A growing number of undergraduates are pushing

beyond the lecture and test, into real research that once was

the sole domain of those pursuing advanced degrees.

by Darv Johnson ’93

Dylan Trettin

Philip Howard

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Something Nobody’s

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Some undergraduates spend their summer vaca-tions painting houses, waiting tables or lookingafter someone else’s kids. Not Philip Howard.The senior spent the summer between his soph-omore and junior years trying to simultaneously

image quantum dots with atomic force microscopy andoptical microscopy.

Meanwhile, Lauren Hartle was using electrospinningto create a flexible polymer surface on which lung cellscould grow.

And Dylan Trettin was in Moscow, working on a littlething he likes to call “A Case Study of the Influence ofRussian Scientific Professionals in Shaping Post-SovietWetlands Policy.”

Lauren Hartle

Ever Done Before

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UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

Howard, Hartle and Trettin are amongthe hundreds of Carolina students who areproving that, these days, research isn’t thesole domain of graduate students and fac-ulty. Spurred on by a summer grant pro-gram and mentored by faculty and gradu-ate students, these students are trying theirhand at real research in everything fromphysics to dramatic art.Along the way,they’re getting a chance to test-drivecareers and face the thrill — and some-times, the tedium, and the paralyzinguncertainty — of original research.

“We have no bottle washers in thegroup,” says Richard Superfine, a professorin the physics and astronomy department.“They have a chance to make a real differ-ence, and they also have a real responsibility.”

As director of UNC’s Office for Under-graduate Research, Patricia Pukkila is lead-ing the movement.Through incentives,outreach and assistance, her office encour-ages faculty to incorporate research com-ponents into their undergraduate courses.They offer grants to graduate students toserve as research consultants to undergrad-uates; they also award some 70 SummerUndergraduate Research Fellowships

(SURFs) a year, enabling students to pur-sue research over the break.

“Our charge is to make research a dis-tinctive feature of the undergraduate expe-rience,” says Pukkila, a biology professorwho in December will receive an awardfrom the American Society for Cell Biologyfor her advocacy of undergraduate scientificresearch.“It allows students to engage inwhat the business of the University is.”

This is, as College of Arts and SciencesDean Holden Thorp ’86 has said,“theopportunity to do something that nobody’sever done before.”

Plenty of students are diving into thebusiness as if they were born to it. Last yearalone, Pukkila says, UNC undergraduatesgave 81 presentations at professional con-ferences and co-authored 355 professionalpapers, some of which turned up in presti-gious journals, including Development,Nature and Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences.

But undergraduate research isn’t just forhard-core scientists. McKay Coble ’79,chair of the department of dramatic art,said a half dozen of her department’s stu-dents have received SURF funding in the

Patricia Pukkila

directs UNC’s Office

of Undergraduate

Research. Through

incentives, outreach

and assistance, the

office encourages

faculty to incorpo-

rate research

components into

their undergraduate

courses. It offers

grants to graduate

students to serve as

research consultants

to undergraduates; it

also awards some 70

Summer Undergrad-

uate Research

Fellowships each

year, enabling stu-

dents to pursue

research over the

break.

‘When they dohomework,

they’re solving a problem that’s

been solved10,000 timesbefore.They

know there’s asolution.There’s

a different psychology.

Research isn’tlike that.

It’s really toughon them.’

Richard Superfineprofessor in physics

and astronomy

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past two years. Recent graduate MadelineWalter ’07, for example, used a grant towrite and stage a play, Mary Brigit Popple-ton is Writing a Memoir, which was pre-sented at last summer’s New York Interna-tional Fringe Festival (related story, page 50).Another dramatic arts student used twogrants to develop theater projects in theEast African nation of Malawi.

Coble says she reminds dramatic arts stu-dents early and often about the existence ofthe grants program.“It really does show stu-dents that they’re not up against the brickwall of a department’s economy,” Coble said.

A $3,000 SURF grant sent Trettin, asenior from Mount Pleasant, S.C., even far-ther east.Trettin, who is majoring in historyand international studies with an Asianstudies minor, traveled to Moscow twosummers ago to research Russia’s wetlandspolicy.Trettin said that experience wasinstrumental in helping him return to Rus-sia to intern at the U.S. Embassy’s Office ofEnvironment, Science and Technology lastsummer.The grant gave him practicalexposure to grant writing and fieldresearch, coupled with “the confidence tojump into these open-ended projects.”

Bold step outside the box

It’s the very open-endedness of researchthat can prey on confidence and pose prob-lems for even the best undergraduates.Accustomed to the clear goals and easilymeasured progress of coursework, they canget bogged down in the vagaries of research.

“When they do homework, they’resolving a problem that’s been solved 10,000times before,” Superfine said.“They knowthere’s a solution.There’s a different psy-chology. Research isn’t like that. It’s reallytough on them.”

For that reason, Superfine finds thatgrades aren’t always a good predictor oflaboratory success. Instead, he said,“one ofthe things we are most concerned with isinitiative and a sense of boldness.”

In that environment, Lauren Hartle hasthrived.The senior physics major fromCharlotte has worked in Superfine’s labsince December 2005 and embraces whatshe calls the “seat-of-the-pants” nature ofresearch.At the same time, she appreciatesthe fact that respect in the lab is doled outbased on ideas and initiative rather than ageor academic standing.

“It’s a totally reasonable expectation for

an undergraduate to make a significantimpact,” Hartle said.“It was really cool forme to gain standing in the group.”

Hartle also got a chance to try on afuture career: She calls her foray intoundergraduate research part of a “survey,” atest of whether scientific research might bethe career for her.The answer, for her, is atentative yes. But after his research experi-ence, Philip Howard, the senior statisticsmajor from Elon, decided to go in a differ-ent direction.

Howard, who worked with MichaelFalvo ’94 (MS, ’97 PhD), a research associ-ate professor in the physics department,found plenty to like about his research. Hisproject, he said,“was something that noone else has worked on before. It was newterritory.There wasn’t a textbook answer.”

In the end, however, Howard found thatlab work wasn’t for him. He found it toorepetitive and the gratification too delayed.Instead of pursuing a career in academicresearch, he has decided to become an actu-ary. But he notes that ruling something outis just as useful as ruling it in.“I’ll neverhave to look back and wonder and think,‘Inever explored that side of things.’ ”

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UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

Katie Almirall ’07:Lemons to Lemonade

Oak Island native Katie Almirall ’07 traveled more than1,000 miles, deep into the heart of Oaxaca, Mexico, toreach the site of her undergraduate research project.

The first thing she found out when she arrived was that it wasn’tgoing to work.

Backed by an undergraduate research grant from UNC andworking under the auspices of a Mexican government program,Almirall had planned on traveling to indigenous communitiesand offering them art classes.“I had a really, really specific ideaand proposal,” she said.

But the program, she found out on arrival, had been can-celed.And even defining who was indigenous and who wasn’tturned out to be almost impossible.

Her first thought:“I’ve just traveled over 1,000 miles.Whatdo I do now?”

Almirall, an art major with a Spanish minor, displayed theresilience of a seasoned researcher. In a few days, she had tailoredher project to the prevailing conditions and launched her artclasses in Oaxaca City itself. For three weeks, she taught art fun-damentals to a class of 10 students, aged 13 to 23. For their finalproject, the students proposed and created a giant inflatablesculpture of a hand out of clear plastic and tape.The sculpture,filled with messages and facts about human rights, then went ondisplay in the city’s central park.“It was really nice to finish witha big bang,” she said.

Almirall now lives in New York and works for Teach ForAmerica’s national office. Her Oaxaca experience taught herhow to navigate the nonprofit world and helped her forge last-ing connections in Oaxaca, an area to which she has sincereturned twice. Undergraduate research, she says,“changed my life.”

Greg Hogan ’05:An Answer No One Else Knows

When Greg Hogan ’05 arrived in Chapel Hill, hewanted to be a doctor. But as soon as he began prob-ing genome-wide chromatin structure with small-

molecule crosslinkers and DNA microarrays, he changed his mind.What, exactly, was that research about, again? Well, it’s complicated

— and therefore perhaps all the more impressive that the Sarasota,Fla., native embarked on this work when he was still a freshman.

Hogan looked at how DNA is packaged in yeast, paying par-ticular attention to chromatin — structures within cell nucleiwhere the DNA helix winds itself around spool-like forms callednucleosomes.To do so, Hogan used a technique called Formalde-hyde-Assisted Isolation of Regulatory Elements that was devel-oped by his mentor, biology Assistant Professor Jason Lieb ’94.Hogan calls the successful use of this technique the most impor-tant part of the research, in that it offers a simple and effectiveroute to mapping open — which is to say, accessible to regulatingmolecules — chromatin in any organism.

Hogan credits his undergraduate research with changing hiscareer path for the better. Mentored and motivated by Lieb, Hogandiscovered a new passion.“I love research,” he says.“I love exploringthe unknown.You can come up with an answer no one else knows.”

The experience catapulted him onto a fast track to a career inresearch. He graduated in three years; soon after, he published apaper on his undergraduate findings in the journal PLoS-Genetics— he was first author — and won a Fulbright Scholarship to doresearch with a professor in Amsterdam. Now 23, Hogan juststarted a doctoral program in biochemistry at Stanford; he turnedup a few semesters early, of course.

“I really think that the absolute best thing I got out of UNCwas this research,” he said.“I wouldn’t have gotten into Stanfordwithout it.”

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Ownership of the material

Encouraging exploration — andencouraging student investment in a givencourse — are among the biggest benefits ofundergraduate research, says Clinton Key’05 (MA), a doctoral student who served asa graduate research consultant to one ofCharles Kurzman’s classes in “Sociology ofthe Islamic World.” In that role, Key helpedthe students create and conduct a survey tomeasure attitudes toward Islam.

The default learning mode for under-graduates, he said, is “to take for grantedand as givens the words that come out of aprofessor’s mouth.When they do research,they have to rely on themselves rather thansources. It gives them a deeper understand-ing and ownership over the material.”

Key, the first graduate student to receivea research consultant grant, now has hisown classes to teach. He has made under-graduate research part of his curricula.

The students aren’t the only ones bene-fiting from the research opportunities.Aprofessor’s graduate students often are tiedby grant money to specific projects withvery specific goals. Undergraduates have no

such strings attached, so scientists canthrow them at more speculative problems— putting them into action as a form ofscientific venture capital.“You can putthem on something that is a little morerisky,” Superfine said.

Brian Billman, an associate professor ofanthropology who has worked with anumber of undergraduate researchers at hisfield school in Peru, has found them quitehelpful as collectors and compilers of data.He also found an unforeseen benefit in theform of the new perspectives they bring tothe field.“The interchange always stimu-lates new ideas,” he said.

For Richard Goldberg, an assistant pro-fessor in the biomedical engineeringdepartment, the biggest rewards are intrin-sic ones. Every summer for the past sixyears, Goldberg has mentored two under-graduates as they try to develop learningdevices for children with disabilities. Hesays he is always gratified to see the “joy ofdiscovery” in his charges.

“They’re so excited when they getsomething to work,” he said of his under-graduates.“This is the first time they have

applied what they’ve learned.”The rewards also can be very tangible.

His students have developed dozens ofdevices for impaired kids, with many ofthem in use across the state. He has appliedfor a patent on one device developed byundergraduates — a Braille trainer for thevisually impaired — and for a small-busi-ness grant from the National Institutes ofHealth to bring another to market.

A factor in the rankings

One drawback for faculty can be thetime commitment required. Billman pointsout that assessment of faculty performanceis based on teaching, service and research, ametric that doesn’t account for or rewardthe mentoring of undergraduates.“Findingthe time to mentor a student is difficult,”he says.“This is over and above what wealready have going on.”

Ramping up the faculty incentives ishigh on the priority list for Pat Pukkila atthe Office for Undergraduate Research.Tothat end, she says, the University recentlycreated two Distinguished Term Professor-ships in research and undergraduate edu-

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Madeline Walter ’07:What’s the Audience Think?

You can research brain development, crop yields or thereproductive habits of a tsetse fly.Why not researchwhether a play you wrote has a satisfying conclusion?

That’s what Madeline Walter ’07, a Robertson Scholar fromMaplewood, N.J., did with Mary Brigit Poppleton is Writing a Memoir.

Walter wrote the play — a comic look at a teenager whodecides to fictionalize the events of her life to make them memoir-worthy — for a class during the spring semester of her junior year;for her senior honors thesis, she wrote a series of short storiesinvolving characters from the play.

That’s where the undergraduate research grant came in.Walterused a small grant to distribute copies of the stories, along withquestionnaires, to audience members at the UNC production.

The idea was an extension of the workshop method that is integralto creative writing courses. Instead of asking for peer review, however,Walter reached out to the general public, asking for editorial assistancefrom the people who one day might pick up her play and read it.

She wanted to know whether the audience saw discrepanciesand connections between the stories and the play; whether theyappreciated and accepted the change in voice; what parts workedand didn’t work.“I got a lot of really thoughtful responses,” shesaid.“It was a really valuable way to get feedback.”

Next, she put the feedback to use, honing a scene in the secondact and adding three scenes to the end of the play to craft a moresatisfying conclusion. By all appearances, the process worked: MaryBrigit was such a success in production at the New York Interna-tional Fringe Festival this summer that it was one of a dozen —out of 200 — plays invited back for an encore run.

Walter is now in Chapel Hill on a yearlong fellowship to helpdevelop the Robertson Scholars program. Her new job and theproduction of her first play are her priorities for the moment, shesays, but she also has her eyes on the next one.

Vishwan Pamarthi

Madeline Walter

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Vishwan Pamarthi:The Business of Medicine

Doctor or entrepreneur? It’s a question with which VishwanPamarthi, a senior from Cary, has grappled as he considershis career plans. On the one hand, he is a biology major

who does undergraduate research at UNC’s Lineberger Compre-hensive Cancer Center; right now, he’s applying to medical school.On the other, he’s an entrepreneurship minor who, at 20, alreadyhas started several companies, including one that delivers minirefrigerators and other essentials to the dorm rooms of freshmen.

Fortunately, a 2006 SURF grant, which took him to India fortwo months, helped provide him with an answer:Why not be both?

Pamarthi used his grant to study the success of the L V PrasadEye Institute in Hyderabad, in southern India. He was drawn bythe institute’s entrepreneurial approach to providing top-notchmedical care to an underserved population: In two decades of exis-tence, Prasad has given surgical care to some 250,000 patients —half of them too poor to pay — all while staying out of the red.

While in India, Pamarthi evaluated the institute as he would afranchise — with success measured in numbers of eyes fixed, not indollars made. Guided by adviser Donald Lauria, a professor inUNC’s department of environmental sciences and engineering, hetried to determine if and how the institute could be replicated tooffer medical care in other developing nations.

One key finding was that at L V Prasad, the doctors also ran thehospital, shouldering administrative tasks to a degree not seen in theU.S.While this double-duty could slow decision-making and con-tribute to burnout, Pamarthi says, it also came with tremendous ben-efits.The doctor-administrators, he says,“know all about the con-cerns of the doctors and are willing to do something about them.”

Pamarthi calls the grants a turning point. While he plans to gethis medical degree, he also will keep his eyes open for opportuni-ties to capitalize on his entrepreneurial streak.“I saw the entrepre-neurial side to medicine,” he says.“That’s right up my alley.”

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cation.The professorships, which will befilled for the first time this year, will comewith a project budget and course releasemoney; the professors also will be hon-ored at an annual banquet and invited toaddress the UNC Board of Trustees.

“We keep piecing things together,” saidPukkila, who has a staff of two and a$500,000 annual budget.

Universities across the nation are doingthe same. Nancy Hensel, executive officerof the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Coun-cil on Undergraduate Research, or CUR,said university membership in her organi-zation has topped 500, a 28 percent spikein the last three years.The growth, shesays, has a number of causes, starting withan effort to mold better students. EchoingClinton Key’s comments about engage-ment, Hensel noted that research forcesstudents to draw on an array of skills, fromlab work to proposal writing and publicspeaking. Universities, she says,“see thepotential for deeper learning.”

Hensel says there’s a strong correlationbetween students who do undergraduateresearch and those who both stay in theirmajors and pursue graduate work. Smalleruniversities, she adds, can rely on under-graduates to bolster understaffed depart-mental research teams.

Not surprisingly in the age of hyper-competitive education, there also is a mar-keting angle:The sharp rise in CUR’smembership roles roughly coincides withU.S. News & World Report’s decision, sev-eral years ago, to begin listing institutionsthat are strong in undergraduate researchin its annual guide to colleges (in whichUNC currently ranks fifth among publicuniversities, 28th overall).“Any time thatsomething has a benefit, it becomes amarketing issue,” Hensel said.

Back at UNC, the primary issue ishow to give as many students as possiblethe chance to try their hand at undergrad-uate research.“In some ways, it’s an extrapart of college,” says Dylan Trettin, thewetlands policy researcher.“But it hasbeen a very important part.”

DARV JOHNSON ’93 is a freelance writerbased in Chapel Hill.

More about UNC’s Office of Undergradu-ate Research is available online atwww.unc.edu/depts/our.

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