Whitton and Dr. Jacob Hickman, Department of Anthropology Initially, the research proposed consisted of two sections constituting the last two semesters of my undergraduate education. The first included collecting published sources regarding millenarianism and messianism within the larger global context and organizing them into a database. The second included systematically cataloging each source in the database for […]

Understanding the Nature of Anxiety in Autism

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Sarah White and Dr. Mickle South, Department of Psychology Anxiety is extremely prevalent in autism, with estimates of the co-occurrence ranging up to 84%. Surprisingly, even though anxiety in autism is implicated in behavioral symptoms ranging from avoiding eye contact with others to always insisting on the same menu for lunch, the majority of research […]

Growth and Government Transfers

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Benjamin Tengelsen and Dr. Richard Evans, Department of Economics Government transfers to households take many forms, including unemployment benefits, food stamps, social security, and cash handouts to households to stimulate consumption. Generally, these transfer programs act as “automatic stabilizers” due to the way they naturally increase (decrease) when economies are weak (strong). Often policy-makers suggest increasing these programs beyond […]

Federalism Dataset

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Nicole Taylor and Dr. Joel Selway, Department of Political Science Comparative politics, the study of government structures around the world, is a relatively new field, and the study of federalism is even more recent. Studies are typically conducted by selecting two or three countries and comparing their government structures using qualitative measures or by studying a large sample […]

The Chinese Name for God: Preserving Unity in the Protestant Term Controversy 1847-1890

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Shayla Sturgess and Dr. Kirk Larsen, Department of History My project began as a supervision course for the Cambridge Direct Enrollment program. Although I initially had planned a project focused around Chinese history I was unable to find a supervisor with that area of expertise and therefore my project changed entirely from what I had […]

Dissociating the Influence of Associations from that of Interference in the Human Hippocampus

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Rick Stone and Dr. Brock Kirwan, Department of Psychology This project has been worked on for nearly a year and a half. It began because research done by others indicated that there was greater hippocampal activity for an associative memory task than for a non-associative memory task. We believe that the greater hippocampal activity they observed may have […]

Credibility and Accountability: The Effect of Publication on NGO Willingness to be Evaluated

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Megan Spencer and Dr. Michael Findley, Department of Political Science Abstract In today’s NGO environment, evaluations are frequent, but NGOs rarely have outsider expectations on which to base their assessments. Thus, NGOs have strong incentives to make their evaluations strictly contextual. Consequently, NGO stakeholders—donors, beneficiaries, and local government officials—have little information as to the quality of a given organization […]

Memory Processes in Pregnant Women

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Quentin Smith and Dr. Brock Kirwan, Department of Pyschology Pregnancy is a complicated biological process that is often accompanied by reported cognitive changes among pregnant women. Pregnant women commonly report diminished cognitive functioning during pregnancy, with “forgetfulness” and “a poor memory” as the most common complaints (Brett & Baxendale, 2001; Crawley, 2002). However, despite these […]

Role of Gap Junctions in Seizures

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Samuel Shin and Dr. Scott Steffensen, Department of Psychology Seizures are a disease that inflict millions with no reliable treatment or cure. One of the main difficulties behind treating seizures is the uncertainty behind the cause. In previous studies we performed we found that connexin-36 (Cx36) knockout (KO) mice may respond differently to stimuli that […]