The Spring 2019 Honors Symposium was held this past Friday, Mar. 1 on the Annandale Campus. Academically strong students and members of the NOVA Honors Program, the Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society, and the National Collegiate Scholar Society were invited to participate. Student presentations spanned many disciplines and subjects and were highly informative and entertaining

I am happy to announce that two of the three awards went to students from the Alexandria campus.

Ashley Davis presented on Application of CRISPR/Cas9 for Treatment of Tay-Sach’s Disease. The CRISPR/Cas9 is a gene editing tool that can be very effective in the treatment of genetic illnesses, one of which is theTay-Sach’s Disease. Ms. Davis’s talk showcased her research on a project that she did in her Genetics class. Prof. Izanne Zorin was the research supervisor of Ms. Davis.

Zainab Saeed presented on Merging Biology and Physics: Our Plasma Membrane as an Electric Capacitor. Ms. Saeed worked with Profs. David Fernandez and Tatiana Stantcheva to integrate knowledge from the fields of biology and physics and to create a unique biophysics talk. The field of biophysics is a highly exciting and relatively new field that is developing rapidly in the modern scientific field. Ms. Saeed’s presentation is unique to the extent that currently there are no classes at NOVA that include even remotely biophysics topics in their curriculum.

Congratulations to the winners!

The Fall 2018 Honors Symposium was held at the Alexandria on Friday, Oct. 26. Two of the participants have kindly provided information about their presentations for which we are grateful.

Beyond Our Borders: Why American Students Should be Multilingual

Daisy Garner

Abstract

At the age of eighteen, Daisy Garner boldly decided to leave her northern Virginia home and move to Germany for six months. She knew only a few phrases in German before moving to Germany, but she was excited to become acquainted with the language. Daisy soon learned, however, that almost everyone she met in Germany would speak to her in English. She was highly impressed with that fact, since, according to Pew Research Center (2018), very few people in the United States speak a second language. The main topic of her presentation was on whether American students should learn another language.

In her presentation, Daisy took her subjective experience learning other languages and combined it with a plethora of data. She also included fascinating data on the cognitive, career, and social benefits of being multilingual. She also encouraged American students and school systems to embrace multilingualism and explained how they can do this.

The Exponential Decay of Beer Froth

Sarah Olsen

Abstract

Sarah Olsen chose to present on the Exponential Decay of Beer Froth at the Fall 2018 Symposium. She was inspired to choose that topic when she read an article about it on the IgNoble website which honors scientists for their achievements that make people laugh and then think.

The Exponential Decay is a very significant process and can be observed in many fields such as biology, economics, chemistry, physics, etc. The German physicist A. Leike chose to study this topic because beer froth is a widely known phenomenon, at least in Europe where the legal age for drinking is 18. Possibly shockingly to American audience, the author was able to easily demonstrate the beer froth decay to his students in the university classroom and published his results in the European Journal of Physics in 2001.

Since the typical american college student will not be allowed to reproduce this experiment in the foreseeable future, here is a link to Sarah’s presentation for those interested.