Binghamton University will celebrate research and scholarly activities with its annual Research Days, reimagined this year as a short series of online events.
“Research is meant to be shared,” said Valerie Imbruce, chair of the Research Days planning committee and director of the Undergraduate Research Center. “Students ask questions and find ways to seek answers. Analyzing and interpreting information, all of that is one aspect of research. But one of the things we herald as part of undergraduate research is the outward-facing nature of it.”
Lisa Theo, research and scholarship advisor with the Undergraduate Research Center, led an effort to retool the large campus-wide poster sessions and put them online. “It’s really exciting that students will be able to share their work when it looked like it could’ve been canceled,” she said.
The two poster sessions will run from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and from 2-3:30 p.m. Friday, April 17, at https://sites.google.com/binghamton.edu/2020researchdaystemplate/homepage, with many students available to speak to guests via Zoom.
“Because of technology, we aren’t limited by the size of the room,” Theo noted. “Potentially thousands of people can see the work of our students.”
She hopes that the event will give students a little sense of normalcy, however brief. “The projects they’ve worked on for months can still be shared with the world,” she said.
The Science Library will coordinate a Citizen Science Wikipedia Edit-a-thon from 3-5 p.m. April 21. Participants will celebrate citizen science by adding needed references to science-related articles on Wikipedia. They will also be encouraged to edit and create new science-related articles.
The Art Museum will coordinate an evening program of student curator presentations on April 23. Beginning at 6 p.m., student curators will present their exhibitions and answer questions posed by participants in a Zoom chat at https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/93560123459.
The spring 2020 exhibitions include “Marvels of Materials: Trade and Materiality in Ancient Egypt,” curated by senior Doug Braun with faculty advisor Hilary Becker, assistant professor of classical and Near Eastern studies; “American Mythology,” curated by senior Kaleigh Pitcher with faculty advisor Andrew Walkling, professor of art history; and “Visualizing Voyeurism,” curated by seniors Emily Mendelson and Eta Pastreich with faculty advisors Katherine Bouman, associate director of the Binghamton University Scholars Program and Tom McDonough, associate professor of art history.
Winners of the annual Art of Science competition, sponsored by S3IP and the Office of Research Advancement, will be announced during Research Days, and a video featuring all of this year’s entries will be posted to YouTube in place of the usual exhibition.
The current crisis is forcing people to think about how we can connect and adapt existing technology to suit our needs, Imbruce said. “We had to do it under the gun but now we can think about how we might build it into our future work,” she added. “We’re also training students to have a set of professional conduct online vs. personal or social space online. So that’s an ancillary teaching opportunity, too.”
Research Days are sponsored by Academic Affairs, Center for Civic Engagement, College of Community and Public Affairs, Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Division of Research, The Graduate School, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, McNair Scholars Program and the Undergraduate Research Center.
