More than 100 students presented research, music and artwork at Susquehanna’s Senior Scholars Day, an event that showcases the culmination of their years of study and honors the professors who served as their mentors.
From patient to researcher
Emma Dickinson ’26, an earth & environmental sciences major from Palmyra, Pennsylvania, drew inspiration for their research from a personal encounter with Lyme disease.
“I was in treatment for Lyme disease for five years and spent a good deal of time in a wheelchair because of it,” Dickinson said. “I want to study ticks so that we can hopefully lower the incidence of these crippling diseases.”
Though they said treatment proved challenging at times, it imbued Dickinson with a desire to understand what factors influence blacklegged ticks, or deer ticks, to latch onto clothing. They prepared nine fabrics to which the captured specimen larvae could attach themselves. They examined each sample and determined how many ticks it retained and recorded the properties of the material that might have factored in.
“Of the fabrics I tested, twill collected the fewest ticks with an average of three ticks out of 20 per exposure, while an artificial fur collected the most with an average of 11 ticks out of 20 per exposure,” Dickinson said. “There are several factors that mediate attachment to clothing types, such as brightness, texture and static electricity.”
Dickinson was assisted in this research by Elise Schaeffer ’29, of Cheswick, Pennsylvania, and Matthew Persons, Charles B. Degenstein Professor of Biology.
After graduation, Dickinson hopes to become a watershed specialist for a county conservation district, a position that would allow them to develop countywide educational programs and restoration projects. They credit their research with helping them make more informed clothing choices for fieldwork, revealing a path they could take to become a tick prevention consultant in parks and nature centers, and exposing procedures within tick population reporting that could benefit from refinement.
Listening to the wild
Sarah Joy ’26, of Palm Bay, Florida, wanted to explore just how big an impact humans have on the everyday lives of animals, which is how she found herself researching how human-created acoustic pollution influences animals’ food foraging patterns.
In collaboration with fellow ecology major Brodie Bard ’29, of Pittsburgh, Joy studied the phenomenon by creating research site installations near campus buildings to measure the volume and duration of sounds escaping from within. Joy found that many building and infrastructure designs make noise louder in some outside areas than others because of poor soundproofing and the loss of natural barriers. Hearing these magnified sounds causes nearby wildlife to have strong negative reactions.
“We found that herbivores are scared by peaks at high volumes,” Joy noted, “whereas omnivores and carnivores are more scared by areas that have consistently loud noise levels. However, all animal activity decreases under these added factors.”
Joy, who credits the research with making her more mindful about the noise she creates when outdoors, was mentored by Maisie MacKnight, visiting assistant professor of biology, and Matt Wilson, director of the CEER Field Station.
Wildfires and the housing price rollercoaster
Michael Jaret ’26, an economics and mathematics double major from Finksburg, Maryland, explored the intersection between wildfires and fluctuating housing prices in California.
Charting the relationship between each subject required Jaret to sift through data and “clean” it for his project, a process made easier by assistance from faculty mentors Edisanter Lo, professor of mathematics & computer science, and Katarina Keller, associate professor of economics.
“After a wildfire, housing prices rise immediately and then fall a few months later,” Jaret said. “The magnitude of these effects vary by each city’s local characteristics, such as wildland-urban interference index and fire history. Notably, cities with higher wildland-urban interference and greater extensive fire history experience more extreme post-exposure price drops. These findings suggest that risk perceptions of wildfires are continually updated and reinforced after a wildfire occurs.”
Though economic theory dictates that housing prices would rise because wildfires reduce the number of homes available for purchase, Jaret expected that prices would stay low because risk-averse homeowners wanted to leave danger as soon as possible. The actual drop in prices comes three months after a given fire has been extinguished, he said.
Jaret credits his research with piquing his interest in interpreting and analyzing data. After graduation, he hopes to work in financial consulting.
