Research at F&M

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

As an English literature and studio art double major, Sojin Shin '22 has a twofold love of words and images. It’s only fitting that she chose to explore how her skills in art and writing complement each other in storytelling by creating a graphic novel.

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.