Over the course of the past week, everyone presented and explained the research they’ve been doing this summer via a chalk talk. It was awesome to see not only the diverse array of topics and subject matter on the edge of science that everyone’s researching, but also how passionate everyone was about what they’re doing.
I was particularly interested in Rena’s talk on bugs as bioindicators. Although it doesn’t pertain to my research, my mentor before the summer started, Vardhman Kumar, did a project where he created a self healing soft robotic dragonfly named “DraBot” that also works to act as an indicator of environmental status. I thought that was a super awesome project, and Rena’s research felt like its predecessor, and perhaps some of her or her labs results may help develop the DraBot further.
I thought Rena’s presentation was comprehensive and her diagram of the river made her talk really easy to follow. I appreciated how she went one by one through the different locations and explained the implications of their environmental and urban surroundings and how that plays into her research. By framing her whole talk through the diagram, I was easily able to associate her hypothesis and methods with her overall question.
She also made her research seem super compelling by connecting it to broad topics like climate change and pollution which put her whole project into perspective. I think even a complete layperson would find her project interesting because she compares it to real-world issues and how they apply to her potential results. Overall, I was a big fan of her presentation and how simply she was able to put it.
