Student-Faculty Research Is Going Strong at Vassar

Deep cuts in government funding for scientific research forced many colleges to curtail or even eliminate summer research programs, but this has not been the case at Vassar. The College’s Undergraduate Research Summer Institute (URSI) and Ford Scholars Program ran right on schedule, allowing more than 100 students and faculty members to pursue collaborative research projects in a wide variety of disciplines.

“What we do at Vassar that very few places do is to provide hands-on opportunities for actually touching the data as an undergraduate,” said Abigail Baird ’91, Professor of Psychological Science on the Arnhold Family Chair, herself a former URSI student researcher who went on to earn a PhD at Harvard. “The irony is that a small liberal arts college continues to provide top-tier training and is preparing students to be in the laboratory at a time when so many larger research institutions have been forced to reduce or eliminate student positions.”

Vassar programs remain strong because they are supported by a host of private foundations, endowments from alums, faculty grants, and other independent donations. Read on for a sampling of the projects.

At the annual fall URSI fall symposium, researchers Isaac Rudnick ’26, Nicholas Misko ’27, Isabelle Borgstedt ’26, and James Hatch ’26 displayed an arm they are in the process of building and programming to act like a human arm, with mentorship by Professor of Cognitive Science Ken Livingston. Rudnick, who began working on the project during the 2024 URSI program, noted that recognizing a voice-activated request and knowing exactly how to respond is highly complex. He valued the opportunity to delve deeply into the project over the past two summers. “I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to focus on this single project,” he said. “All of us involved in the project enjoyed doing work you just don’t get to do during regular school time.”

Launched in 2019 by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Professor of Hispanic Studies on the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair, this ambitious project has involved translating more than 6,000 pages of text written by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557), commonly known as Oviedo, a Spanish soldier, historian, writer, botanist, and colonist. More than 200 Vassar students have taken part in the project, including five Ford Scholars.

La Natural Hystoria de las Indias describes the lives of the colonized people, flora, and fauna of the region. It had never been fully translated into English until Paravisini-Gebert undertook the project in collaboration with Michael Aronna, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies. “It’s been a challenging project because we are really working with three languages—16th-century Spanish, modern Spanish, and modern English,” said Lilli Palmer ’27, the Ford Scholar who took part in the project this year. The first volume of the translated text will be published later this year—in time to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the completion of Oviedo’s work in 1526.

Moose play an important role in local tourism—but more importantly, they play a unique ecological role in these forests. As temperatures rise and less snow and cold weather dominate the regions they call home, moose in the northeastern United States and Canada face many challenges. Their food supplies are becoming patchier, parasites are more prevalent, and a rising abundance of predators such as coyotes and black bears pose a threat to newborn calves.

URSI student Otis Wildman ’26 and Associate Professor of Biology Lynn Christenson spent the summer evaluating how climate change is affecting the moose population at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, a 7,800-acre northern hardwood forest located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. On the trip, they monitored cameras that captured the movements of moose and other wildlife. When he returned to Vassar, Wildman used specially designed software to map and analyze the data. “My experience was really useful and let me gain some insight from professionals in the field,” he said.

Take a peek into their research.

The Hudson River serves as a source of drinking water for some Hudson Valley residents and as a haven for fishing and other activities for both residents and visitors from New York City to Troy. This summer, URSI students Paloma Oteiza ’26 and Jordan Alch ’26 spent a day cruising up the Hudson from Ossining to Poughkeepsie on a boat operated by Riverkeeper. This environmental organization monitors water quality and habitat in and along the river and its tributaries and assesses the impact of climate change on the river’s ecology.

The students analyzed water samples they collected in a lab back at the College, assessing the prevalence of phosphates, which can serve as key indicators of the river’s health. “Phosphates are present in rocks and plants in the water,” Oteiza explained. Too much can indicate the presence of sewage and other pollutants in the river, while too little can also signal other threats to the river’s ecology. The research showed that the levels have not changed significantly since a previous study was conducted about 30 years ago. “I really enjoyed getting out in the community and meeting people who live along the river who are affected by its ecology,” she said. “This summer’s experience was a combination of scientific research and community interaction.”

Faculty mentors for the project were Assistant Professor of Earth Science and Environmental Studies Deon Knights and Associate Professor of Biology Justin Touchon. Both said they had been impressed with their students’ independence in completing the project. “The students were pretty autonomous, and we gathered a lot of good data,” Knights said.

Four students worked with Assistant Professor of Psychological Science Rebecca Peretz-Lange to see how parents and other caregivers might be able to leverage young children’s natural aversion to anything “unfair” to help them recognize structural inequalities in society. They also sought to understand kids’ reasoning about why various groups are in different social positions, since kids often wrongly assume that marginalized groups must be internally inferior (rather than externally disadvantaged), an assumption which can foster prejudice. “Oftentimes they come up with explanations on their own, and we don’t realize it,” explained Sam Vandyck ’27, a member of the project team. “We know from past research that kids view inequalities as deserved and something that the person was born with, or it’s their fault. They don’t see the structural reasons for inequalities.”

As an example, team member Asiyah Abbas ’27 said, “All U.S presidents have been men and none have been women. So why is that? Most of it’s because of voter bias and a lot of barriers for women to get into fields like politics. But a child would immediately jump to inborn qualities [of women] and think that this discrepancy is fair, which it obviously is not,” Abbas said.

With the help of a cartoon game-based experiment designed by Peretz-Lange, the students met with hundreds of 5- to 10-year-olds in person and over Zoom to understand their reasoning about fairness. No matter how the research turns out, Peretz-Lange said, the mixed group of student-scientists are already changing the face of the profession for children, who often see science as a male profession—that can discourage girls from wanting to pursue science.

Abigail Baird ’91, Professor of Psychological Science on the Arnhold Family Chair, and Jannay Morrow, Associate Professor of Psychological Science, decided to have their five URSI researchers delve into empathy after a challenging academic year in which they saw many students struggling to stay focused on schoolwork while helping friends with wrenching issues. “We were all interested in knowing more about what might make people better able to engage with others compassionately,” said Morrow.

“Basically, we asked ourselves: What psychological resources or strategies can people turn to that would allow them to be more compassionate, especially when they are dealing with many stressors or challenges in their lives?” They asked their URSI students to take that concept and run with it.

Madeline Busam ’26 became intrigued by “self-concept clarity”—the extent to which an individual’s beliefs about themself are clearly and confidently defined. With her professors’ help, Busam designed a survey to measure self-concept clarity and its potential correlation with compassion burnout, recruiting about 300 adult participants through the data site prolific.com.

“We’ve definitely found some stuff that correlates with what I have predicted: That having a higher level of self-concept clarity is going to lead to greater well-being and less compassion fatigue,” said Busam. Baird said she and Morrow will continue to work with Busam, who is one of at least two students in this group likely to be able to publish their studies. “She’s going to see it all the way through with not one but two professors supporting her as an undergraduate, and that’s a wonderfully unusual setup,” Baird said.

“It’s been very helpful and eye-opening for what I want to do after Vassar,” said Busam, who is considering pursuing psychological science in grad school. “I think I’ve been able to get a lot of skills out of it that I wouldn’t have gotten at a big school where your professor might not even know your name. Being able to work on this small a scale, one-on-one, has been really amazing.”

Every year, dozens of players in the National Basketball Association decide to opt out of their existing contracts in search of a better deal or a deal with a team more likely to win a championship. How often do such gambles pay off? That was the task Ford Scholar Aneesh Koppolu ’27 and Associate Professor of Economics Qi Ge set out to explore this summer. The duo finished the Ford Scholars project with a comprehensive data set on players’ salaries and team-level transactions.

Koppolu, who will continue analyzing the actual outcomes of the players’ gambles during the academic year, said collaborating on a single project with a faculty mentor was an enlightening experience. “It was like I was at one end of a maze and he was at the other, and while he tried to guide me, I had to make a lot of decisions on my own because he couldn’t see what I was seeing.”

Said Ge, “This was truly a collaborative effort, and [Koppolu’s] liberal arts training helped him deal with the challenges he faced independently and iron out most issues himself.” These are abilities that will serve Koppolu well in his post-Vassar life, his mentor predicted.

—Larry Hertz and Kimberly Schaye