UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AND SCHOLARLY ACHIEVEMENT URSA SCHOLARS WEEK Committed to Undergraduate Excellence MARCH 26-29, 2018 ABSTRACTS & PROGRAM Achievement • Creativity • Research • Vision 1 Nominate your faculty research advisor for Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year! Nomination forms are available on the URSA website: (www.baylor.edu/ursa). It will only take a few minutes to complete a nomina- tion for an exceptional research mentor, and submit it via the website. 2 What is URSA? The Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Achievement (URSA) initiative at Baylor welcomes all undergraduates, from freshman to senior, to maximize their education through a variety of research, creative and scholarly activities. Undergradu- ates take advantage of opportunities on-campus from the laboratories in the Baylor Sciences Building, to the design studios, to the library collections. They also participate in off-campus programs, including research internships at medical schools, assistantships at field stations, and apprenticeships in museums. URSA sponsors a small grant program, with funds available exclusively for undergraduate projects. What is Scholars Week? Each year Baylor Sponsors a series of events to celebrate undergraduate research and creativity. Every spring, Baylor dedi- cates an entire week to scholarly presentation. The first two days are dedicated to platform (oral) presentations where stu- dents from a cross-section of academic disciplines share their projects and results. In mid-week, individual students and re- search teams dis-play posters in the Baylor Sciences Building. Academic departments and the Baylor Libraries provide judges to determine the most outstanding efforts from both the platform and poster presentations. URSA recognizes the winners, along with outstanding faculty mentors at an Awards Reception at the end of April. Who administers Scholars Week and URSA? The Office of the Vice Provost for Research has oversight over The URSA Steering Committee, which includes faculty and student representatives. Administrative research staff participate ex-officio. BURST, Baylor Undergraduate Research in Sci- ence and Technolgy, a student-run organization, assists with the event venue for Scholars Week. The URSA Steering Committee Susan Bratton, PhD, Director William Chan (BURST) Dennis Johnston, PhD, Grants Chair Cindy Burney, PhD Tamarah Adair, PhD Paul Larson, PhD Eileen Bentsen, MLS Robert Miner, PhD Courtney Smith (BURST) Kelly Rossler, PhD, RN Nathan Elkins, PhD Rich Sanker, PhD Patrick Farmer, PhD Dianna Vitanza, PhD (OVPR) Jonathan Hu, PhD Brian Raines, PhD 3 Colleagues: Once again, I have the pleasure of welcoming you to the Baylor URSA Scholars Week. Please find time within your busy schedule to examine the breadth and depth of the research of our students. It is easy to see that Bay- lor Research is Making a Difference in the lives of our undergraduates around the world. The achievements of the faculty and students represented in this eleventh annual Scholars Week celebration are exemplary. As such, I encourage you to sample all of the scholarship on display, not just in your own discipline. The quality of each individual presentation once again demonstrates the monumental commitment pro-vided by every Baylor faculty mentor and the direct impact this commitment has on our students. Please also take the time to thank your faculty colleagues and students who have worked so hard to bring URSA to where it is today. Their unwavering enthusiasm promises a bright future for the undergraduate research experi- ence at Baylor and is worthy of our praise! As always, please accept my thanks for all you do on a daily basis for Baylor research. I appreciate it and you. Best regards, Truell W. Hyde Truell W. Hyde, PhD Vice Provost for Research 4 KEYNOTE ADDRESS A special Scholars Week presentation and reception, organized as part of the speakers series spon- sored by BURST. with The College of Arts and Sciences. Adventures in Solid State Synthesis: Hidden Gems to Link Materials’ Properties Julia Chan, PhD Author of over 170 publications in solid state chemistry Monday, March 26, 2018 4:00 pm BSB B110 Presented by: Professor Julia Chan (B.S. in Chemistry, Baylor University; Ph.D., University of California at Davis) be- gan her faculty appointment at Louisiana State University in Fall 2000, after spending two years as a Na- tional Research Council Postdoctoral Associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory. She then moved her research group to the University of Texas at Dallas Fall 2013. Her research interests involve synthesis of materials that exhibit metal-to- insulator transitions, mixed valence, highly correlated electronic systems, superconductivity, and materi- als for energy conversion. Efforts are placed on the crystal growth, structures, and properties of new ma- terials. Prof. Chan has published over 170 papers and given over 100 invited talks. She has graduated 19 Ph.D. students and has mentored over 40 undergraduates in her laboratory. Prof. Chan’s awards include NSF Career Award, American Crystallographic Association Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award, Baylor University Outstanding Alumni Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Iota Sigma Pi Agnes Fay Mor- gan Award, American Chemical Society Exxon Mobil Faculty Fellowship in Solid State Chemistry and one of 12 Profiled in 2002 C&E News series on “Women in Chemistry”, highlighting women making an im- pact in the chemical sciences. She is currently an associate editor of Science Advances and served on the Edi- torial Advisory Board of Chemistry of Materials and Inorganic Chemistry. 5 Table of Contents Oral Presentations– Bill Daniel Student Center MONDAY 1:30 p.m. 8 MONDAY 3:30 p.m. 18 TUESDAY 1:30 p.m. 21 TUESDAY 3:30 p.m. 28 Poster Presentations– Baylor Science Building Session One: Monday—Tuesday Family and Consumer Science 35 Pre-Health and Biology 36 Health, Human Performance and Recreation 48 Geosciences 58 Chemistry and Biochemistry 63 Session Two: Wednesday-Thursday Communication Sciences and Disorders 68 Journalism 69 Management 69 English 70 Environmental Science 70 Psychology & Neuroscience 78 Statistics 90 Anthropology 92 Religion 94 Physics 94 Engineering 98 6 Platform Presentations Bill Daniel Student Center March 26-27, 2018 7 Monday, 1:30 p.m. Session One - Baines Room Economics A1. The Effect of the Gender Education Gap on Infant Mortality Rates in Sub-Saharan Africa Jessica Schurz; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Corneliu Bolbocean Department: Economics Closing the gender gap in education has the potential to develop the third world. Investing in education em- powers both men and women by creating a healthier and more economically developed population. This paper seeks to explore how the gender education gap affects infant mortality rates in Sub-Saharan Africa. Data from the years 2000-2015 across 48 Sub-Saharan African countries was collected from the World Bank data base to test the hypothesis that the education gender gap is an indicator of a country’s infant mortality rate, holding constant life expectancy, health expenditure, adolescent fertility rate, GDP, and GDP growth. Evidence was found to support this hypothesis, indicating that the gender gap in education has affected infant mortality rates in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 16 years. One of the major contributions of this paper is in explaining how the education gender gap is an indicator (rather than predictor) of health outcomes. Other researchers have ex- plored how women’s empowerment causes health outcomes on a societal level. They argue that women cur- rently enrolled in school are likely to have children later, have fewer children, take better care of their children, and implement better health practices. This paper is unique in that it looks specifically at a population of girls who are not having children -these girls are not the ones whose infants are dying. This paper shows, rather, that the countries which are not educating women are likely to have worse health outcomes for its infants. A2. Charitable Giving and Its Effects on Altruistic Behavior Rebecca Peirce; Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jason A. Aimone Department: Economics Prosocial behavior, specifically the acts of volunteering and charitable giving, is an aspect of human behavior that has been analyzed by economists in the recent past. When the acts of volunteering and contributing to charity are analyzed at surface level, it appears that those individuals who participate in these actions do so on- ly for the benefit of those less fortunate or for the betterment of society. Research has shown, however, that one’s desire to volunteer can stem from various motives, one of which is warm glow motivation. Warm glow motivation is the desire to engage in prosocial behavior not because the prosocial behavior benefits society, but rather because it provides the individual engaging in the prosocial behavior with positive feelings that boost self-image (Lilley and Slonim, 2013). The research conducted in these laboratory experiments further analyzes prosocial behavior in order to draw conclusions regarding charitable giving and the manner in which it affects an individual’s altruistic behavior. Specifically, the laboratory experiments focus on the ways in which differ- ent social settings, including the public knowledge of one’s charitable donations and the presence of a repre- sentative from the charitable organization, affect an individual’s altruistic behavior