Undergraduate students have energized the warm summer days at Emory College of Arts and Sciences by testing themselves.
From challenging their skills with complex piano performances to upending expectations about molecular reactions, the students in the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program have expanded their coursework with full-time, hands-on research.
This year’s SURE program included 111 students and affiliate researchers.
Launched 35 years ago as an initiative to support students in the natural sciences, SURE has since grown to encompass those studying the social sciences, humanities and the arts. The program provides free housing and 10 weeks of independent research working directly with professors.
SURE is a centerpiece of the Pathways Center’s Undergraduate Research Programs. In addition to giving students more time to explore their interests and possible career paths, SURE helps them hone the perseverance, creativity and problem-solving skills they will apply in their post-Emory lives.
“Research is not just an academic skill confined to the natural sciences — it’s a life skill that all Emory students need to develop to navigate an increasingly ambiguous world,” says Branden Grimmett, vice provost for career and professional development and Emory College associate dean. “I am thrilled to see more social sciences, arts and humanities students and faculty embracing the SURE program. The thriving research culture at Emory is a testament to our students' curiosity and love of learning.”
The program will culminate with SURE participants and other student researchers showcasing their work at the Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium on Wednesday, July 31. Activities kick off at 9 a.m. with performances at the Emory Performing Arts Studio on North Decatur Road. Oral and poster presentations will continue at 10:30 a.m. in the Emory Student Center.
Designed to invite questions and discussion on the students’ achievements, the symposium is open to the broader community.
The 2024 SURE students hailed from Emory’s Atlanta and Oxford College campuses. Meet four who will present at the symposium.
Ajani Claxton-Warner: The privilege of exploration
As a sophomore last year at Oxford College, Ajani Claxton-Warner knew declaring a philosophy, politics and law major would help him reach his goal to become a trial lawyer. He was far less certain about what his research idea — looking at historical African American music — would look like or how it fit into his plans.
Brainstorming with Regina Barrett, Oxford’s director of programs in academic affairs, led him to Emorja Roberson, an assistant professor of music who specializes in gospel and classical music.
Together, they shaped a project that focuses on the music and storytelling in three song arrangements that use Psalm 23 for the text.
The “Lord is my shepherd” verse comforted Claxton-Warner during his own anxiety and uncertainty. His summer research included reviewing case studies on the pieces and conducting one-on-one interviews with those who performed them.
Most significantly, he says, he learned how to listen to a cappella, gospel and chorale arrangements to reveal how separate sacred traditions interpret the metaphor, which deepened his own spiritual journey.
He will share his research by including snippets of the different songs and seeking audience participation during his oral presentation at the symposium.
“The practice of intentional listening, then going deeper to articulate what you’re feeling, was entirely new to me,” says Claxton-Warner, whose research inspired him to write poetry and songs.
“The privilege of this exploration is it challenged me to develop a more well-rounded sense of how to tell stories within different frameworks,” he adds.
As a SURE mentor for the first time, Roberson was excited to immerse a student in the different performances, including at a recent Hymn Society conference on the Atlanta campus. Roberson plans to do more than participate in the program in the future. He has already decided to incorporate some of Claxton-Warner’s research in his fall course on the globalization of gospel music.
“It has been inspiring to see Ajani looking at what informs this music for the composer and the techniques composers use to create emotion for the audience,” Roberson says. “I have a firm belief that music will always be interdisciplinary because there is so much you can glean from it.”
Nyasha Musoni: Putting puzzle pieces together
Researching how a high-blood pressure medication might be repurposed to overcome chemoresistance in prostate cancer could seem like straightforward medicinal chemistry work.
Rising senior Nyasha Musoni can attest that it isn’t. And the challenges, such as making the special type of molecule needed to create and test a new compound, are exactly the appeal.
“I specifically like the puzzle piecing of chemistry,” says Musoni, a double major in film and media and chemistry. “Seeing how all of these molecules come together, putting together little pieces of the puzzle, is literally all I want to do.”
With plans to pursue a joint MD/PhD degree, Musoni began conducting research the spring of her sophomore year with chemistry professor Frank McDonald. She successfully synthesized the necessary chiral (or left- and right-handed) molecules for the drug repurposing last spring.
She has continued that work in SURE this summer through Maximizing Access to Research Careers (MARC), Emory’s undergraduate-only program funded by the National Institutes of Health focused on biomedical, public health and other science research.
Being full-time in the lab gave Musoni the time needed for closely monitoring the experiments to show that two chemical reactions creating the molecule, or ligand, were happening at essentially the same time, instead of in sequence.
“There is something funny with this chemistry, because Nyasha has documented that the first reaction triggers a faster second reaction, which is not often observed,” says McDonald, who is also a member of the Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute.
“Now that she has shown how to create the ligand as part of the catalyst to do the chemistry we want to test, we can set up control experiments, and we plan to thoroughly test the catalysts early in fall semester,” McDonald adds. “Nyasha has been making real progress this summer.”
Musoni has practiced giving updates on her research during SURE networking and professional development events this summer. That same research will become her honors thesis.
She plans to apply what she learned listening to other students’ projects — including one on 19th-century theater — and her film courses to break down her project’s story during an oral presentation at the symposium.
“If you’re having a good time talking about it, I’m going to have a good time hearing about it,” Musoni says of listening to her peers. “Working on this project in particular, where the larger impact and medical application is clear, provides me with a lot of motivation to enjoy talking about it.”
Alex Martinez: Conducting research, building community
Growing up in Houston, Alex Martinez instinctively understood “fixin’ to” and Texas drawls.
Then he arrived at Oxford College and met people from around the globe using dozens of languages, dialects and phrases on the small campus 36 miles east of Atlanta.
Now a rising senior with a joint psychology and linguistics major, Martinez mentioned his interest in such social factors of language last year to Emory linguistics teaching professor Susan Tamasi. The chat led to his SURE project: figuring out ways to build a database of Emory students’ speech.
The work serves as the foundation of Emory Voices, Tamasi’s long-envisioned idea to record every undergraduate as incoming first-year students and again as seniors, capturing features such as vocabulary, accent and intonation. That data would be open for researchers from multiple fields to study.
“This is a strange and big project, but Alex has gone further than I ever expected because of his attention to detail and ability to extract ideas from what he’s reading,” Tamasi says. “To do this work, he also has to build community by talking to people, which I know he can do because his research came out of a conversation we had.”
Martinez has completed literature reviews and begun testing questions designed to encourage natural discussions to record. He also has developed questions that reveal language attitudes, or speakers’ opinions about terms and phrases.
For his symposium presentation, he will share some of those questions and how smaller projects approached similar research.
“The vision is to be able to ask questions like whether students incorporate ‘y’all’ into their vocabulary by being in the South or if all Emory students start saying ‘Coke’ for any kind of soda,” Martinez says. “Every piece of it is cool, and it’s been hugely important in letting me explore whether I could do this kind of research and feel passionate about it.”
Martinez is certain enough in the topic and his skills that he plans to continue working with Tamasi in the fall and to pilot interviews. He is less certain about what else his future has in store, but his work with Tamasi has helped how he views that uncertainty.
“It brings me a lot of comfort to know that she didn’t know she wanted to be all the impressive things she is now when she was in my position,” Martinez says. “Right now, I think research in general might be too broad for me, but then I also think I could do this project or something like it forever.”
Peiming Yang: Developing skills from a personal challenge
With a double major in music composition and psychology, rising senior Peiming Yang originally thought he would conduct research this summer related to human behavior.
By pairing with Elena Cholakova, Emory’s professor of piano studies and an associate music professor, for in-depth study and performance of Chopin’s Ballade No. 2 and No. 3, he focused instead on his own behavior.
“I wanted to challenge myself, so I set an overall target to play all four Chopin ballades by graduation,” Yang says of the single-movement piano pieces renowned for their poetic atmosphere and elaborate complexity. “SURE has been a great opportunity to work with Dr. Cholakova to make the pieces more understandable.”
Creative endeavors expand the common understanding of research with their original contributions. They also build on traditional investigations, such as Yang’s work to read thematic analyses and to listen to virtuoso recordings of the pieces.
Cholakova guided Yang on that deeper consideration, mentoring his ability to visualize the pieces and unearth the contrasts that add to their depth. She also reviewed recordings of his two- and three-hour daily practices.
Despite being primarily self-taught — he had only two years of piano lessons as a child — Yang is making the connections required to play such intricate works, Cholakova says.
“When we perform Chopin, we try to imitate the human voice,” she says. “Musically speaking, they are a combination of extreme technicality and refined listening and production. Peiming has improved his playing and pedaling, which means his listening skills have improved.”
Yang is one of two pianists, both Cholakova’s students, who will perform at the symposium at Emory’s Performing Arts Studio on North Decatur Road. It will be his debut performance of Chopin — and the first time he has played anywhere but for himself and in class.
He is open to playing in competitions once the academic year begins, when he will work on Ballade No. 4 and apply for graduate school. Yang still plans to become a clinical psychologist but says his summer research has gotten him closer to one goal.
“I want to be able to call myself a pianist,” Yang says.