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Undergraduate Research

At TLU, any student has the opportunity to participate in faculty-led undergraduate research.

Undergraduate Research Opportunities

Undergraduate Research Opportunities

  • Develop critical thinking skills
  • Foster teamwork and collaboration
  • Increase marketability to potential employers
  • Serve as career preparation

Summer Research

In addition to research done during the school year, TLU’s summer research programs give students hands-on experiences in specialized areas ranging from lab work, to the intersection of theology and gender, to diabetes education in local communities.

These independent studies allow students the opportunity to work closely with professors and gain valuable experience in their prospective fields.

Microbiology Research Lab

TLU is a Council On Undergraduate Research (CUR) Affiliate

CUR provides support and professional development opportunities for faculty, staff, administrators, and students.

Our publications and outreach activities are designed to share successful models and strategies for establishing, nurturing, and institutionalizing undergraduate research programs.

Young Student Performing Chemsitry Research

They assist administrators and faculty members in improving and assessing the research environment at their institutions.

CUR recognizes institutions that have exemplary undergraduate research programs and faculty who have facilitated undergraduate research at their institutions through their mentorship and leadership.

They also provide information on the importance of undergraduate research to private foundations, government agencies, state legislatures, and the U.S. Congress.

Faculty, staff, administrators, students, and colleagues from all types of academic institutions and organizations form the dynamic CUR membership.

Faculty-Led Research

fNIRS Lab

As part of ongoing research, students Macey Barton, Makayla Unks, Abby Becerra, Malia Mikol, recent graduate Lance Radtke’ 22, Psychology Professor Dr. Scott Bailey and Assistant Psychology Professor Dr. Elizabeth Woods collaborated on neuroscience projects in the functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Lab.

fNIRS Research Lab
Macey Barton, Makayla Unks, Dr. Elizabeth Woods, Dr. Scott Bailey, Malia Mikol, Lance Radtke ’22, and Abby Becerra.

FNIRS instrumentation permits ecologically valid, real-world insight into brain activity while participants engage in cognitive tasks that are common in academic settings and standardized assessments of scholastic aptitude. The research teams investigated brain regions involved in easy and difficult language and math tasks. In the language experiment, participants were instructed to attend to letters in a list of familiar and unfamiliar words.

They were slower and less accurate at performing the task with familiar words, perhaps because participants were considering the meanings of the words rather than their constituent letters. Results from the math experiment extend the sparse fNIRS literature on mental math. Math anxiety influenced speed and accuracy during simple and complex multiplication and order of operations tasks. A key takeaway from this research was that participants activated left and right hemispheres when tasks were more cognitively demanding, consistent with neuroimaging data from other labs.

Results from both projects raised many additional questions the group looks forward to pursuing. The research teams are grateful for the generous financial support of Knaier, Inc. and alumnus Mark Knaier ’82 who supports the fNIRS lab.

Team Rice

In 2013, Assistant Chemistry Professor Dr. Alison Bray received an E. Kika De La Garza grant from the U.S Department of Agriculture and “Team Rice” began examining arsenic uptake by rice plants. Now in their ninth year, Team Rice’s initial research has sparked many new projects, like investigating other foods for metal or metalloid contamination like basil, measuring potential contaminants in a wide variety of commercial dog foods, and trying to make a polymer that will absorb contaminants like arsenic from the water before the plants are grown.

Team Rice USDA Research Greenhouse
Dr. Alison Bray and former Team Rice researcher and Biochemistry major Jenny Carrillo '21. Carrillo is currently a research assistant in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Texas at San Antonio's Long School of Medicine. After joining Dr. Bray’s team, she was drawn toward pursuing research in graduate school.

This summer, the sixth generation of TLU’s agricultural and environmental chemistry group, Team Rice 6.0, continued experiments to examine rice plants grown in soil containing arsenic and cadmium. The group has continued to study arsenic and cadmium as they are both carcinogens and at high concentrations can be toxic The popular press has reported many studies of elevated concentrations of arsenic in rice as well as rice containing products like baby cereal. This crop of plants were grown under different conditions with some plants flooded like a typical rice paddy and others in moist but not flooded conditions.

Most recently, students Casey Martin, Cat Ramos, and Mark Mainez worked with plants grown by Team Rice 5.0 over the academic year to determine the elemental concentration of these two contaminants in the stems, leaves, leaf tips, and seeds in order to gain a better understanding of how these elements distribute through the plant under different growing conditions.

Using Optical Emission Spectrometry and Mass Spectrometry, the students found that we were unable to detect any uptake of cadmium by the plants and that the plants grown in arsenic soil were extremely stunted. Unlike their previous data, the students found that most of the arsenic collected in the plant stems, but this likely reflects the very poor growth of the plants grown in arsenic contaminated soil.

STEM Undergrads Reaching For Excellence (SURE)

Students and faculty from Biology, Math, Psychology, Integrated Science, and Physics all participate in the STEM Undergrads Reaching for Excellence (SURE) research program funded through a National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education grant. The grant supports research at Hispanic Serving Institutions like TLU, and students presented their findings during a special summer research symposium.

SURE Grant Summer Research Students
Students and faculty from Biology, Math, Psychology, Integrated Science, and Physics all participated in the STEM Undergrads Reaching for Excellence (SURE) research program funded through a National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education grant. The grant supports research at Hispanic Serving Institutions like TLU, and students presented their findings during a special summer research symposium.

Annual Student Academic Symposium

Started in 2009, the annual Student Academic Symposium (SAS) allows students to share the culmination of their senior thesis or capstone project with the campus community. From conducting and artwork to research on type 2 diabetes and higher education funding in Texas, students have the opportunity to showcase their talent, skills, and knowledge in various academic areas. Over the years, presentations have ranged from "A Review of Three Lactobacillus Species and Their Ability to Reduce the Antigenicity of Cow's Milk Protein" to “Black Masculinity and Responses to the Moynihan Report in Ebony Magazine.”