Twenty-two Informatics students showcased their research at the . Held on May 16, the event – titled “Take Flight!” -- featured five poster sessions, three oral presentation sessions, a performing arts showcase and one visual arts and design presentation. With over 1,500 participants, the symposium celebrated the diverse research disciplines of students across the three UW campuses.
For Informatics students presenting, the symposium is an opportunity to showcase the work they have been doing outside of the classroom. Informatics encourages interdisciplinary research, allowing students to apply their iSchool background to various fields.
Senior Anahi Villanueva combined her studies in Informatics and Psychology in her project, “Stress or Pharmacological Activation of the Kappa Opioid Receptor Modulates Both Serotonin and Dopamine Levels in the Nucleus Accumbens.” Her research examined how stress affects reward-seeking behaviors, increasing the likelihood of relapse for individuals with substance use disorder.
Another iSchool student combining Informatics and Psychology is junior Jenny Speelmon. With interests in multiple disciplines, she presented two separate projects at the symposium.
“I wanted to combine the two majors together because after taking INFO 300: Research Methods, I knew that there were so many more complex topics I could be learning,” Speelmon said.
Her first poster presentation, “Examining the Local Business Landscape: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of King County Businesses & Community Impacts,” examined the scope of commercial gentrification in Seattle.
Speelmon’s other project, “How Years of Teaching Experience Influence the Success of Evidence-Based Practices in the Classroom,” analyzed how teaching experience and attitudes affect the effectiveness of educational methods.
“I had taken a lot of classes on human-computer interaction with the iSchool and worked with kids a lot, so I thought education could be the next parallel that I could dive into,” she said.
Many iSchool students emphasized the role of coding and working with datasets in their research, attributing their skills to their INFO classes.
Junior Simran Gupta is an dual Informatics and Biology major who is interested in bioinformatics. This year was her third time presenting at the symposium. She used R studio for her project, “The Effects of Diet, Habitat, & Climate on Primate and Carnivoran Mandibular Evolution,” a continuation of her research from last year with the Burke Museum.
“I really like research. It really taught me how to apply BIO and INFO outside of the classroom,” Gupta said.
Senior Celestine Le is another iSchool student who presented multiple projects at the symposium. During the oral presentation session Archiving Narratives of Race and Change, she presented her research, “Seeking Sustenance: Designing a Repository for Storytelling Objects in the Vietnamese Diaspora.” She described how she used design research methodology to create a digital archive for storytelling objects in the Vietnamese diaspora.
“The past few years, I have been interested in understanding how information technologies interact with the ways we perceive our lived experiences, identities and sense of self,” Le said.
Later in the day, Le participated in a poster session with senior Informatics student Nandita Raman for their research project, “Typology of Five Alt-Tech Platforms’ Policies,” which explores how alternative-technology platforms such as Telegram and Truth Social have become misinformation hubs, contributing to distrust in governments and tech companies.
The pair were drawn to the project — born through the iSchool’s Center for an Informed Public, — after seeing the impact of misinformation circulating online and the results of the presidential election. Their goal was to highlight what is occurring on these platforms to contribute to the conversation around how misinformation is spread online.
“We need to do more to understand what these communities are thinking and how this misinformation comes to be,” Le said. “Rather than just approaching it only from the angle of rapid response, we want to approach it from other ways to understand how these communities are coming to spread this type of misinformation in the first place and how they are organizing on these platforms.”
Throughout the daylong event, Informatics students presented on a variety of topics including the nature of cyberbullying toward the transgender community, diversity audits of AI systems, and government cloning conspiracies.
The Undergraduate Research Symposium gives students a unique chance to present their projects alongside peers from various degrees and disciplines. It presents a forum to celebrate and recognize the impact of student research.
“I was just really proud of the research we had been doing, so it was a good opportunity,” Anahi Villanueva said.
The symposium also featured presentations and poster session from the following iSchool students:
- Hoda Ayad and Kaylee Cho, Tweets of a Native Son: James Baldwin in the Digital Age
- Eloise Hou, Direct Observations of Cell Motility Under Controlled Experimental Perturbations
- Alouna Hoxha, Archiving and Digitizing Black Grandmothers Worldmaking
- Yuanxi Li, The Extent and Nature of Cyberbullying Towards Transgender in Emerging Adulthood
- Stephanie Ren, Understanding Enslaved Childhoods Through Toys
- Ndeye Diop, Auditing Diversity in LLM (Language Learning Models) and TTI (Text-to-Image) Systems (pictured at top)
- Marisa C Johnson, Civil Discourse Project: Leveraging Identity-Based Factors for Inclusion and Cultural Responsiveness in Undergraduate Discourse Spaces
- Iris Hamilton, Development and Validation of an Arthritis-Detection Algorithm Using Thermal Imaging in Adults and Children​ and Potential Usage in Telehealth
- Amelia Li, Accelerometer-Based Machine Learning Classifier Using Wireless Implantable Devices to Understand Animal Behavioral States
- Nandita Raman, Typology of Five Alt-Tech Platforms’ Policies
- Madhumitha Sridhar, Enhancing Synthetic Bone Findings for CT Imaging Through Prompt Tuning
- Aileen Kuang, Rethinking the Cyborg Through Blade Runner
- Arushi Argarwal, Transforming Historical Texts into Data: Network Analysis of Medical Practices in 19th Century Ottoman Iraq
- Nathan Chen, Integrating Polygenic Risk Scores and Wearable Data to Model Depression Severity and Genetic-Behavioral Interactions in Youth
- Taylor Ruthann Hansen, Evaluating Seattle’s Surveillance Technology Pilot
- Pranathi Kesapragada, Long-Term in vitro Exposure of T. pallidum to Doxycycline to Assess Development of Antibiotic Resistance
- Hannah Phanitchob, The Government is Doing WHAT?: "Websploring" Perspectives on Cloning, Conspiracy, and the More-Than-Human World