Contact: Seth Meisel
(262) 472-5150
meisels@uww.edu
WHITEWATER After months of hard work and research, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater summer undergraduate research program came to a close last Thursday, when student researchers presented their findings at undergraduate research day.
Christine Clements, interim provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, opened the event by thanking the faculty and staff who spent their summer working with students and then went on to congratulate the students for their accomplishments. “It speaks well to our future that we have people like you developing these skills,” she said.
At undergraduate research day, student researchers went through their research process and results with attendees. Throughout the day, 12 research projects were presented, six oral presentations and six posters, with topics ranging from sustainable farming to microfinance to the effects of drugs on the environment.
Kyle Butzine of Lake Mills and Jasmine Crafton of Milwaukee spent the summer researching the effects of caffeine and ibuprofen on Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant. Butzine found that in the early stages of plant growth, caffeine had a negative effect, but only at high levels. Crafton looked at the later stages of growth and found that caffeine was beneficial to flower and leaf development but ibuprofen had a negative effect.
“Growing the plants was our biggest challenge. They took forever to grow,” Butzine said.
James Fietzer of Madison researched the effects of triclocarban, a chemical in hand sanitizer, and caffeine on Gammarus pseudolimnaeus, a type of freshwater shrimp. He found the levels of caffeine in the environment to be non-lethal, but the levels of triclocarban found in surface water were lethal. For the most part things went smoothly for Fietzer, but he did hit a snag when all of the shrimp in his control group died unexpectedly in one experiment.
“Doing research this summer was awesome,” Butzine said. “You learn about this stuff in class but to actually be able to apply the methods helps you understand them and because of the Merck grant it¹s a real life problem and we¹re researchers on it, which is pretty awesome.”
