Students across Utah gathered at Southern Utah University in Cedar City Feb. 28 for the Utah Conference of Undergraduate Research.
The conference is modeled after the Nation Conference of Undergraduate Research. It was created with the goal of uniting students across multiple disciplines to share their research and achievements.
Faculty at the University of Utah condensed this idea to only focus on students in the state of Utah and held the first UCUR event in 2007 in Salt Lake City.
Utah Tech University was represented by 80 students from disciplines ranging from art, physical science and humanities.
One of the students representing Utah Tech was Emma Mancuso, a senior criminal justice major from Henderson, Nevada. She applied in October by writing an abstract detailing her research topic and was selected to present shortly after.
She spoke about 3D scanning, mapping technology and how it can be used within criminal justice investigation. She attributes her project’s inspiration to a trip to Singapore with a local digital forensic crime lab and her internship at INTERPOL, a crime analysis and prevention firm.
“They showed us… 3D scanning and mapping technology,” Mancuso said. “They were wondering how is that used in the U.S. right now. I wanted to take my research from actual crime scene investigators and detectives who work with the technology to see if they really feel like it’s a good fit for crime scene investigation.”
Hallee Hassell is a junior psychology major from Ogden who also represented the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She presented on the effects of childhood sexual abuse and said one of the main reasons she wanted to participate at UCUR was the influence of joining a psychology lab at Utah Tech.
“My lab group had done a whole big research study reporting on all different things like attachment styles, sexual literacy and body image,” Hassell said. “Nobody had ever reported on what they found with body image. So, I thought that I could connect that into something that I am interested in and present on it.”
She said most of the research process was spent compiling various resources about the topic and conducting a large-scale literature review that allowed her to form a hypothesis.
“Research is really tedious, but I really like it,” Hassell said. “It’s really interesting and there’s still so much to be done.”
The College of Health Sciences had a handful of representatives as well, one of whom was Spencer Luque, a senior individualized studies major, with a pre-physical therapy emphasis, from Orem.
“I initially got the idea during an English class,” he said. “I work in physical therapy and blood flow restriction is something I deal with on a pretty regular basis. So I thought, ‘Hey, let’s look at some of the effects of blood flow restriction on chronic pain management.’”
Luque said how working on a research paper in that English class and working with a physical therapist helped him conduct the research. His presentation argued how treatments similar to this could be used in place of pharmaceuticals or surgical treatments.
Luque said, “No matter what, you’re never done researching and there’s always something more to learn.”
