Presenting to the Pros
Being able to communicate your research is almost as important as the methods and results themselves.
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Formulating theories to explain unexpected lab results, conducting focus groups, submitting papers for publication in academic journals, presenting findings at national conferences: Though commonly associated with graduate study, these are all challenges that undergraduate Arts and Sciences researchers at Marquette can be found tackling.
Such growth and skill development are assured given students’ roles as real partners of faculty researchers. And they can be exhilarating, though Dr. Martin St. Maurice, professor of biological sciences and founder of the ME(D)3 research program, warns of potentially long waits for eureka moments. “Research is 95 percent beating your head against a wall, with a small chance of success on the back end. It’s important for undergraduate students to experience some of the tedium and frustration that is inevitably part of the research process and to learn for themselves whether the thrill of discovery is enough to keep them going.”
Students recognize the skills and resilience they pick up along the way as invaluable. When Noah Greenberg started conducting research in the lab of faculty mentor Dr. Andrew Kunz, the then-junior majoring in physics quickly realized that being able to articulate the substance of his research to his mentor was almost as important as the methods and results themselves. “I definitely grew into that,” he recalls.
Over a productive semester of research in Kunz’s lab exploring something called “artificial spin ice,” Greenberg simulated unstable patterns of molecular spin mimicking what’s generated when polarized water molecules crystallize into icy lattice structures. And his assuredness grew along with his results.
After writing code that functioned flawlessly as spin ice and manipulating it to show what happens when specific parts of the artificial lattice are removed, Greenberg was ready for a step that Kunz, an associate professor of physics, relishes offering students as they progress in his lab — presenting their findings to top researchers at a national physics conference.
In Greenberg’s case the setting was the annual conference of the American Physical Society in New Orleans last March, where he happened to spot a titan in the field — the acknowledged inventor of artificial spin ice — in the audience for his presentation. That expert, Dr. Peter Schiffer of Yale University, even stopped Greenberg on his way from the podium, startling him a bit, to offer a tip about an article that would help corroborate the Marquette team’s findings. The episode taught Greenberg a lasting lesson. “Attending conferences and dialoguing with people in the field teaches you things you can’t get from reading or researching on your own,” he says.
Greenberg’s case also reveals how these research experiences act as springboards to attractive opportunities: internships, prestigious fellowships, graduate study, job offers. Since presenting in New Orleans, Greenberg has linked together summer and fall research fellowships at two renowned research centers: the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Ontario, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey. And Kunz points to a roster of former student researchers who have gone on to successful
doctoral study in physics and related fields, and faculty positions at research universities.
— By Jennifer Anderson and Steve Filmanowicz
This section is part of “The Discoverers,” a multi-part story on the abundant undergraduate research opportunities in Marquette’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences. Read the final chapter or return to the introduction.
