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Rockers Make their Mark with Original Research
Rockers are ambitious learners. They are explorers, inspired thinkers, and they are some of the youngest published students in the world.
Simon's Rock students work side by side with accomplished faculty, who proudly share top billing on published papers and in academic journals. Rockers are also some of the youngest presenters at notable conferences where they meet and make lasting connections with distinguished scholars, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers.
In August 2018, six Rockers presented their work at conferences: Jonathan Gabor ’16, Sophia White ’15, Addison Allen ’15, and Daniel Packer ’14 attended the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry; and Darcy Pollard ’16 and Carla Hamida ’16 each presented papers at the Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (RAIS) Conference. Darcy presented on water security and civilian casualty minimization in Yemen, and Carla on the lack of decentralization of data.
Jonathan Gabor ’16
“Our students make us proud through their discoveries, accomplishments, publications, presentations, and theses, and we endeavor to support any student seeking to enhance their academic experience through research.”
-Pat Sharpe
Dean of Academic Affairs
Because class sizes are small, there are frequent opportunities for student-faculty collaboration at Simon’s Rock. The individualized attention helps cultivate a sense of excitement and agency in students’ work, which is often the impetus that leads to pursuing research opportunities.
Isabella Cho ’17
Isabella Cho ’17 studies biomedical engineering and has worked closely with her advisors, Chemistry Professor David Myers and Assistant Professor of Environmental Science Donald McClelland, and together they have developed a research project to ascertain the botanical origins of honey. There is currently no process to identify fingerprint compounds unique to certain types of honey, and their work could help detect fraudulent honey sources and affect true market valuations of the product.
Kai Naor ’12 is concentrating in psychology and contemporary critical theory, and his senior thesis is directly related to a research internship he has pursued with the help of his advisor, Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of Institutional Research Anne O’Dwyer. It isn't uncommon at Simon's Rock for a class project to evolve into a multiple-term research project, which in turn can become the foundation for a senior thesis. Along with Wynona Meyer ’15, Kai became a research assistant for staff psychologist Dr. Marilyn Charles of the Austen Riggs Center, a therapeutic community, open psychiatric hospital, and center for education and research in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They are studying narcissism, psychopathy, and addiction, and exploring possible links among these disorders through the lens of thinking, comprehending, and self-assessment. They intend to do statistical analysis to uncover potential patterns among the disorders to find out whether the data supports different preliminary hypotheses. Kai’s senior thesis explores the idea that these three disorders share a common etiology and sets out to prove they share common symptoms, both behaviorally and internally.
Rocker's ideas are as individualized and diverse as the students themselves, and with professors who see students as partners in the work of intellectual exploration, there are few limitations on what Rockers can achieve.