High Point University’s campus is busy with approximately 75 students and 40 faculty collaborating on innovative summer research on a variety of topics through three unique programs. Pictured is a student athlete turning while running on turf as his feet are monitored from left by Ja’Niyah Williams, a senior exercise science major with a sports management minor; Jillian Schulz, a sophomore exercise science major; and Katie Whalen, a senior exercise science major as other student athletes observe along with Dr. Brett Pexa, assistant professor of athletic training, at right.
HIGH POINT, N.C., July 25, 2024 – High Point University’s campus is busy with approximately 75 students and 40 faculty collaborating on innovative summer research on a variety of topics through three unique programs. For example, the Congdon School of Health Sciences alone is working on research projects funded at nearly $4 million.
Students from every academic school are participating in these programs, which they applied for during the spring semester. The programs are SuRF (Summer Research Fellowship), SuRPS (Summer Research Programs in the Sciences), and SuRI (Summer Research Initiative). Each program pairs students with professors who guide them through projects in a variety of fields. This provides students with a range of opportunities, from learning new lab technology to working together as a team.
Biomechanics of Athletes and Turf
Three students are working in HPU’s Human Biometrics and Physiology Lab with Dr. Brett Pexa, assistant professor of athletic training, to evaluate feet in researching the impact of turf on biomechanics and workload in young athletes.
“What we’re doing is comparing a couple of different types of turf,” said Pexa. “Turf normally is investigated from a materials perspective, but we want to look at how people move on it. We think this will be important for performance but also mostly for injury prevention. Sports teams in general can make good decisions about what should or should not be on their fields.”
The research, sponsored by a turf company, inspects how athletes move on turf, where their feet land and whether different kinds of turf cause their feet to stick or slide. Pexa expects to complete the research this summer, and the information could help determine if an increase in injuries sustained by NFL players is related to playing on turf or grass.
Dr. Kevin Ford, dean of the Congdon School of Health Sciences and professor of physical therapy, noted recent publicity about athletes getting injured while playing on turf. He oversees the research on the traction and cushioning of two common artificial surfaces used for games.
“We’re collecting objective information about the performance on two different types of surfaces,” Ford said. “Not too many groups do this type of work, so it’s innovative. This allows us to understand the biomechanics of not only how athletes perform, how they optimize performance but also how they could reduce risk or injury.”
Students who participate in summer research get exposed to state-of-the-art equipment and can take creative problem-solving skills with them wherever they go, Ford said. Graduate schools and employers want candidates who have the life skills to identify a research question and figure out ways to solve a problem, which sets HPU students apart, he said.
“It helps me apply the knowledge we learn in the classroom,” said Ja’Niyah Williams, a senior exercise science major with a sport management minor from Goldsboro, North Carolina. “Learning the terminology and biomechanics of different body systems is one thing but applying it to actual real-life subjects just elevates your experience.”
Katie Whalen, a senior exercise science major with a psychology minor and in the pre-athletic training program, agreed. “The whole reason I’m here is because of this lab. When I toured this school and saw this lab, I thought I would regret it if I didn’t come here. I toured a bunch of different schools in North Carolina and none of them had anything like this.”
SuRFS Tackles Physical Research
Two HPU sophomores are working in the Virtual Reality and Clinical Gait Analysis Lab for the first time this summer with Dr. David Sinacore, professor of physical therapy, as part of his five-year $3.9 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant.
“The whole purpose is to study the feet of individuals who have diabetes and peripheral neuropathy,” said Sinacore. “One of the complications is they develop progressive chronic kidney disease. Because the people with the worst chronic kidney disease (Stage 5 CKD) also have the highest rates of amputation in the U.S., we want to figure out if there are ways that we can identify them early to prevent amputation.”
The grant, titled “Chronic Kidney Disease – Mineral Bone Disorder (CKD-MBD) Syndrome in the Diabetic Neuropathic Foot,” was awarded to HPU by the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) in collaboration with the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of California-San Francisco. The goals of the grant are to determine the impact of type 2 diabetes, peripheral neuropathy and various stages of chronic kidney disease on the foot using cross-sectional (stages 1-5) and longitudinal changes (over three years). The grant started in 2023 and continues through Aug. 31, 2028.
Gracie Ritchey, an exercise science major from King, North Carolina, said the opportunity to work on undergraduate research will help her navigate graduate school and a future career in physical therapy.
“I’ve learned how the process works as far as the tests with patients,” Ritchey said. “I’ve also learned how to critically think when looking at the data to consider questions that may pertain to it and be able to find the answers. I’ve learned to make graphs with different data points to find various answers to what I’m looking for.”
The summer research experience is also helpful for Julia Crenshaw, a neuroscience major from Greensboro, North Carolina.
“I’ve learned how to take blood pressure, measure reflexes and dissect really complicated literature because the things we’re doing are very niche and complicated on the cellular level,” Crenshaw said.
SuRPS Students Initiate Innovative Equipment
Students working in the lab with Dr. Jacob Brooks, assistant professor of physics, and Dr. Sean Johnson, assistant professor of electrical engineering, were among the first to use a new $150,000 lithography instrument that was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Brooks’ three students are using this cutting-edge instrument to study microfluidics, looking at how fluids move at the microscopic scale.
“That will bleed into dealing with how cells interact with their environment and how they feel their way around in the body, which has ramifications for cancer metastasis and other things in the medical field,” said Brooks. “We have cilia all over our body. They’re just little hairs on our cells that beat back and forth to help move fluid around. We decided to build an artificial platform based off that, using a silicon rubber to form microstructures.”
The research eventually could lead to identifying cancerous cells quicker, understanding how cells change from benign to metastatic and promoting prevention, Brooks said.
“I had background knowledge on largely everything we’re doing, but I got a much deeper dive,” said Ryland Brady, a senior biochemistry major from Daytona Beach, Florida.
Although she had volunteered in labs before, this was the first experience of working in a lab for Caitlyn Wingeart, a sophomore neurology major and physics minor from King George, Virginia.
“I want to have a career in research, and this is helping me learn about the research process,” Wingeart said. “Having the opportunity to do research as an undergraduate is important to me, and having access to these state-of-the-art facilities and technology is great.”
“A lot of what I’m learning is just real-world experience,” said Jack Moreland, a sophomore physics and biochemistry major from Dallas, Texas. “I’m taking notes on what I’m doing in the process to more effectively make a design change and implement it, seeing what the results are and changing my process based off the results to get a better result.”
Developing Nanowires
Johnson’s electrical engineering research also uses the lithography instrument to study semiconductor materials with a specific goal of shaping them into nanowires for the purpose of light detection. Two students working with him focus on graphing, mapping and creating patterns to develop improved materials.
“It’s an application that is an enabler in various things,” said Johnson. “Whenever there is a technology that needs to be light-generated, light-sensed or light-captured, if the material can capture the particular wavelength of light, it can be used there. Applications include military, ranging and automotive self-driving vehicles — all of those need sensors. This will be part of the sensor technology for those greater technology groups. We are at the forefront of this piece from what we have gathered in our background research.”
Tyler Rogers, a sophomore chemistry and physics major from Tampa, Florida, learned to conduct extensive background research on semiconductor materials to support the study.
“Ultimately, I want to get a Ph.D., which would end up being a lot of research,” Rogers said. “These are the first steps of working toward that and learning if this is really what I want to do, whether I enjoy this and whether I am going to be able to stick with this.”
It was also a first-time summer research experience for Morgan Abrams, a junior computer engineering major from Charlotte, North Carolina. Her biggest takeaways were developing notetaking and time-management skills while learning research techniques.
“I joined summer research to see if this was a subsection of the field that I wanted to go into,” said Abrams. “It’s given me a good perspective of what I want to do going forward.”
Researching Antibiotic-Resistance
Dr. Meghan Blackledge, associate professor of chemistry and director of HPU’s Natural Sciences Fellows, is working with five students this summer to continue research on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including MRSA.
Underway since 2019, the research was supported by a nearly $440,000 National Institutes of Health grant that was the first NIH Academic Research Enhancement Award grant awarded to HPU. The collaboration includes principal investigator Dr. Heather Miller, associate professor of chemistry, and faculty at the University of Richmond.
“We’re looking at small molecules that can break antibiotic resistance, and we’ve found a few molecules that have shown some real promise, so we have students working on various aspects of the project,” said Blackledge. “We’re starting to break out from very small questions of does this turn resistance on and off to does it do other things. Does it make the bacteria less infectious? Does it make us able to survive an infection better? It’s been exciting to see how it’s grown from a small project and just an aha moment to this really big thing that encompasses so many different students.”
The goal is to identify ingredients that will make existing antibiotics more effective against antibiotic-resistant infections that are on the rise, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Whether or not we do, what’s really key is that all of these students get to see what collaborative science looks like,” Blackledge said.
That was also key for Chloe Cox, a senior biochemistry major from Clarkson, Kentucky. She wants to earn a Ph.D. and a career in research. She described returning to the lab this summer as a fun, full-circle moment.
“Having as many years and semesters of experience as I’ve had here will give me a competitive edge when it comes to grad school applications in the fall,” said Cox. “The hard skills I’ve learned have been helpful but also the soft skills of learning to talk about my research and present it. All the little pieces that have come together over the last three years have given me a glimpse of what it’s going to look like five or 10 years down the line.”
Participating in research also broadened the horizons and medical school aspirations of Izzie Marshall, a junior biology and music double-major and Natural Sciences Fellow from Charleston, South Carolina.
“I learned how to time-manage and rely on myself when there’s a problem in the lab and no one’s around,” said Marshall. “I have to refer back to the protocol and figure out how I can get around this issue to continue this experiment. I learned perseverance to solve problems on my own, and I think that’s a valuable skill that I can use for the rest of my life.”
Setting the Circadian Clock
Dr. Alex Mosier, a visiting assistant professor of biology, continues his research of the circadian clock, which regulates an organism’s internal patterns related to 24-hour time periods and is synchronized with solar time.
“We’re looking at how this time-keeping mechanism helps to regulate things, so we do things at the proper timing and it’s proactive rather than reactive,” said Mosier. “The clock itself is the same with all organisms, so the goal would be to see how disruptions occur and what they might be impacting. Then, we can look at mice and eventually humans to see how this relates to different diseases and ailments people have. It has been shown that disruption to the clock has been connected to psychological disorders, obesity, stroke, heart attack, cancer and diabetes. We’re looking at what are some of the factors that might be causing that?”
Two students working in the lab with Mosier this summer said they are gaining foundational research skills that could help them achieve their goal of pursuing medical school.
“We’ve done a lot of background research and literary deep dives into scholarly articles and research papers, so we can relate what we know about proteins and their interactions to the circadian clock,” said Carlee Logan, a sophomore neuroscience major from Hickory, North Carolina. “Within that, we’re trying to see how we can relate it to diseases.”
In addition to using innovative lab equipment and reading scholarly articles, students got a head start on learning to write grant proposals, said Gracie Bruyere, a sophomore neuroscience major from Richlands, North Carolina.
Dual-Task Balance
Dr. Melike Kahya, assistant professor of physical therapy, is working in the Virtual Reality and Clinical Gait Analysis Lab with two students to analyze older adults’ balance when they must do two things at once (such as standing and performing a cognitive task simultaneously). They are also looking at overall brain activity and how noninvasive brain stimulation can improve balance when multitasking.
“With aging and the cognitive degeneration process, people usually have difficulties maintaining their balance,” said Kahya. “If you add another task when they’re standing, that can create much more difficulty for them to do two tasks at the same time and lead to either a fall or a decrease in cognitive performance or both.”
An electroencephalogram (EEG) is used to measure brain activity while individuals are standing and when standing while also doing a cognitive task. Once researchers have an understanding about brain activity, they use noninvasive brain stimulation on regions of the brain responsible for balance and cognitive tasks to understand whether modulation can improve performance. The goal is to eventually promote better balance, decrease the rate of falls and slow the progression of cognitive decline.
“I’ve learned how beneficial research can be,” said Rachel Smith, a senior exercise science major from Waxhaw, North Carolina. “It’s about creating methods to help people, which is inspiring. I feel this has strengthened my desire to go into further studies by just being able to work with other people and enhance my skills. I never thought as an undergraduate that I would be able to work with a graduate professor in a research lab, especially as established as this one.”
Serene Alshalabi, a senior biology major from Waxhaw, North Carolina, who plans to continue her studies in either physician assistant or medical school, said she transferred to HPU from another university because the previous school didn’t offer as many research opportunities. When she initially toured HPU, her tour guide was a biology and chemistry double major who advised her to email every science professor because each is involved in research.
“That’s exactly what I did, and I am very thankful for High Point University and for this research experience,” Alshalabi said.
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