Student Research at F&M

As the use of artificial intelligence becomes increasingly common, recent F&M grad Kirin Sawasdikosol ’24 and junior Dilrabo Kodirova ’26 hope to harness the power of AI to help students learn. The two wanted to develop a product that encourages students to use AI responsibly. “We’re focusing on how we integrate AI as a tool for the learning process, rather than just how we get your assignment done as quickly as possible,” Sawasdikosol said. The result is a software startup, UniMind, which Sawasdikosol plans to launch publicly now that he has graduated.

Alongside Professor of Classics Zachary Biles, Therese Watkins '23 co-authored work that an international journal published in 2023. Watkins and Professor Biles were the first scholars to recognize an allusion in poem “37” to a passage in Homer’s the “Iliad.”

History and archaeology are Gavin Vogel's twin studies of interest, and for six weeks one summer, he found himself immersed in both. In Germany's Black Forest, the recent grad worked with an archaeological research team uncovering wreckage and possible remains from an American B-17G Flying Fortress, a nine-crew member bomber that crashed there in 1944. "It was right up my alley," he says. "I absolutely love studying the world wars, the 20th century, and the evolution of technology between the two world wars.”

An F&M compost initiative has evolved into a co-op saving the City of Lancaster $5,215 per year – all while diverting 16,638 pounds of food waste from the solid-waste stream each month. Three students spent their summer evaluating and co-authoring a white paper documenting the co-op's first year.

Working under the guidance of Elena Cuffari, assistant professor of psychology & scientific philosophical studies of mind, students Ayako Belka, Daisy Zang, and Wendy Huang combed through six hours of Zoom class footage to identify gestures exhibited by participating professors and students. The team identified 1,497 gestures.

Mathematics major Yusong (Sebastian) Deng of Liaoning, China, explored a project he called the “core spirit” of today’s engineering studies: engineering for humanity. Deng spent his summer working as a student researcher in the School of Applied Science and Engineering of Columbia University in New York.

As the James Webb Space Telescope sent Earth infrared images of galaxies in the early universe, Io Kovach helped their professor with final calculations to one of the telescope's first projects. Kovach worked with Ryan Trainor, assistant professor in F&M's Department of Physics & Astronomy, to discover how certain chemical properties vary across galaxies in the universe.