Symposium offers grad students chance to present research

For the first time, graduate students from various disciplines were able to display their research together for students at Friday's Graduate Research Symposium in Whig Hall.

The winning presentation, as judged by her peers, was EEB graduate student Maria Ramos's study of the conflict between reproductive success and the ability to outrun predators in male spiders.

Other entrants included Christine Percheski's "Does Mothers' Money Matter?," Nancy Khalek's "Continuity and Change in Byzantine and Early Islamic Damascus" and Nicole Avena's "Sugar-dependence in rats: similarities to drug abuse."

These presenters, from the sociology, history and psychology departments, respectively, represented the diversity of the academic work sought by the symposium's organizers.

"There's an interdisciplinary aspect to it," said committee member Shin-Yi Lin.

Karla Evans, also a committee member, agreed that an important goal was "to give an opportunity to graduate students to develop skills in presenting their work to people who are not specialists in their field . . . and to think about the significance of the work."

Organizers also wanted community members to participate, and several were present, talking with students about their projects.

"For a lot of [graduate students], we're being funded by the public and there's really no way the public gets anything out of it, so this was a good opportunity to address that," Lin said.

Avena said she appreciated the symposium because "in the psychology department we're only exposed to research in our own department . . . It's been interesting to see what other people are doing and meet people."

The organizing committee began setting up the symposium over the summer, which involved fundraising and calling for students to submit abstracts, or 250-word summaries of their research, in preparation for a more thorough poster presentation. In the end, 19 graduate students created poster presentations for the symposium.

"Hopefully in the future we'll be able to expand," Lin said.

The judging panel was composed of four graduate students who volunteered to participate.

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Barbara Bucknix, a graduate student judge from the politics department, said she was impressed by all entries, and also by the interdisciplinary effort of the symposium.

"Usually the questions [a researcher] is really interested in have very broad applications," she said. "It's been quite an eyeopener . . . Sometimes I've really begun to understand what [science] students are asking."

CEE student Hongbo Su won second place with his project, "Remote sensing of evapotranspiration on land surface," and Christiane Meyer of the EEB department took third with "Big males are sexy and win fights — why are there still small males in wild populations?"

The schedule for the event included "poster sessions" in which student researchers presented their posters and findings to the judging committee and two guest speakers. Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which funds graduate research and helped sponsor the symposium, spoke in the morning.

Daniel Kahneman, a University psychology professor who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, was the keynote speaker in the afternoon.

The event was also sponsored by the Graduate School, McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni and Graduate Student Government.