The Senior Program

At the core of the Senior Program in biology is the senior project, an intensive two-semester field or laboratory research project carried out in association with a faculty member. The project concludes with a written project and an oral presentation given in the second semester of the senior year. The senior project is an opportunity to synthesize and focus previous coursework. It culminates in an original work of scholarship that provides an in-depth examination of a particular empirical or theoretical issue.

The scope and variety of undergraduate research is indicated by the following examples of student projects in biology:

• Assessing Associative Learning in American Crows Through a Touchscreen Operant Chamber
• Assessing Kinesin-Driven Acentric Plasmid Inheritance in Budding Yeast Utilizing Fluorescence Microscopy
• Assessing Migratory Strategies and Their Effect on American Crow Cognition
• Cloning Eyeless and Twin of Eyeless Enhancer Sequences
• Crowbot™: Investigating Behavioral Responses in American Crows Through Robotic Decoys
• Dynamics of the Green Lake Redoxcline: Oxic Methanogenesis and Reactive Oxygen Species
• Electroactive Microbial Community Enrichment in Green Lake
• Fertilization Mode Shapes the Evolution of Novel Flagellar Structures in Amphibians
• Hi-C Resolved Pangenomics of Purple Sulfur Bacteria in Green Lake
• Histological Analysis of Oviductal Morphology in Two Species of Lithobates
• Identifying Nutrient Inputs to Oriskany Creek From Agriculture and Sewage
• Investigating Glycogen Metabolism and the Effects of Starvation in Tetrahymena thermophila
• Investigating the Role of Kinesins in Chromosome Segregation
• Investigating the Transgenerational Effects of Lead (Pb) Exposure on Drosophila melanogaster
• Lead-Induced Retinal Degeneration in Drosophila melanogaster
• Microbial H+ -PPase Transcription Rates in Diverse Energy Environments
• Modeling Retinoblastoma: Exploring Rbf1’s Role in Eye Development Using Drosophila melanogaster
• Photosynthetic Pigments and Particulate Matter in the Stratified Waters of the Meromictic Green Lake
• Quantifying Particulate Phosphorus at Various Depths in Phosphorus-Limited Green Lake
• Salamander Spermatophore Phenology
• Seasonal Variation in Sperm Allocation and Spermatophore Characteristics in Male Redback Salamanders (Plethodon cinereus)
• Spatial Scale of Underground Freshwater Gene Flow in the Amphipod, G. duebeni
• Synthetic Reconstitution of Meiotic Drive in Ab10 Zea mays Using LexA-LexO Tethering System in Yeast
• Tethering Cse4 via LexA-LexO to Create a Synthetic Kinetochore
• Testosterone, Inbreeding, and Age Effects on Disease Mortality of American Crows
• The Effect of Intestinal Parasites on the Cognitive Abilities of American Crows
• The Effect of pH on Phenol Oxidase and Peroxidase Activity in Salt Marsh Soils: Testing the Efficacy of Enhanced Olivine Weathering
• The Effect of Inbreeding on the Cognitive Function of American Crows
• The Effects of Forest Composition on Rodent Seed Selection and Activity Levels
• The Effects of Habitat Type on Predation-Induced Fear in Small Mammal Communities
• Exploration of Microcystin-Related Gene Expression in Freshwater Environments
• Assessing Tetrahymena thermophila Cell Viability