Current and incoming Centre students get busy with summer research program

RELEASED: July 5, 2007

[Editor's Note: Katt McGinley '09, a psychology major from Taylorsville, Ky., and Andy Rapone '09, a Spanish major from Jamestown, Ky., collaborated in writing this feature.]

DANVILLE, KY— This summer, one current Centre student and two rising freshmen were chosen to participate in the Kentucky-West Virginia Alliance for Minority Participation, which is coordinated on Centre's campus by Preston Miles, professor of chemistry at the College.

Deysi Hernandez '09 of Louisville is spending her summer "learning a lot of languages." She is currently working on modifying the organic chemistry section of the Centre Web site. For this job, Hernandez is learning HTML and other computer programming languages. Adjustments she is making to the Web pages include creating a chemical database and filling in missing functional group reaction information.

The two rising freshmen involved in the program this summer are Jasmin Kaeser of Louisville and Chrys Jones of Harrodsburg, Ky.

Kaeser, who has been working for a week in the psychology lab (located in Young Hall on campus) with Melissa Burns-Cusato, assistant professor of psychology, is spending her days "working in conjunction with the University of Virginia trying to identify the differences in transgenic and non-transgenic mice in memory, anxiety and different behavioral areas." (Transgenic refers to mice that have been genetically engineered by adding an additional gene into their DNA.) Kaeser says that her time at Centre has been busy and that she is having a lot of fun.

Jones has spent his time working with quail in the "bird room" located in Young Hall in the psychology lab. He is currently learning how to handle the birds that he will be working with later this summer. His student supervisor, Bekah Holder '09, says that this summer she and Jones will be trying to condition the quail to respond to different sound and visual cues.

"Our hypothesis is that the females will respond to an audio tone because the male quails are so vocal in the wild, and that since the females make hardly any noise at all, the males will respond to a visual cue." Jones says that this experience is definitely unlike anything else he's ever done and that he thinks it will be fun and interesting.

The Kentucky-West Virginia Alliance for Minority Participation is a regional partnership of 10 Kentucky and West Virginia universities formulating strategies to double the number of engineering, science and mathematics baccalaureate degrees awarded to minority students in both states over five years.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Consumers Digest ranks Centre No. 1 in educational value among all U.S. liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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