On the Ground: A Sampling of Undergraduate Student Research

Genetics and plant biology majors Alyson Ennis and Kristen Poen worked with Benjamin Blackman, an assistant professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, on a project researching the solar tracking of sunflowers. The developing disks of sunflower plants move to face the sun throughout the day, but when the flowers bloom, they stop moving and face east. To begin to understand why, Blackman and the students grew many types of domesticated and wild sunflowers in the field, keeping track of their daily stem movements and where blooms faced when they matured.

Three undergraduates joined environmental science, policy, and management (ESPM) professor Celine Pallud’s lab to assist with research on the fern Pteris vittata’s ability to remove arsenic from soil by gathering the chemical into its fronds. Through their participation in field and greenhouse experiments, Kristen Chinn (conservation and resource studies and geology), Marcella Depunzio (environmental sciences), and Aizah Khurram (molecular environmental biology) gained experience in field-experiment design and setup, sampling soil and plant tissue, and preparing samples for laboratory analysis. Some of their soil sampling will help community organizations determine how a local vacant lot can be used for urban agriculture.

As part of the UC Berkeley Food Security Committee’s initiative to address food insecurity on campus, in spring 2016 the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology (NST) offered a new course on preparing healthful meals, taking into consideration student limitations like food availability, budget, and time. Sabrina Lee, an undergraduate in the dietetics specialization of the nutritional sciences major, worked with course instructors and the director of the dietetics program, Mikelle McCoin, on course implementation and an evaluation of the course’s impact on student skills, knowledge, and attitudes. Lee developed a research poster on the course and presented it at the California Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ annual meeting in Riverside.

In summer 2016, Marta Vuckovic and Hong Sik Yoo, postdoctoral research fellows in NST professor Joe Napoli’s lab, advised two undergraduates on research examining vitamin A metabolism and its relationship to energy metabolism in the context of obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Students Adrienne Rodriguez (microbial biology) and Emily Devericks (nutritional sciences - toxicology) learned about histology analysis and gene expression and received hands-on training in mouse-colony management and other techniques used in molecular biology and cell-culture research.

Jared O’Shaughnessy, a conservation and resource studies major, and Kevin Ong, an environmental sciences major, worked on a team led by agricultural and resource economics (ARE) professors Sofia Berto Villas-Boas and Peter Berck to analyze the efficacy and efficiency of California’s “Convenience Zones” for recycling centers, which were established as part of Governor Jerry Brown’s California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act. The students geo-coded the centers, then combined their data with zip code demographics and the volume capacity of each recycling center to inform the design of user surveys.

Twenty students joined ARE professor David Zilberman’s study of the 150 weather stations across California that have provided information for irrigation decisions in agricultural and urban settings since 1982. The group designed surveys, conducted interviews, and compiled user-feedback forms to analyze weather-station use and the resulting overall impact on water and energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Gaining real-world practice with survey design and implementation, the students also contributed to a growing body of literature on drought preparation that becomes increasingly important as the effects of climate change intensify.