A Photo-journalistic Journey into Okinawa

By Lizzy Santoro

 

I am a dual major in Photography and Political Science. My passion for social and political issues always compliments my artistic side. In summer 2016 I received an OUR summer grant to study the culture of the American military community of Okinawa, Japan. My decision to do a photo-journalistic research in Okinawa was motivated by a personal experience. My journey began when I joined an Okinawan martial arts dojo, Kodokai, seven years ago. My Sensei is a Marine Corps veteran who was stationed in Okinawa during the seventies and learned martial arts during his time there. He truly immersed himself in the culture and became versed in the conflict between the Okinawans and American military. By going to the dojo five days a week, three/four hours a day, for seven years I, too, learned about the culture and the relationship between the American military and Okinawa.

 

Left: Portrait of Santoro at UMass Dartmouth quad; right: Santoro’s photograph of two Okinawans taking a selfie with an American at Gate Two street in Okinawa, 2016.

 

There are 5 times as more American bases in Japan than in Afghanistan and 75% of those bases are located in just 0.6% of Japan’s landmass, on the island of Okinawa. This over-saturation of American military on a very small landmass has affected the area in a large number of tangible ways- both positive and negative. Okinawa’s economy, culture, and history have been strongly influenced by America; conversely, thousands of Americans have been shaped by the Okinawan culture and society.

 

Left: American soldier shares rations with Okinawan children in 1945; right: Santoro’s photograph of the Osprey helicopters on Futenma Air Base, 2016.

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In my recent travel, I did my best to tell the story of the American military presence in Okinawa through both texts and images. I took notes as I explored different places. I interviewed both Americans and Okinawans. I did research on my own and I captured the culture, utilizing the elegance of the frozen moment that only photographs can provide. It is important to note that my photographs are not just representations of reality; they are mediated images with deep meanings. Indeed, I did my best to capture important moments and locations and I “framed” these moments and locations in meaningful ways. Even though the final product–an illustrated book–ended up being not too long, it definitely proved to be very challenging. The recent history of Okinawa is incredibly complicated. It includes 70 years of injustice and Okinawan bitterness at both the Japanese and the American central governments. At the macro level, there are fierce political debates about how necessary the bases are in Okinawa, whether the Okinawan people have been subjugated by American and Japanese superpowers, and whether the bases do more harm than good. But there is also a less polarized micro reality. Most Americans are just doing their jobs. They were given relatively no choice to be stationed in Okinawa and are just fulfilling their duty as honorably as possible. Simultaneously, most Okinawans are just living their daily lives as best as they can, and as harmoniously as possible with their American neighbors.

 

Santoro’s photograph of a neighborhood near the American base, 2016. American iconography and English Signage are fairly common throughout Okinawa, but they are especially prevalent near the bases.

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There were more challenges than just the complexity of my research topic. I struggled particularly with the writing portion of this project because my upbringing put me on both sides of this debate. I grew up in a military family, with a father who was a Naval Commander and a brother training to be a Marine Corps officer. On the other hand, I have strong personal relationships with several people who are somewhat critical of the American military presence in Okinawa. The only way I could navigate through these conflicting emotions was to tell the story as historically accurate as possible. The result of this strategy is a book that is as removed from myself as I could manage; however, the origins of this book could not have been more personal because, for me, this research project is about a place where my second home was conceived. To read my book and to see more of my photographs, please click on the book’s cover:

 

 

Emotional Differences in Preschool-aged Children

By Alicia Cronister-Morais

 

During my first semester as a transfer student here at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth I was presented with an opportunity to join a research study.

My advisor, Dr. Robin Locke-Arkerson, was looking for interested students to participate in research conducted in her Child Emotion Center. Research projects in the Child Emotion Center examine emotional development in children, with specific interest in understanding how various emotional, cognitive, and biological processes influence social and emotional behavior.  Current and future projects  of the center include individual differences in emotional behavior, emotional understanding, neuroendocrine (cortisol) and cardiac physiology, attention, language, aggressive behavior, bullying, victimization, peer rejection, and loneliness.

Initially I started working in the Child Emotion Center as a volunteer, but my interest in research compelled me to participate at a greater level. I first assisted with a National Institute of Health (NIH) – funded study that examines multiple factors associated with emotional differences in preschool-aged children. Later, this complex study of child emotion gave me the opportunity to train on various behavioral, cognitive, and biological assessments.  Given the multitrait-multimethod design employed by the study, I was exposed to various forms of data collection, including child interviews, physiological assessments, teacher- and parent-reports, as well as behavioral measures. The behavioral measures are very expansive, with many tasks spanning the realm of various emotions. The interview measures tap into child receptive language skills and knowledge of their own and others’ emotions. I feel the cumulative exposure to the preparation and implementation of this study in Dr. Locke-Arkerson’s lab prepared me to partake in an individual research project. The summer grant I received from OUR and the CAS Dean’s summer research fellowship provided me with the funds to examine unique research questions within this complex study on child emotion. I independently carried out all roles required to conduct this research project. I was invested in all aspects of the study from the beginning (participant recruitment) to the end (participant compensation).  I interacted with many of the school staff and families that so kindly volunteered to participate in this important research on child emotion.  Most importantly, the OUR summer grant and CAS Dean’s fellowship provided an opportunity to examine questions on how language comprehension and emotion knowledge relate to peer rejection and externalizing behavior.  Preliminary findings from my research indicate that children with lower recognition of emotional faces and emotional situations were more likely than other children to be rejected by their peers. Furthermore, a child’s tendency to attribute anger to non-anger faces was also associated with greater peer rejection.  In addition, language comprehension was related to emotion knowledge and attention problems.

 

Cronister-Morais administering the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) as an assessment of receptive language during an interview with a preschool-aged child, 2016.

 

During this period I also submitted an abstract to present some of the preliminary results from my OUR and CAS Dean’s fellowship funded study at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) to be held in Austin, TX in April 2017. A future goal of mine is to submit a manuscript based on my findings for publication in a peer-reviewed journal of psychology.

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Being offered the opportunity to work at a greater capacity on this research project helped me understand the many different techniques employed by researchers to gain additional insight and information into how to improve everyday life. In particular, I am thankful for understanding how children’s language and emotion knowledge are important for adaptive social functioning and how they could be helpful in guiding early intervention and prevention. Recognizing deficits at an early age increases the ability to facilitate improvement in important aspects of a child’s relational functioning.

Coronister-Morais and her advisor Dr. Robin Locke-Arkerson at the 2017 SRCD (Society for Research in Child Development) Conference, where she presented her research poster.

 

In addition to addressing my own research questions, the data collection that occurred under the OUR summer grant and CAS Dean’s fellowship will be used to address goals of a broader future research. Research in psychology is very important: it helps elucidate what makes people think, feel, and act in certain situations. It can also give clinicians a better understanding of how relationships within families can improve. As a Psychology major, I wanted to get more involved with research in the field. When I first started at the university I hoped to gain as much experience within the discipline of psychology as I could; I wanted to better understand how research is conducted. The opportunity to work in Professor Locke-Arkerson’s lab with an OUR summer grant and CAS Dean’s summer fellowship was extremely valuable to me. Above all, it prepared me for graduate programs in clinical psychology. I am currently a full time Graduate student in the Master’s in Social Work Program at Bridgewater State University continuing my education. I will graduate 2020 after which I will obtain my license and become a therapist. My ultimate goal is to be an LICSW and open my own practice working with children and families. Choosing this clinical psychology path, I want to develop treatment models based on the factors that influence social development. Understanding how and why research is conducted has helped me in term of my future career goals. I look forward to assisting children and families develop the skills needed for productive relationships and better social interactions.

 

Exploring the Post-Industrial Landscapes of the Northeast

 

By Hannah Gadbois

 

I graduated from the Art History Department in May 2016. I am from Seekonk, Massachusetts and became interested in art history while attending high school there. As a native of New England, I was always intrigued by the post-industrial landscapes of this region. However, this post-industrial landscape became even more interesting to me when I took Architecture & Sustainability in the American Post-Industrial City, a course offered by Professor Pamela Karimi. The body of literature we covered in this class introduced me to the very many ways of looking at America’s post-industrial environments.

 

Gadbois and her classmates taking a tour of abandoned zones and vacant lots in the city of New Bedford, 2015.

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Since the closing of American factories in the late 1970s, post-industrial ruins have appeared in many parts of the UNited States. Whether left abandoned or transformed into new uses, the post-industrial building is a prevalent force on the Northeastern American setting. Accordingly, these buildings (especially their ruinous shells), have been popular subjects of both art and art historical research and are particularly of interest to photographers. Having read a vast body of literature on the American post-industrial city, I quickly learned that, unfortunately, many of these urban contexts end up remaining in ruins, a problem particularly common in Detroit. Foreign tourists come to see the abandoned factories, forcing the city to remain in disrepair with low quality of life for its citizens. What is the history of the fetishization or the neglect of the industrial ruin in the New England region? How far back does this history go? What can we learn from this history? How can this historical knowledge allow us to come up with better ways of representing these cities and even providing remedies for them?

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In fall 2015 I received a grant from the OUR to further investigate the ways in which the post-industrial landscapes of the Northeast were depicted in the work of late-twentieth century artists. My OUR funded research analyzed Northeastern American post-industrial ruins in the work of six artists from four perspectives: ruins as prophetic, ruins as nostalgic, ruins as disappointment, and ruins as problematic. The ambiguity of the ruin allows these vastly different lenses to color the interpretations of ruins photography. Their complex character in photography is also directly tied to their complicated relationship to American history. The post-industrial factory and its corresponding neighborhood was at once a symbol for American power and wealth as well as a reflection of the flawed class system that forced many into difficult labor. The period of prosperity in which factories were prominent was also a time of intense race and gender boundaries and reflections on the post-industrial building are innately tied to the society created by powerful class borders. The American’s relationship to the post-industrial ruin is inherently entwined with our complicated feelings about our difficult past. However, ruins are fundamentally ambiguous; the empty spaces can be nostalgic, prophetic, or escapist so meaning heavily relies on artists’ intentions and viewer expectations.

 

Bernd and Hilla Becher, Coal Tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania,1975. Screenshot from the Museum of Modern Art website. Available at http://www.moma.org/collection/works/109523?locale=en. © Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

 

The first, and possibly most instinctive, way to analyze photography of the post-industrial ruin is from the perspective of memory and nostalgia. In describing the famous photographs of abandoned factories taken by her and her husband, Hilla Becher says, “the olden days will never come back… there is nothing left of the facilities but memories.”[i] In that same interview, Becher discussed how her husband began to photograph factory ruins as a method of preserving them and the memories they held.[ii] The post-industrial ruin, from the moment of the industry’s closing in America, was doomed to crumble. Although the factory-workers were not living incredibly prosperous lives, the buildings still represented the American Dream. The time of the American factory was a time of self-made men and affordable goals. The factory was a way to set out on the path to prosperity, a fair-paying job that paved the road to success. The Bechers’ photographs reflect the sudden loss of a pervasive dream. The world rapidly changed, leaving many without steady jobs and a predictable role in society. With the economic downturn and outsourcing came turmoil. Bechers’ abandoned coal tipple reminds the viewer of the coal workers who had built lives around the industry, lives that were made suddenly transient.

Joachim Koester, Boarded Up House, Philadelphia, 2011. Screenshot from Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen. Available at http://www.nicolaiwallner.com/artists.php?action=details&id=3. © Galleri Nicolai Wallner.

 

The reminiscence surrounding ruins is not entirely innocent. Looking nostalgically back can inspire, “ideological phantasms,”[iii] where we imagine better, more simple pasts and void this period of American history of its underpinnings of racism, sexism, and classism. Many argue for a return to the factory period and neglect to acknowledge the negative basis of the era. Art historians, Magali Arriola and Andreas Huyssen, both warn against this possible role of ruins, cautioning against the destructiveness of the “picturesque ruin”[iv] on accurate historical memory. From this perspective, the ruin can serve to delude recollections into overly sentimental and optimistic views of a deeply flawed past. However, the ruin can also act to reignite memory. Rebecca Solnit argued that our memory is incomplete and ruins are, “our guides to situating ourselves in a landscape of time.”[v] Artist Joachim Koester shares this appreciation for ruins as providing an awareness of our place in history, allowing us to shape our future in, “better and surprising ways.”[vi] Of course, the difficultly here lies in the ambiguity of the ruin. The same building can be analyzed by one as a call to action and by another as a call to return to the past. Koester speaks passionately about his photographs of ruined buildings as liminal spaces that incite change, but their ambiguity lends itself to a multitude of interpretations, often reflecting what the viewer wishes to see.

Another prominent perspective in the realm of ruins photography is the ruin as prophetic. This lens stretches back to the beginning of ruins scholarship and specifically the popularity of Roman ruins in art. Denis Diderot analyzed the interest in ruins in the quote, “We contemplate the ravages of time, and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground; in that moment solitude and silence prevail around us, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that is no more. Such is the first tenet of the poetics of ruin.”[vii] The destruction of powerful buildings of the past inspires the viewer to look prophetically forward and predict the end of their own civilization, reminded of the ephemerality of society. This perspective is reflected in the work of Walker Evans who encouraged artists to, “Photograph the present as it would be seen in the past.”[viii]

This sense of a forewarned future is very present in Walker Evan’s cityscapes with their absence of human presence and partly destroyed facades. The city objectively existed during the period of factory-closings in the 60s and 70s but it looks as if it foretells a distant future, the future fall of our own civilization. This element of the foreseen destruction of a building is also a focus in the scholarship of Robert Smithson who describes the phenomena of the “ruins in reverse,” that, “rise into ruin before they are built.”[ix] Often, these reverse ruins are in construction sites, projects begun during periods of economic wealth and abandoned during slower economic times. Inherent to Smithson’s ruins in reverse is the concept of entropy, or that all things increase towards chaos.[x] Even in the process of building, the ruins are prophesized and subsequently inevitable. A similar analysis to Walker Evan’s work can be made of Stephen Shore’s. Shore photographed the American Northeast during the same period of the factory closings. His works share that prophetic emptiness, of a city vacant before its time. The closing of factories did not just produce abandoned factories, it created abandoned cities, empty of people and past prosperity. With that incredibly permeable barrenness came mixed feelings about the events that brought the cities to their current state.

Stephen Shore. Holden St, North Adams, Massachusetts, 1974. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Screenshot taken from the personal website of the artist. Available at  http://stephenshore.net/photographs/six/index.php?page=8&menu=photographs.

 

Reflecting on the situation of many Northeastern cities after the closing of major businesses, a good deal of artists and art historians turned to the ruin as a sign of their disappointment. Edgar Martins, the photographer of photo series ‘Ruins of the Second Gilded Age’ (later called ‘This Is Not A House’) described his photographed ruins in the statement, “They deploy the metaphor of struggle between poetic failures and the promise of success to suggest a place uncertain of its future.”[xi] Martins’ photographs reference the concept of ‘failure’ as he creates spaces that are almost ghost towns stuck in a “capitalist limbo” between “boomtown prosperity and quiet devastation.”[xii] While analyzing Martins’ work, art historian Gilda Williams wrote, “So much human failure from the recent past is tied up with ruins.”[xiii] She further argued that artists turned to ruins to lament the collapse of modernist ideas.[xiv] The hopeful and booming future that modernism had ceaselessly moved towards had suddenly collapsed. With the disappearance of the promised future came a reversal to the concept of progress. No longer was life getting increasingly better and many people now found themselves questioning the future they had always been certain of. Martins’ haunting photographs of buildings are interestingly timeless; they could have been abandoned minutes ago or decades. This immutability embodies the other perspectives, whether these ruins project our future or capture our past; they address a disappointment with our place in history.

 

Edgar Martins, Untitled, Connecticut. From This is Not a House Series, 2008. Screenshot taken from Purdy Hicks Gallery’s website. Available at http://www.purdyhicks.com/display.php?aID=243#2. © Purdy Hicks Gallery, London.

 

The final, and oft forgotten, perspective on photographic ruins is their problematic nature. Scholarship on the abstract nature of the ruin regularly neglects the fact that people still live in these areas. Though many fled to suburbia during the factories’ prosperity, the areas surrounding the industrial buildings still held a large population. Camilo Jose Vergara addresses that in his photo series, “Fern St., Camden” and “5^th Ave at 7^th Street” in which he photographed several streets in  industrial areas of Camden and Newark, New Jersey from 1979, the time of many factory closings, until 2014. Vergara describes his images as, “bricks that when placed next to each other reveal shapes and meanings of neglected urban communities.”[xv] His buildings are not ruins, they are homes. Of all the meanings that the ruin can hold to a removed observer, they cannot be more powerful than the understanding of the ruin as part of your home environment. Even if artists photograph with this in mind, these images of, “gutted buildings can never adequately describe the longstanding causes of urban poverty.”[xvi] The reflective nature of photograph allows for meditation on the subject but without hearing from the people who are living amongst ruins, one cannot truly understand the basis of the ruin. Furthermore, this reflection does not improve the neighborhood. Fetishizing ruins does nothing for the efforts to revitalize urban areas. Although the goal of this paper is to understand artistic intentions and the discourse surrounding the ruin, it is still entirely necessary to address the abstracted nature of ruin photography.

 

Camilo Jose Vergara, 15^th Ave at 7^th Street, Newark. NJ, 1980. Screenshot taken from the artist’s website. Available at http://www.camilojosevergara.com/Camden/Former-Camden-Free-Public-Library/1. © Camilo Jose Vergara.

 

American perspective on post-industrial ruins is above all else, temporal. The ruin is at once analyzed as nostalgic, prophetic, and a timeless symbol of failure. Tied up into our understanding of ruins are our feelings about our American past, our understandings of our flawed history and our shared hopes for what the future holds. Among all these hypotheticals, however, is the fact that the ruin exists in the hometowns of real people. As art historian Lucy Lippard once remarked, “Poverty is a great preserver of history.”[xvii] It is vastly important that we understand the complexities of our own place in history without romanticizing the past but it is exceedingly important to address the ruin not as a hypothetical but as a real issue. The photographed post-industrial ruin points to the American past of prosperity and unequal wealth while also gesturing towards our increasingly ambiguous future. The building itself cannot stand as a reminder to this, it is not “liminal,” or “marginal,” it is real and it must be addressed as such.

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While conducting my research on the portrayal of post-industrial cities in the Northeast, I worked on several off-campus research projects including one concerning the work of the renowned American landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt, for an exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum.

 

Snapshot of Gadbois’s article for RISD Museum’s Manual journal.

 

Upon graduation I received a Mellon Summer Internship grant from the RISD Museum. There I worked with Emily Peters at the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. My contributions involved cataloguing Flemish prints in the extensive RISD archives as well as publishing an essay in RISD Museum’s online journal, Manual.

 

Gadbois exploring New Bedford’s abolitionist homes at the New Bedford Registry of Deeds, 2016.

 

I am now continuing my research on the architecture of the city of New Bedford’s Abolitionist neighborhood. The project, called The Aesthetics and Architectonics of an Abolitionist Neighborhood is led by Professor Karimi and is funded by a Creative Economy Grant. So far, in my capacity as a research assistant to the project, I have conducted research at the archives of the Whaling Museum, The New Bedford Registry of Deeds, and the New Bedford Public Library.  These research projects have prepared me well for graduate school. I am currently applying to several graduate programs in Art History and I hope to be a professor of Art History, training the future generation of Americans.

 

References

[i]  “Hilla Becher Interviewed at Paris Photo,” Phaidon, November 12, 2012, accessed March 29, 2016, http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2012/november/21/hilla-becher-interviewed-at-paris-photo/.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii]  Andreas Huyssen, “Authentic Ruins,” in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 53.

[iv] Magali Arriola, “A Victim and a Viewer: Some Thoughts on Anticipated Ruins,” in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011), 174.

[v] Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 354-355.

[vi] “Questionnaire: Joachim Koester,” Frieze, November 1, 2010, accessed March 30, 2016, https://frieze.com/article/questionnaire-joachim-koester/.

[vii] Denis Diderot, “Le Salon de 1767,” trans. John Goodman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 196-197.

[viii] Department of Photographs. “Walker Evans (1903–1975).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm (October 2004).

[ix] Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writing, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 68-74.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] David W. Dunlap, “Behind the Scenes: Edgar Martins Speaks,” New York Times, July 31, 2009, accessed April 2, 2016, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/behind-10/?_r=0.

[xii] Gilda Williams, “It Was What it Was: Modern Ruins,” in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 96.

[xiii] Ibid, 97.

[xiv] Ibid, 96-99.

[xv] Camilo Jose Vergara, “From the Inner Cities to the White House,” Time, July 9, 2013, accessed April 1, 2016, http://time.com/3800841/from-the-inner-cities-to-the-white-house-photographs-by-camilo-jose-vergara/.

[xvi] Richard B. Woodward, “Disaster Photography: When is Documentary Exploitation?” ArtNews, February 6, 2013, accessed April 1, 2016, http://www.artnews.com/2013/02/06/the-debate-over-ruin-porn/.

[xvii] Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates, 355.

Does Ego-Resilience Impact Friendship Outcomes?

 

By Elizabeth B. Lozano

 

I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, as well as a Master’s degree in Research Psychology from UMass Dartmouth. Currently, I’m a first-year doctoral student studying Social Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The story of my research began in 2009 as a freshman at UMass Dartmouth. Having always wanted to be a “doctor”, I felt completely unsure of my future and where I was headed. Luckily, Dr. Trina Kershaw’s PSYCH 101 class (in particular, her weekly book club) got me really excited about Psychology! This interest quickly developed into my active involvement as an undergraduate research assistant.

As the next few years passed, the passion for serving as an RA blossomed into my undergraduate thesis as a Commonwealth Honors Program Scholar and consequently, my desire to attend graduate school. I was extremely fortunate to have a faculty member whose research was closely aligned with my own. Dr. Mahzad Hojjat had a keen interest in Positive Psychology which led to my idea of studying resilience and positive emotions in the context of friendship. As daunting as the project was at times, I knew it was going to help me further my goals.

Looking back, the person who truly inspired me was, indeed, my advisor, Dr. Hojjat. Despite every challenge, she encouraged me to keep going. Every week I looked forward to our talks about research and academia. As we bonded throughout the years, Dr. Hojjat became the role model that I wished to emulate.

 

 

Elizabeth B. Lozano and Dr. Mahzad Hojjat at the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) conference, 2015.

 

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By the time application deadlines for graduate programs approached, I was certain that my dream was taking hold. Not only had I established fruitful contact with potential lab directors (i.e., PIs), but I possessed summa cum laude standing, approximately four years of research experience, and leadership in extracurricular activities. In an effort to present myself even better, I chose to pursue a terminal Master’s degree in Research Psychology and accept a teaching assistant-ship for my tenure of graduate school. It is through these opportunities that I obtained valuable experiences, such as supervising an undergraduate honors student on her thesis and co-teaching the lab component of a graduate-level statistics class. Above all, I published the results of my OUR funded honors thesis research. The research examined the connection between resilience and beneficial outcomes in young adult friendships. It was found that resilience and positive emotions were associated with desirable friendship outcomes such as closeness, maintenance behaviors, and received social support. Most importantly, we are among the first to discover that positive emotions mediate (or explain) this relationship. Our results have important implications for interpersonal functioning, most notably that positive emotions may lead to positive behaviors (i.e., friendship maintenance) and higher quality friendships.

 

Left: The cover page of the Journal of Individual Differences, where Lozano’s OUR funded research was published; right: Snapshot from Lozano’s article, written in conjunction with Mahzad Hojjat and Judith Sims-Knight.

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Two years later, and with considerably more experience, I applied to PhD programs. I had two options. The first option was to work as an IRB Analyst at Tufts University in Boston, close to home, while the second prospect involved moving my life to Illinois to work in a research lab at U of I. Rather than focusing on the short-term sacrifices (e.g., location, time, and money), I recognized that the research position would give me more opportunities to network, all the while allowing me to do what I love. Later that year, I was accepted to the PhD program in Social Psychology at the University of Illinois In Urbana-Champaign.

Fast forward to October 2016 and I’m about a month into my long-awaited journey as a doctoral student. My new advisor and I are working on a series of experiments investigating whether blame and praise are socially contagious. We’re particularly interested in the ways that individuals quantify these judgements.

The six years at UMass Dartmouth were some of the best years of my life — every experience helped cultivate my strong work ethic and desire to excel in research, thanks to the passion and support of faculty and staff. I can safely say that my scholarly experience as a Corsair effectively prepared me for the challenges of today, where I am a student at one of the best Social Psychology programs in the country. It is my hope that sharing my research journey will encourage readers to pursue their passion despite the many challenges and roadblocks that may lie ahead.

 

Reference
*Elizabeth B. Lozano, Mahzad Hojjat and Judith Sims-Knight, Journal of Individual Differences (2016), 37, pp. 128-134. DOI: 10.1027/1614-0001/a000197. © 2016 Hogrefe Publishing.

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Going into the Cloud to Study Renewable Energy Extraction from Ocean Waves

 

By Cole Freniere

 

I joined the Computational Multiphase Flow Research Group in the summer after my sophomore year. Led by Dr. Mehdi Raessi, the research group is primarily focused on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of two immiscible fluids interacting with moving or stationary solid bodies. Specifically, I was assigned to a project funded by the National Science Foundation (CBET Grant No. 1236462), which involved simulations of Ocean Wave Energy Converters interacting with ocean waves. These Wave Energy Converters are complex to simulate, and require a large supercomputer to run for an extended period of time. How quickly the supercomputer solves the problem mainly depends on its hardware – processors, network cables, etc. There are several supercomputers available to us as university researchers, but we wanted to explore a new option – Cloud Computing. Amazon, whom we all know for its large online store, also offers computing resources in the Cloud, which customers can essentially “rent.” It is possible to build a supercomputer in the cloud, for a cost that depends on how powerful the hardware is, and how long we use the resources. The grant I received from the OUR provided the funds we needed to “benchmark” Amazon’s Cloud to see if it would be an economically feasible option for us. The outcome of the study was that Amazon’s Cloud offers a high amount of flexibility, and short term benefits, but over the long term, it is not an economically feasible alternative to university supercomputers. This is mainly because we need access to these resources continuously for long periods of time, which is not the Cloud’s strong-suit at this point. However, it seems more appealing for smaller, short term projects, for example: engineering consulting work. The cloud is also compelling because it offers so many different sets of hardware, which all are a low price to test, and enables exploration of the many different flavors of hardware available.

 

Left: The cover page of the CiSE journal; right: the front page of Freniere’s undergraduate research publication, which was partially supported by the OUR.

 

In this OUR supported project, I worked with Prof. Mehdi Raessi and his PhD student Ashish Pathak (both from the Mechanical Engineering Dept.) as well as Dr. Gaurav Khanna, Professor at the Physics Department and the Associate Director of the Center for Scientific Computing & Visualization Research. Dr. Khanna is well known for his Playstation supercomputer that is used for Black hole simulations. It was a pleasure collaborating with the experts in computational physics, and a great learning experience.

I presented the results from this OUR funded project at the American Physical Society, Division of Fluid Dynamics conference, which had more than 2,000 attendees; this was during my senior year, which is rare for an undergraduate student. In addition, I gave presentations at three other local research conferences. I was also able to publish my work* in the journal of Computing in Science and Engineering, co-published by the IEEE Computer Society and the American Institute of Physics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Freniere watching the clock count down before he begins his timed presentation at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics conference, 2016.

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My OUR funded project was very fruitful for many reasons. It provided insight into an unexplored alternative to meet my research group’s supercomputing needs, and the Journal publication contributes to a specialized area of research. Also, the project enabled me to experience presenting at a research conference, and publishing a paper. Finally, it was a valuable experience because I learned something about a growing field of interest – High Performance Computing (HPC). This changed the way I view science and made me reflect on the capability of computer models. Additionally, it made me wonder: to what extent can we really simulate physical phenomena? Nowadays, the scope of simulations that scientists and engineers are implementing is incredible, and new advancements are being made all the time. I find scientific computing a compelling subject, and it is the main reason I decided to pursue a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering.

This project was related to my research on Ocean Wave Energy Converters, because it introduced me to the field of High Performance Computing, and gave me an idea about how the simulation model performs on different types of supercomputers. Supercomputers come in many different flavors, and it is not always apparent which flavor is the best, because different algorithms require specialized hardware to run efficiently. For instance, data analytics and molecular dynamics models would require a completely different structure of supercomputer for optimal efficiency. When we get access to better hardware, we can do larger simulations which solve higher levels of complexity of the ocean wave motion as it interacts with the Wave Energy Converter. This can significantly increase insight into the physical problem. I am very excited to present the Wave Energy research at the 2016 American Physical Society conference in Portland, Oregon.

 

 

Computer simulation of an ocean wave energy converter. The device is a buoyant flap which pivots around a shaft on the ocean floor. Courtesy of Ashish Pathak.

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As a mechanical engineering student, I was compelled by the subject material, and I was eager to get involved with undergraduate research. I also enrolled in the 5 year BSMS program, which enabled me to take graduate courses my senior year, which count towards both a bachelor’s and master’s degree. In my view, undergraduate research can be an excellent way to accelerate a graduate degree. Research is also interesting because during the course of conducting a research project, one always learns something new; it never really gets old and, above all, it is intellectually challenging. Another noteworthy issue is that everybody’s research trajectory is different. So, I can’t really tell you what it’s like to do research–you will need to see for yourself!

 

Reference

*Cole Freniere, Ashish Pathak, Mehdi Raessi, Gaurav Khanna, “The Feasibility of Amazon’s Cloud Computing Platform for Parallel, GPU-Accelerated, Multiphase-Flow Simulations,”Computing in Science & Engineering, vol. 18, no. , pp. 68-77, Sept.-Oct. 2016, doi:10.1109/MCSE.2016.94.