Every year, hundreds of undergraduate students in every major participate in research. They start out working in professors’ labs and often move to leading their own projects with grants from the university or other organizations. More than 500 of those students are presenting at NAU’s Undergrad Symposium on April 25; this annual event showcases research in the sciences, humanities, engineering, business, education and the arts. Learn more about the symposium and see the schedule online and read about a few of those exceptional students below.
What Do I Do? The Development of an Education Program for the Improvement of Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Child Welfare
Researcher: Isabela Herckes
Major: Business management and psychological sciences
Advisor: Beth McManis
Herckes got involved in research her second year of college through the Interns-2-Scholars program; she began working with McManis, an assistant professor in the College of Nursing, and the next two years she developed her own projects with funding from the Hooper Undergraduate Research Award (HURA).
Her original project investigated issues in how child welfare professionals respond to cases of potential child maltreatment. Herckes interviewed professionals in Coconino County and asked about common frustrations in responding to these situations.
She found the three biggest challenges were:
- Misunderstandings regarding agency protocols
- A lack of practical or hand-on training at regular and/or frequent intervals
- Miscommunication between entities on multidisciplinary teams.
That’s Phase I. For Phase II, she developed an online learning program geared toward child welfare professionals and mandated reporters. The program includes information about the responsibilities of different positions within the system, how to recognize warning signs of child maltreatment and exercises for learners to put this knowledge into practice. An early draft of this program will be shared with professionals later this year.
She’s learned a lot, both about the child welfare field and the importance of diving into research, asking questions and seeking information.
“Research forces you to engage with the content and make connections that you would not have recognized otherwise,” she said. “Each person doing research creates their own path but finds new knowledge that they can then contribute to their community.”
Decolonizing a Zooarchaeological Comparative Collection
Researcher: Max Schrader
Major: Anthropology
Advisor: Chrissina Burke
A year ago, Schrader started working in the Faunal Analysis Lab; for the last year, he’s worked with the Museum of Northern Arizona to provide data about the animal bones in their collection. Burke’s lab focuses on decolonizing zooarchaeology, and Schrader’s project focused on making the lab more accessible to Indigenous people.
This started with the knowledge that several local Indigenous communities can be negatively affected by interacting with animal bones. To gain a better understanding, Schrader met with Indigenous students and staff to learn more about their perspectives on interacting with animal bones, organizing animals and ways the lab could better support their interests.
They then made changes to the lab’s setup, including moving bones into opaque boxes with more informative labels and developing a public-facing inventory to help reduce unwanted interactions. He also helped developed more thorough trainings that take Indigenous viewpoints into account.
“I’m beyond grateful for the opportunities I had through undergraduate research, as they allowed me to apply my coursework to real situations and people in our community,” he said. “Not even a month into this project, nearly all of my lecture notes’ margins were filled with ways to connect what I was learning from my professors to this research.”
Creating Naturalistic Synthetic Speech for Low-Resource Languages
Researcher: Niah Nieuwenhuis
Major: Communications sciences and disorders
Advisors: Benjamin Tucker and Davis Henderson
You know how you can ask Google Translate to pronounce words and sentences in other languages? That’s courtesy of text-to-speech software, and besides being used to ask Alexa to change the channel, that technology is used by nonverbal people throughout the world to speak. Stephen Hawking is perhaps the most famous individual to use a speech synthesizer as his main method of communication.
However, for someone who wants a voice that sounds like their own, it’s complicated and expensive. Depending on the language they speak, it may not even be possible. There are no speech synthesizers in Navajo, despite 100,000 people speaking the language. That’s the hole Nieuwenhuis is filling with her research project, funded by the Hooper Undergraduate Research Award.
She has spent the past year creating a pilot program of a Spanish speech synthesizer using a young woman’s voice. She recorded five hours of speaking, then removed non-speech sounds, breaths and other fillers, leaving her with about two hours of data. (Siri learned from thousands of hours of data.) She then used that data to create a language model and synthesize speech, using deep neural network software Tacotron 2 and Waveglow. She created three different models: One that learned the language for about half a day, one that learned it for three days and one median model.
From there, she had each model translate 60 standardized sentences in Spanish and had native Spanish speakers listen to them and rate each on a scale of completely unnatural to completely natural. What Nieuwenhuis found was that with three days of computing, her speech synthesizer could say all sentences naturally.
That means a functional, customized speech synthesizer can be created quickly and relatively inexpensively. That in itself is great news, but that’s only part one of Nieuwenhuis’ project. Now that she knows the process to develop this synthesizer, she can replicate that process with Navajo.
“There is a need for culturally appropriate and linguistically diverse voices to be available to individuals who may not be able to pay for a company to synthesize their own voice,” she said. “Something as personal and authentic as voice is something that’s often not discussed, ironically.”
Indigenous Citizenship: Regulation of Citizenship in Colonial Empires and National Identities
Researcher: Erik Martinez
Major: History and anthropology
Adviser: Marcus Macktima
What does it mean to be an American citizen?
That’s a complicated question for Indigenous communities. Their members have been in the United States long before it was the United States, and they also belong to sovereign nations. Perhaps more importantly, how do Indigenous Americans feel about citizenship?
That’s the question Martinez asked in his research project, funded by the McKenzie Fellowship for Democracy, which looked at Latino and Indigenous communities along the U.S.-Mexico border and how citizenship has influenced intercommunity interactions. He went to Arizona communities and observed how identity was negotiated and understood.
What he learned through his research ranged from societal observations his individual experiences. First, the big picture: It’s complicated. Latino and Indigenous communities have a lot in common, including around citizenship. In Latino communities, for example, citizenship is a marker—some people had it, some had other legal residency, some were undocumented.
In Indigenous communities, the legacy of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which required tribal communities to create governments that mirrored the federal system and institute some form of tribal citizenship or membership, is still alive. Their standing within the United States is not legally in question, but it’s still complicated. And those communities, which have a long history of interactions and relationships on both sides of the border, now are focusing on protecting their stateside communities.
“The U.S. government is using citizenship almost like this carrot on a dangling stick—we’ll guarantee your citizenship as long as you cooperate as we combat undocumented migration,” Martinez said. “It’s this give and take, and some choose to protect their own.”
He also learned the importance of language—in this case, Spanish. Martinez described himself as a light-skinned Mexican and his Spanish as OK—usable, but not fluent. When he went into communities, he was immediately treated as an outsider until he began speaking. Even in those Indigenous communities, that opened doors for him.
For Martinez, who grew up in Utah and mainly interacted with Latinos and white Americans, this opportunity to work with a community that was like his but different helped him to understand the world more fully and understand the complexities of the diverse populations in the American Southwest.
“I did this research so I could learn more and so that I could find opportunities to help not only my community but other communities that face unique but similar problems in the United States,” he said.
Heidi Toth | NAU Communications
(928) 523-8737 | heidi.toth@nau.edu