Southern Miss McNair Scholars Program Announces 2024 Participants
Wed, 07/31/2024 - 08:06am | By: David Tisdale
Twelve University of Southern Mississippi (USM) undergraduates have been chosen for the prestigious McNair Scholars Program at Southern Miss.
Officially known as The Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, the McNair Scholars Program is a federal TRIO program funded across the United States and Puerto Rico by the U.S. Department of Education. Scholars selected to the program come from disadvantaged backgrounds and demonstrate strong academic potential.
Competitive grant funding is awarded to institutions of higher education to prepare eligible participants in the program for doctoral studies through involvement in research and other scholarly activities. Institutions encourage participants to enroll in graduate programs and then track their progress through to the successful completion of advanced degrees with an overall goal to increase the attainment of Ph.D. degrees by students from underrepresented segments of society. Since the program’s inception in 1999, Southern Miss has assisted more than 200 scholars.
“We are thrilled to have an exceptionally talented group of undergraduate researchers this year,” said Dr. Daleana Phillips, director of the USM McNair Scholars Program. “Many are participating in conferences, research symposiums, researching in labs, and even traveling offsite to conduct research, all while researching graduate schools and programs of interest.”
For Dr. Phillips, the most exciting part of working with McNair scholars is watching the individuals and their skills as researchers evolve. “I enjoy seeing them present their work at our McNair Research Symposium, and then share their excitement about securing assistantships, fellowships, and other types of funding for their chosen graduate programs.
“Seeing them move on to pursue their dreams is truly inspiring and rewarding to me.”
The 2024 Southern Miss McNair Scholars include:
Kalan Bledsoe from Batesville, Miss., sophomore psychology major
“The Impact of Mental Health on Academic Achievement in African American Men”
Bledsoe is working under the advisement of Dr. Karen Kozlowski in the School of Social Science and Global Studies. Her McNair research explores the association between mental health and education with a particular focus on African American men, an especially marginalized group in the U.S. with one of the lowest degree completion rates; with this in mind, it is important to recognize the role stigma and their amplified challenges with masculinity play in occasionally ignoring mental health struggles. Thus, finding the right interventions to make their experiences in school more comfortable and productive, hence analyzing this interaction, holds significance.
Kyle Brown from Long Beach, Miss., junior computer science major
“Using Neural Networks to Predict Suicide Risk in Youth”
Brown’s McNair Research looks to create a Deep Learning model to predict the risk of suicide in high school students using survey data from the CDC's 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS). Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among this age group. Additionally, Brown plans to seek assessment of this system's apparent relevance from a medical professional. He is working under the advisement of Professor Joe Zhang in the School of Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering.
Margaret Brune from Ocean Springs, Miss., sophomore mathematics and physics
“The Kite Configuration of the 4-Body Problem with Two Pairs of Equal Masses”
Brune’s research explores the infamous N-Body Problem in physics, which predicts the individual motions of a group of celestial objects interacting with each other gravitationally. The number of solutions, or variations of successful celestial orbits, is known for the 2-body, 3-body, and 4-body cases. Under the advisement of Dr. Zhifu Xie in the School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Brune will use mathematics and computing to find the exact number of solutions for a specific configuration of five orbital bodies.
Astrid Gomez from Hattiesburg, Miss., sophomore biology (biochemistry) major
“Further Characterization of Antimicrobial Peptides in Apis Mellifera”
Gomez’s McNair research explores the innate immune responses of honeybees when exposed to certain pathogens to see if the response (the AMPs) can be isolated and tested on diseases/bacteria like E. coli or fungus known to affect humans. Working under the advisement of Dr. Shahis Karim in the School of Biological, Environmental, and Earth Sciences, this research can help advance mechanisms for tackling various human illnesses.
Jaylin Jones from Clarksdale, Miss., senior English major,
“‘Call Us Alive Someplace Better’: Black Imagined Afterlives and the Contemporary Significance of Black Undeath”
Jones’ research analyzes the speculative afterlives created and occupied by Black individuals in fiction and poetry from contemporary African American authors. With a focus on paradisiacal and trauma-locked afterlives, this study aims to understand the Black community's engagement with grief and connect the literary representation of racial violence to real-life concepts such as racism-induced allostatic load and the hyper-masculinization of Black males.
Marcus Kirkland from Ocean Springs, Miss., sophomore marketing major
“Consumer Activism: An In-depth Examination of Motivations and Practices Among College Students”
Kirkland is advised by Dr. Ayse Banu Elmadag Bad in the School of Marketing. This research aims to explore the dynamic between brand actions and consumer perceptions, especially regarding sociopolitical factors that may create discrepancies between certain brands and their consumer base. He intends to investigate the motivations behind consumer engagement with activist movements such as Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and LGBTQ Rights, while also highlighting corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Through interviews with college students, they seek to uncover insights into modern activism's drivers and its influence on brand-consumer relationships, particularly within the realm of social media discourse.
Drew Le from Hattiesburg, Miss., junior sociology and psychology
“Culturally Relevant or Cultural Cover: Evaluating ACUE’s Fostering a Culture of Belonging”
Le is working under the advisement of Dr. Karen Kozlowski and Dr. Jessica Valles in the School of Social Science and Global Studies on research evaluating implementation of DEI initiatives in academia, namely analyzing the Association of College and University Educator's (ACUE) Fostering a Culture of Belonging (FCB) diversity training course via Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), to understand whether it makes a difference in faculty attitudes and behavior, and if that translates to positive student outcomes.
Keimirra Lewis, Hattiesburg, Miss., junior public health (health education) major
“Evaluating Opioid Overdose Rates in Mississippi and the Impact of Opioid Prescription Patterns: An Analysis of Contributing Factors to the Opioid Epidemic in the State”
Lewis is working under the advisement of Traci Hayes in the School of Health Professions. Due to the recent peak in the use of various weight loss drugs, Lewis will study the effects of these drugs on health and mental health of patients.
Teyanna Monroe from Vicksburg, Miss., sophomore biology (biochemistry) major
“Synthesis of Piperidine Heterocycles with Specific Functional Groups”
Monroe works under the advisement of Dr. Matthew Donahue, with her McNair research focused on the synthesis of a nitrogen heterocycle called piperidine using a cyclization reaction from readily available chemicals. This is a common starting point in the development of new small molecule drugs, with the research effort seeking to control the relationships of functional groups bonded to the piperidine ring.
Sadie Pitre from Poplarville, Miss., senior, chemistry (ACS-certified) major
“Utilizing WebMO in Undergraduate Laboratories to Introduce Computational Chemistry at USM”
Pitre is advised by Dr. Julie Pigza in the School of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Her work looks to incorporate the use of WebMO (a computational chemistry program) into undergraduate labs at USM. This involves personally performing the lab exercises and adjusting them as needed. Then, these labs will be administered to students taking organic chemistry, so they can compare the accuracy of the lab reports done alongside WebMO and without WebMO. Computational chemistry is a growing and significant subset of advanced chemistry, and this addition has immense potential for chemistry education at USM.
Rachel Wince from Hattiesburg, Miss., sophomore biology (biochemistry) major
“The Connection of Cognitive Function with Anxiety in College Students”
Wince works with Dr. Mark Huff in the School of Psychology. Her McNair research will focus on the difficulties one may experience with anxiety disorder, analyzing cognitive ability by measuring how someone with anxiety will function by taking memory tests, answering a questionnaire, and measuring their mental focus with other tests. They look to identify symptoms such as difficulties with concentration, inefficiency in processing information, or retaining new information as high levels of anxiety have been linked to impairments in these cognitive processes and more. After collecting data from research participants, they look to show anxiety’s impact based on race and age.
Liz Wynne from Madison, Miss., senior biological sciences major
“The Molecular Basis of Sex-ratio Meiotic Drive in Aedes aegypti”
Wynne is advised by Dr. Alex Flynt in the School of Biological, Environmental, and Earth Sciences. Sex chromosome meiotic drive in sexually reproducing organisms involves "selfish" sex-linked genes disrupting the transmission of reciprocal sex chromosomes, often causing unequal sex ratios. Research is limited on this topic, and Wynne’s collaborative study with Eric Lai lab at the Sloan Kettering Institute will examine similar pathways in the medically significant Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Utilizing computational pipelines to analyze RNA sequencing from mutant core RNAi knockout Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which lack the ability to produce hpRNAs, they seek to understand the consequences of depressed selfish sex-linked genes in male germlines.
The McNair Scholars Program is named for the late Dr. Ronald McNair, a former NASA astronaut who earned his Ph.D. in laser physics; in 1984, he became the second African American to fly in space. Two years later, he was selected to serve as mission specialist aboard the ill-fated U.S. Challenger space shuttle.
The McNair Scholars Program is housed in the USM Graduate School.