34th Annual UMBC McNair & Undergraduate Research National Conference

Choosing a graduate program is often reduced to rankings, funding packages, and program prestige, metrics that say little about whether a mentor or department will actually see, challenge, and sustain a scholar. This workshop introduces Holistic Critical Mentoring (HCM) as a dual-purpose tool: a practice framework for faculty seeking to deepen their mentoring relationships, and a decision-making compass for scholars evaluating graduate pathways. Participants will explore HCM's three pillars, Holistic Presence, Critical Curiosity, and Mentoring Reciprocity, and its five Core Commitments, then apply them directly. Faculty will identify concrete strategies for embedding HCM into everyday mentoring practice. Scholars will build a personal "HCM Compass" checklist they can use to interrogate prospective mentors, labs, and programs before committing to one. The session closes with faculty-scholar pairs exchanging insights across roles, reinforcing that HCM is strongest when practiced as a shared language rather than a one-directional obligation.

Wild bird feeding is one of the few instances in which humans are able to connect with nature, especially as bird biodiversity continues declining and urban human populations keep increasing. There is currently limited scientific literature regarding the safety of commercial wild bird feed. Consequently, the potential risks associated with pesticide residues remain unknown. As a result, this study aims to perform a pesticide multiresidue analysis on commercially sold bird feed.
Commercial bird seeds were bought from stores around Ithaca, New York. A total of N=68 bags from 23 products of bird seed were purchased. The seed types consisted of bird feed mixes(n=13), black oil sunflower seeds(n=14), and sunflower chips & hearts(n=15). Small samples from each bag were obtained for pesticide analysis.
Our study revealed that some wild bird feed has residues from one or more of the 95 pesticides studied in the Cornell Chemical Ecology Core Facility. Our preliminary analysis detected fungicides and insecticides across the samples, with the synergist piperonyl butoxide appearing in most. Our result showcases that commercial birdfeed can contain residues that may be harmful to wild birds.

In the present study, weinvestigated the role of Black psychological empowerment (BPE) and liberation in fostering sociopolitical development among Black youth impacted by community violence. This study developed a measure of BPE based on Black youths’ reports of empowerment, racial identity, and sociopolitical leadership, informed by a literature review. Data were derived from the Youth Voices program evaluation as part of the Healthy Communities for Youth study (Lozada et al., 2025). The Youth Voices program included 115 Black youth, ages 14–18, in 9th–12th grade from communities affected by community violence. A convergent triangulation mixed-methods design was utilized to establish a multidimensional measure of BPE, examine whether BPE predicts critical consciousness and sociopolitical development, and examine youths’ narratives. Exploratory factor analysis resulted in four factors: Awareness and Motivation for Community Engagement (α = .85), Collective Action Beliefs (α = .84), Positive Racial Identity (α = .82), and Positive Self-Esteem/Self-Concept (α = .82). Regression analyses indicated that Collective Action Beliefs negatively predicted critical action (β = -.31, SE = 0.11, p = .005). Positive racial identity did not predict perceived inequality (β = -.05, SE = 0.20, p = .818). These findings suggest that certain dimensions of BPE relate to sociopolitical development.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) are two neurodegenerative diseases, among others, characterized by protein aggregation, specifically TDP-43 aggregation. Primarily, TDP-43 is localized in the nucleus, but research suggests that individuals with ALS and FTD show nuclear depletion and cytoplasmic aggregation of TDP-43 as well as sleep defects. In vitro experiments indicate the formation of stress granules (SGs), which are molecules that form when the cell is under stress and which are marked by G3BP1 in human cells. However, the mechanistic role and cellular implications of stress granule formation with respect to sleep deprivation and TDP-43 aggregation have not been fully explored in vivo. Here we use p62, ATG8a, TDP-43, and tubulin to investigate lysosomal activity in the presence of stress granules using Drosophila and iPSCs from human neuronal cells. In Drosophila, we found that TDP-43 overexpression induces sleep loss, and when the formation of stress granules is inhibited by the G3BP1 homolog Raspurin, sleep loss occurs even earlier. In human cells, we observed that stress granules inhibit lysosomal activity, which then inhibits the breakdown of TDP-43 in the cytoplasm.

C. elegans are small, transparent nematode worms and are widely used as model organisms in biological research. Their utility stems from their simplicity and well-characterized biology. Most of the population are hermaphrodites, possessing both male and female reproductive organs, which facilitates self-fertilization. (males only make up about 0.2–0.5% in the wild) This reproductive capability, combined with a fixed number of cells, a fully sequenced genome, and a short life cycle, makes C. elegans ideal for studying gene function and development.
In addition C. elegans possess the evolutionarily conserved Argonaute/PIWI proteins that interact with small RNAs such as piRNAs. These piRNAs play a critical role in reproductive stability, and their absence results in sterility since Piwi will be marked for degradation when a piRNA is not attached to it. This research aims to elucidate the mechanisms behind piRNA-related sterility and to explore methods of maintaining a stable Piwi Argonaute in their absence. Additionally, the study focuses on the role of lysine residues, which are known to be important for Piwi function, and their role in creating a stable Piwi Argonaute even when piRNAs are absent. In addition to testing the piRNA abundance in strains where different mutations are influencing their transcription.

This study analyzes the argument of artificial turf versus natural grass used in the NFL, addressing the rationale for the former. With a focus on Sport Administration, the research was composed of quantitative metrics and qualitative interpretation to bridge statistics with subjectivity. Data was collected from websites surrounding the NFL using secondary research then comparatively scrutinized. This framework addressed connections between the field materials, player and management dynamics, and marketability ambitions. Findings convey grass is better for athletes, establishing a campaign for its ubiquity at the professional level. Contrarily, results acknowledge turf’s benefits that warrant its use over grass, mandating further agricultural innovation for the latter to be predominant in the NFL. These outcomes provide support for grass to be standardized across sport leagues, challenging previous beliefs of turf’s capabilities in relation to grass. Overall, this study contributes to the advancement of player health and safety optimization across sports and offers practical implications for sport managers – including but not limited to commissioners, athletic trainers, coaches, and athletic directors. The findings highlight the importance of prioritizing players over profit, while also highlighting areas for future research, particularly in legal issues in sports and activity.

Incubation of Craving is cue induced craving that gets stroner overtime during abstinence. There are 2 types of abstinance : forced abstince and social based voluntary abstinance. In forced Abstinance rats are kept in their homecage, and incubation of craving increases with forced abstinence. For social based voluntary abstinence resident rats and partner rats press levers to socially interact, when compared with forced abstinence incubation of craving increases. In previous studies the Resident is the one to initiate social interaction while the partener is just there, but for our experiment the partner is the one to initiate social interaction we did this because we had a question "Is the Resident choices (social interaction or Drug) dependent on the partner's behavior. For our approach we had 5 days of mutuals social interaction, 14 days of self drug (heroin) administration, 1 test day of incubation, 14 days of voulntary abstinence, and 1 test day of incubation.

Automated colony counting on agar plates remains a bottleneck in microbiology workflows, with manual counting prone to fatigue-driven error and existing automated systems often requiring fixed imaging setups. We present a distance-invariant colony counting system built on classical computer vision, designed to operate reliably under variable camera positioning and backlit plate illumination. The pipeline detects the plate boundary via Hough circle transform, flattens illumination gradients, and applies watershed segmentation to separate touching colonies before contour-based morphometric filtering rejects non-colony artifacts. A two-layer anomaly detection system flags abnormal colonies: a statistical layer operating from the first plate, and a machine learning classifier designed to activate as labelled data accumulates. The system is organized around organism-by-plate-type profiles spanning 39 organisms and 11 media types, allowing profile-aware interpretation of colony morphology. Central to the design is a human-in-the-loop validation workflow, where users confirm, flag, or correct automated counts through a web-based interface, generating the ground-truth dataset required for the supervised learning layer. We discuss the architecture, design rationale for prioritizing measurement invariance and validation infrastructure, and the system's readiness for biological validation in ongoing work.

In the 80’s, Gunnar Carlsson introduced a conjecture pertaining to the singular homology of certain finite CW complexes. In 2018, Iyengar and Walker demonstrated that a related conjecture was false using tools from homological algebra and a result on maximal rank of multiplication maps between exterior algebras over vector spaces in a paper by Conca, Herbig, and Iyengar. This presentation will showcase an investigation of maximal rank of a generalized form of multiplication map not discussed in the prior papers. In particular, such a generalized form of multiplication map between exterior algebras is induced by a certain partition of a finite dimensional vector space’s basis. Although more counterexamples can be produced in this way, this research indicates why vector spaces of dimension 2n induce certain multiplication maps that are well-behaved, and why more research is needed for the case of vector spaces of dimension dn.

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) uses techniques from algebraic topology to interpret high-dimensional and noisy data. Both multimodal and multiview Machine Learning (ML) aim to understand complex, high-dimensional data as well via the integration of different data types and different views of the same data type respectively. While their combination seems natural, the methods for implementation, the intent for their fusion, and the data sets used are varied across disciplines. This presentation looks at the ways in which TDA is being fused with multimodal and multiview ML from the approach of a systematized scoping review. In the development of this project, the Kitchenham guidelines and the PRISMA checklist for scoping reviews were followed as closely as possible. Of note is that the limited personnel behind the project means that the guidelines nor the checklist were able to be followed perfectly thus the project is instead a systematized scoping review. The papers reviewed were decided based in part by the inclusion of at least one TDA tool, use of multimodal or multiview data, and implementation of a multimodal or multiview ML framework. Preliminary results compare disciplines involved in research, purposes for development, and the ML pipelines used.