VCU Celebrates Creative Thinkers

VCU Research Weeks is a celebration of research and creative expression featuring a series of events that brought together undergraduate and graduate students from across disciplines and campuses. From students doing research in women’s health to engineering students designing the next new gadget, from student artists exhibiting their work to business students pitching a new company, VCU was overflowing with displays of student talent, ingenuity and creativity.

Art: Flexing creative muscle

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Creative expression was on full display at the VCU School of the Arts Juried Design and Fine Arts Exhibition, which opened April 3 and was celebrated as part of Research Weeks. From paintings to large installation pieces, photographs to sculptures, art students flexed their creativity to produce a one-of-a-kind art show.

The exhibition featured works by undergraduate students in all fine arts departments, including communication arts, fashion design, graphic design, interior design and kinetic imaging.

Social work: Restraint and seclusion

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Megan Remaley and Lauren Weidner, both students in the Master of Social Work program, presented their research during the School of Social Work Research Symposium (April 25) on the use of restraint and seclusion in Virginia public schools.

Restraint, they said, is a type of hold that school officials can employ to hold down a child whose behavior has become unmanageable. Seclusion is the practice of putting a child in another room by themselves until they have “de-escalated,” they said.

“What we looked at was the level of understanding of attitudes in understanding for policies regarding restraint and seclusion in public schools,” Weidner said. “Throughout the United States, some states have policies regarding the use of these practices. However, Virginia just has guidelines and leaves it up to each district what type of policy they want to have.”

Remaley and Weidner found that in schools with policies on restraint and seclusion, teachers had a better understanding of the techniques and felt more prepared to use them.

“There's definitely a need for more clear guidelines in policies and training throughout Virginia,” Weidner said.

Social shopping platform that allows you to tag purchases in images to earn deals? Brilliant!

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Graduate division winners Tagather, developed by VCU Brandcenter student Karen Hymes, took top prize in the graduate division, winning $4,000 for a social shopping platform that allows consumers to tag recent purchases in images they take to earn rewards in the form of coupons and gift cards.

“I know the work everyone put in, I know the talent that is in every team, and I know them as friends. So, I am very overwhelmed. I am still not sure of the differentiating factor because all the ideas were very, very good,” Hymes said. “I’m a creative technologist, but I had a learning curve to get to this point and every book or resource recommended, I bought and read it.”

World Studies: ‘Carytown Jesus’

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Jazmyne Fernandez, a senior religious studies major, presented her research project, "Carytown Jesus," in which she surveyed 25 people in Carytown on their perceptions of what Jesus looked like.

“My grandmother has that generic image of Jesus – where he has blue eyes, light brown hair and rosy cheeks – up in her house, and it got me wondering: Do people still think that Jesus looked like that? It's just so unrealistic. He was from the Middle East. He was a carpenter who grew up in Jerusalem."

Fernandez asked Richmond residents to describe what Jesus looked like, basing her questions off the FBI’s composite sketch guidelines. She enlisted the help of a VCU art student who drew a sketch of Jesus that incorporated the survey results, which showed that the respondents did not believe in the stereotypical portrayal of Jesus.

“I was curious what people really thought. I wanted to know if people thought the same way as I do. I wasn't sure if I was the one being outlandish,” Fernandez said. “I thought people were going to say Jesus had light brown hair and blue eyes. So they disproved my thesis, which was great.”

"Being that I suffer from pressure ulcers, and each of my teammates knew about pressure ulcers, we all joined a team and said we should combat that problem."

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Undergraduate division winners In the undergraduate division, One Step at A Time, comprising VCU School of Business students Calvin Peterson, Kaitlin Taylor and Wallace Pitts and School of Engineering student Elliot Roth, won $4,000 as the first-place finisher in this year’s competition. Their product was a cushion, called Cush, specifically designed for wheelchair users to help aid in the prevention of pressure ulcers.

“We were up against a lot of great competition,” said Peterson, a member of the winning team. “Without a great team, we wouldn’t have been able to win. It started off as a class project. Being that I suffer from pressure ulcers, and each of my teammates knew about pressure ulcers, we all joined a team and said we should combat that problem. We’re going to take our winnings and just invest it back into the company.”

Farhana Sakloth, a graduate student in medicinal chemistry at the School of Pharmacy, studied analogs of the designer drug “bath salts.” The study was created to determine the ligand complexes responsible for manipulating serotonin and dopamine levels in the user. Sakloth, a student who came to VCU from India, presented her research during the Graduate Student Research Symposium and Exhibit.

Dentistry: Pain management during orthodontic treatment

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Sara Schutte, a third-year dental student in the VCU School of Dentistry, presented her research project investigating whether or not orthodontists can closely predict patients’ pain during treatment. Her research found that most orthodontists overestimate the amount of pain felt by patients. The research implied that more pain management protocol is needed.

Spending more than two years on the research, Schutte created her own project design and performed data collection and analysis. She completed a research article, which is currently being considered for publication.

“I think research is a great way to assimilate practice and didactic course work,” Schutte said. “It gave me a personal relationship with scientific data as I collected the data from patients. The experience also makes me more empathetic to my patients.”

VCU: Six Conversations about Research

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Engineering students Josh Hensley, Farheen Azam and Prathika Kasireddy explain their Rapid Response Vehicle Positioning System to Todd Waldo, enterprise engineering manager for Royall & Company, during the VCU School of Engineering Design Expo at the Science Museum of Virginia.

Political science: Two presidencies

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At VCU's Political Science Student Research Conference (April 11), students presented their research on topics such as super PACs, relations between the United States and Iran, stop-and-frisk policies, climate change, cyberwarfare and more.

The all-day event offered students a chance to present their research findings to their peers in an academic conference setting.

Andrew Ward, a senior sociology major, presented his paper, “Domestic Versus Foreign Affairs: The Two Presidencies That Address Them.” Ward’s presentation was on Aaron Wildavsky’s two presidencies theory, which argues that a single president is judged on two different presidencies – one centered on domestic affairs and one centered on foreign affairs.

“For foreign affairs, for the most part, the president generally has free reign and can generally make decisions without Congress. But in domestic affairs, he’s usually stopped along the way pretty frequently,” Ward said.

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College of Humanities and Sciences student Sahil Aggarwal presented his nonprofit business, PENdulum, during the Venture Creation Competition hosted by the da Vinci Center for Innovation.

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Angelica De Jesus, graduate student in the Department of Psychology, presented her research on body image problems and parental weight comments and how they predict Latino young adults’ depressive symptoms during the 10th Annual Women’s Health Research Day poster session.

In its fourth year, Research Weeks has gone from a week of four events to more than two weeks of 14 events. The Undergraduate Research Symposium alone featured 300 research posters.

"This is indicative of the growth of student engagement in research at VCU," Hill said. "It also exhibits the diversity of interests among students in research and creative expression."