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I believe research is a great way to learn new skills-both technical and soft skills. The best way to get started is by reaching out to professors.
Mariam Shahab
Biosystems Engineering
Undergraduate Research in the Neighborhoods
The goal of Mariam’s research project was to determine if locusts can smell the two types of bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus (SA) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA), as well as differentiate between their two life phases, planktonic or biofilm. Surgeries on the locusts exposed their olfactory brain centers for electrode placement. She analyzed neural recordings from the locusts brain using Igor and MATLAB software to isolate individual neuron firing patterns and then perform both single neuron and population neural analysis. Mariam used dimensionality reduction techniques to visualize the data and leave-one-trial-out analysis to quantitatively assess the classification potential. Preliminary data shows that locusts uniquely encode the orders from the different types of bacteria and their life phases with greater than 70% accuracy.
Learn more about this and other research in the STEM Teaching and Learning Facility.
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