Category: SRS Round 3 (March 2026)

CLOSED: Using GIS to identify wildland firefighting tactics (Calvin Bryan)

Remote: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 6 weeks, finishing on 7/17/2026.

Project Description

In this project, students will use GIS programs to investigate how aircraft have been employed in combating active wildfires. Data has been collected on the exact times and locations of aerial drops of fire retardant from firefighting aircraft over about five years. Students will use this data, along with spatial data on wildfire burn boundaries over the same time period, to help identify the objective of each retardant drop. This data will ultimately be used as a part of a project to estimate the effectiveness of aerial firefighting at actually altering wildfire outcomes.

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Prerequisites

At a minimum, students should be familiar with ArcGIS. It will also be useful if students have experience working in R, Python, and/or have an interest in AI and machine learning.

Special Comments

Students will need to have access to ArcGIS. They will be able to do some of this work from home if they can use it on their personal computer, but may have to work from a campus computer if not.

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 7/17/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 6 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 1

Research Location: Remote

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Calvin Bryan (email: cbryan@wlu.edu)

AI Rhetoric in Crowdfunding: Signal or Hype? (Bright Frimpong)

Remote: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 8 weeks, finishing on 7/31/2026.

Project Description

Are you interested in artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship? Are you curious about how language shapes investment decisions in digital marketplaces? Are you concerned about whether entrepreneurs authentically represent their technological capabilities? Then this project is for you. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have democratized venture financing, allowing everyday consumers to back entrepreneurial projects. Entrepreneurs increasingly use AI-related language in their pitches, claiming their products use terms like “machine learning,” “neural networks,” “intelligent algorithms” or “generative AI”. However, the ease of invoking AI terminology raises a critical question: does AI rhetoric genuinely signal technological innovation, or does it simply exploit hype to attract funding? Can everyday backers decipher genuine AI capabilities from exaggerated claims? Understanding how backers respond to AI rhetoric has important implications for platform governance, consumer protection, and entrepreneurial legitimacy. This project investigates how AI rhetoric in crowdfunding campaigns affects funding outcomes. Specifically, we will compare campaigns that employ AI-related language with those that do not, examining whether AI rhetoric increases funding success and backer engagement. Furthermore, we will explore whether the credibility of AI claims, indicated by factors such as the entrepreneur’s technical credentials, specificity of technical descriptions, or prior track record, moderates backers’ responses to AI rhetoric. Using data from Indiegogo and Kickstarter, student researchers will employ computational text analysis tools to systematically identify and categorize AI-related language across thousands of campaign descriptions. Students will gain hands-on experience with natural language processing techniques, learn to extract meaningful patterns from unstructured text data, and develop skills in designing empirical studies that connect linguistic features to economic outcomes.

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Prerequisites

Students must have completed BUS 202 or its equivalent.

Special Comments

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 7/31/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 8 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 2

Research Location: Remote

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Bright Frimpong (email: bfrimpong@wlu.edu)

Building Literacy Through Access: Examining the Impact of a Bilingual School Library on English Vocabulary Development in Nepal (Sarah Margalus)

Remote: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 6 weeks, finishing on 7/17/2026.

Project Description

Illiteracy remains a significant educational challenge in Nepal, where nearly 40% of individuals lack access to literacy opportunities. Educational poverty closely correlates with income poverty, and students attending community schools often have limited access to high-quality instructional resources, particularly in English. English fluency is essential for university admission and employment opportunities in Nepal, yet students from under-resourced schools frequently graduate with limited proficiency. This project examines the impact of developing a bilingual (Nepali–English) school library on English vocabulary acquisition among multilingual learners at a community school in Nepal. The library includes approximately 4,800 books in both Nepali and English, carefully selected to provide comprehensible, engaging texts aligned with students’ interests. Grounded in second language acquisition theory emphasizing meaningful input and literacy-rich environments, the research investigates how access to readable, interest-driven texts supports vocabulary growth among students who are often third- or fourth-language learners. The study contributes to scholarship on literacy access, multilingual education, and the role of school libraries in supporting language development in under-resourced contexts. Student researchers will transcribe handwritten or scanned student writing into accurate digital text, verify transcription accuracy, organize writing samples for analysis, run computer programs to collect and analyze vocabulary data, ensure data integrity, and collaborate with the faculty and lead student researcher to interpret emerging findings. Additional research in education may be required. Tasks may include reading and summarizing scholarly articles.

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Prerequisites

Coursework or experience in education, literacy studies, linguistics, psychology, or related fields is preferred but not required. Attention to detail, strong writing skills, and comfort working with digital documents and data are important.

Special Comments

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 7/17/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 6 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 2

Research Location: Remote

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Sarah Margalus (email: smargalus@wlu.edu)

Depression and Aesthetic Experience (Angela Sun)

Remote: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 6 weeks, finishing on 7/17/2026.

Project Description

This project will examine the effect of depressive symptoms on our perception, attention, and emotional responses to art and other aesthetic objects. While philosophical aesthetics has a long tradition of analyzing “the aesthetic attitude” and the conditions for proper aesthetic appreciation, and clinical research in psychology and psychiatry has documented depression’s effects on affect and cognition, the overlap remains underexplored. Student researchers will gain expertise on ways that scholars from various disciplines have approached depression and aesthetic experience and provide assistance in synthesizing these findings into a philosophical argument.

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Prerequisites

Students must be rising senior philosophy majors

Special Comments

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 7/17/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 6 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 2

Research Location: Remote

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Angela Sun (email: asun@wlu.edu)

Florence As It Was (George Bent)

On campus: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 8 weeks, finishing on 7/31/2026.

Project Description

Florence As It Was combines three-dimensional models of buildings, digitized documents, photogrammetric models of art works, translations of early modern descriptions, and original interpretative essays in an academic, not-for-profit, web-based platform that aims to recreate the Tuscan city as it appeared in the year 1500. Work conducted in 2026 will focus on editing point clouds and using Blender and Cinema4D to manipulate models to reconstruct spaces as they may have appeared in the 15th century.

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Prerequisites

Students should be comfortable learning and using new software programs. Prior knowledge of Blender is a plus, but not required.

Special Comments

Students will need to be flexible with hours, as the IQ Center is heavily used in summer weeks between 9 am and 5 pm.

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 7/31/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 8 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 2

Research Location: On campus

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: George Bent (email: bentg@wlu.edu)

Toward a hyper-empirical gravitational wave source localization pipeline (Tom McClain)

On campus: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 6 weeks, finishing on 7/17/2026.

Project Description

When binary black hole systems produce gravitational waves that are eventually observed at the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra gravitational wave detectors, a key question is: where in the sky did those gravitational waves come from? This question is of particular interest to electromagnetic astronomers, who might like to point their telescopes at the appropriate place to see what else might have been happening at that location when the black holes merged. This summer research project in computational physics aims to build a full data processing pipeline for the rapid localization of gravitational wave sources. While some of this pipeline has been the subject of previous summer research projects, opportunities remain for students interested in database design, fast and accurate signal processing in high noise environments, GPU-accelerated cloud computing, algorithm optimization, and Bayesian inference.

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Prerequisites

PHYS 111, PHYS 112

Special Comments

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 7/17/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 6 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 5

Research Location: On campus

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Tom McClain (email: mcclaint@wlu.edu)

Yeast synthetic lethal screen (Gregg Whitworth)

On campus: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 10 weeks, finishing on 8/14/2026.

Project Description

We will be conducting a synthetic lethal screen in yeast and using high through-put sequencing to identify interesting SNPs in the mutant population

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Prerequisites

Bench and computational experience

Special Comments

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 8/14/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 10 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 2

Research Location: On campus

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Gregg Whitworth (email: whitworthg@wlu.edu)

Testbed Development for 5G/6G Security Threat Modeling and Experimental Evaluation (Sana Habib)

Hybrid: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 10 weeks, finishing on 8/14/2026.

Project Description

This project will develop a controlled experimental testbed for studying security threats in emerging 5G and early-stage 6G network environments. The testbed will simulate key architectural components of next-generation mobile networks, enabling controlled experimentation with attack scenarios such as denial-of-service, signaling storms, misconfiguration events, and routing anomalies. Students will help deploy containerized network components, implement traffic generation and attack modules, and build monitoring and measurement pipelines. The resulting platform will serve as a reproducible research infrastructure to support future publications and external grant proposals in next-generation network security.

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Prerequisites

• Completion of Computer Networks (or equivalent) • Familiarity with Linux command line • Programming experience in Python

Special Comments

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 8/14/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 10 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 2

Research Location: Hybrid

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Sana Habib (email: shabib@wlu.edu)

CS Fundamentals Studio: Interactive Educational Tool for Computer Science Education (Sana Habib)

Hybrid: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 8 weeks, finishing on 7/31/2026.

Project Description

This project will design and develop modular, interactive educational tools to enhance undergraduate computer science instruction. Students will build browser-based simulators for foundational topics such as stacks, queues, recursion, graph traversal, and introductory cybersecurity concepts. The goal is to create visually engaging tools that support active learning and can be directly integrated into classroom instruction. Participants will collaborate on front-end visualization, backend logic, and usability testing. Final deliverables will include deployable web modules, instructor guides, and classroom-ready activities. The tools will be open-source and designed for long-term use in introductory and intermediate CS courses.

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Prerequisites

• Completion of Data Structures (or equivalent) • Proficiency in Python or JavaScript • Familiarity with basic algorithms (stacks, recursion, graphs) • Interest in computer science education or outreach

Special Comments

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 7/31/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 8 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 2

Research Location: Hybrid

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Sana Habib (email: shabib@wlu.edu)

Mission Drift and the Profitability Paradox as Double-Deviation (Gavin Fox)

Remote: this project is scheduled to begin on 6/8/2026 and run for 6 weeks, finishing on 7/17/2026.

Project Description

Prior research has largely examined mission drift in hybrid social enterprises through governance and institutional lenses. However, its breadth of application to services from the standpoint of customer perceptions, attributions, and recovery efforts remains understudied. In this study, mission drift is conceptualized as a form of moral value proposition failure rather than governance failure. Researchers will identify consumers of three types of firms (traditional CSR, legal Benefit Corporations, and BCorp certified) through brand followership on social media. Once identified, researchers will guide prospective respondents to an online scenario-driven research instrument. This is an opportunity for students to train on sales and marketing tactics and leverage these to skills to affect real-world outcomes.

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Prerequisites

No. We will teach them what they need to know in order to succeed.

Special Comments

Faculty will need to spend at least a few hours educating students on sales and marketing techniques to help them drive respondents to the instrument. We will also need to develop a strategy with workers to ensure effective remote work.

Project Information (subject to change)

Estimated Start Date: 6/8/2026

Estimated End Date: 7/17/2026

Estimated Project Duration: 6 weeks

Maximum Number of Students Sought: 2

Research Location: Remote

Travel Required? No (If “yes”: )

Contact Information: Gavin Fox (email: foxg@wlu.edu)