by Rob Daniels
photography by Ken Bennett

For the Wake Forest students who throw themselves into the topics under the auspices of the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URECA) Center, the work is intellectually rewarding and often accompanied by tangible proof of effort. But it’s the journey more than the jewel — or, to put it another way, the who above the what — that makes the greatest impact.

And the who, in this case, is a group of faculty who embrace collaborative, creative and scholarly work with undergraduates, a concept embedded in the culture of the University but codified and enhanced by a formal organizational structure. URECA doesn’t merely facilitate work between students and their teachers; it brings together departments of the College that, on the surface, don’t seem like automatic partners.

“The University always advertises that it has close faculty-student interaction,” said Kristen Binz (’13), a physics major from suburban St. Louis whose research dealt with World War II. “But URECA, I think, shows that the University is honest about what it’s advertising because it’s giving funded research opportunities to students to do research with faculty or independent study projects or creative projects or whatever the interest may be. That’s one of the benefits of being at a university like Wake Forest. They always say, ‘Small school, big resources,’ but it’s true. It’s really true.”

In most cases, the results of URECA-funded inquiry, like those of every other research consortium, take a while to become apparent. But the biggest benefits in the learning process are often immediate.

“When students talk to me about the challenges of undergraduate research,” said Dr. Anne Boyle, associate dean of Wake Forest College for Student-Faculty Engagement and a chief URECA administrator, “I tell them to celebrate the process rather than thinking just about the problem.”

By itself, URECA satisfies at least two of the 10 most important elements of an undergraduate’s educational experience, according to a 2008 study of 323,000 students by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Those are undergraduate research and collaborative work, and they’re on the list with internships, writing-based courses and others.

Amanda Cain (’13) didn’t expect volume or speed of response when she contacted several faculty to ask if they’d like her help in their various undertakings. She was only a sophomore at the time, and she had heard stories from friends at other institutions that suggested caution. She was pleasantly surprised.

“I went online and looked at the types of research available,” Cain recalled. “I e-mailed them and they all e-mailed back. And I actually got to choose what research I wanted because they were all so incredibly available and open to having students working in their labs. It was great.”

This seems to be a defining characteristic of URECA. While undergraduates participate in research throughout American academia, few schools offer options to as wide a cross-section of their populace as Wake Forest does. The AACU report concluded that undergraduate research is still largely confined to the sciences on a national level, but at Wake Forest, it runs the gamut. On Undergraduate Research Day, the annual celebration of undergraduate student-scholars, 23 of the College’s 25 academic departments were represented by sponsoring faculty in 2012. More than one-third of the total sponsoring faculty came from disciplines broadly described as the humanities.

“When I go to conferences and talk about our Undergraduate Research Day,” said Dr. Jacquelyn Fetrow, dean of Wake Forest College, “the most common thing I hear is, ‘I wish we could do that.’ ”

“I came to Wake Forest because I specifically wanted to teach and inspire undergraduate students to consider the value of research and their potential for a research career,” said Dr. Wayne Pratt, Cain’s mentor and associate professor of psychology. “In many ways, I built my research program with undergraduates in mind so that my mentoring relationship with them would strengthen my scientific program at the same time it offered real research opportunities for entry-level scientists. The longer that I am able to work with a student-scholar, the more I can teach him or her, and the more independent they can become in their projects.”

Cain’s work, funded by URECA, is part of Pratt’s National Institutes of Health-bankrolled study of brain circuitry affiliated with overeating. Where and how does the brain tell animals — rats, in this case — to keep seeking food when other neural transmissions are saying dinner’s done and sufficient? The 10-week URECA fellowship involved injecting drugs that induced rats’ overeating, studying brain slices weeks later, identifying the telltale signs of the behavior with top-shelf technology and participating in neurosurgical procedures.

Weeks later, Cain relived the moments of discovery. “That’s the area. That’s where we see the results. That’s where we put the drug. And that’s what’s causing the reaction,” she said. “That was great.”

Pratt was along for every step of the process, backed by an enthusiastic group of undergrads and master’s degree candidates. He works with juniors, seniors and graduate students but is not afraid to cultivate interest in a scholar’s sophomore year and encourage retention. That way, the student develops a degree of independence in the research project and can serve as a mentor to eventual successors.

“Dr. Pratt was so easy to approach,” Cain said. “We met several times to figure out if what he was doing was everything I was interested in. We were very involved in comparing interests.”

“Dr. Pratt was so easy to approach,” Cain said. “We met several times to figure out if what he was doing was everything I was interested in. We were very involved in comparing interests.”

Cain is now showing the ropes to others, and she hopes to do a one-year fellowship in Vietnam or Haiti before entering medical school.

Collaboration isn’t necessarily limited by locale anymore, and with URECA, it often takes place across disciplines.

When Paul Lord (’13), a Russian major and pre-med student from Omaha, Neb., wanted to study social gaps in the modern Ukraine, he paired up with Dr. Billy Hamilton, a professor of German and Russian, on a project funded by the Richter Foundation and administered by URECA.

While Hamilton stayed on campus to supervise others, Lord went to the source. He embarked in late May 2012 on a journey to Kiev and several other locales in the former Soviet state, and he kept in touch with Hamilton with regular e-mails. The seven-hour time difference mattered little when Lord sent a message in his early evening and Hamilton got it in the middle of his day.

“He can be pretty prompt with his response,” Lord said. Lord felt comfortable contacting Hamilton under a variety of circumstances. Even when he seemingly had nothing to report. “There was one point I was between active periods,” he said. “I e-mailed him and told him, ‘I have down time for a couple of days here.’ And his response was, ‘You can’t have down time. Go take a survey — a photographic survey — of different areas.’”

Specifically, Hamilton remembered something his wife, Cindy, had seen in a venture with Wake Forest students years earlier. The sight suggested a new government was having trouble with its equivalent of the Americans With Disabilities Act. “It was a concrete ramp that came out of a building but stopped at the curb at an altitude of 18 inches,” the professor recalled. “Nobody in a wheelchair could have survived the dropoff.

“When Paul got his grant to go study disability in Ukraine, I suggested he photograph some other handicap ramps. Many of them turned out just like the one we had captured: bizarre roads to nowhere, twisted results of tortured engineering thought and poor planning.”

Lord found that ramps often differed in quality and that those differences were often associated with the political climate of their cities. Those areas that clung to the Soviet days were often less developed in their infrastructure than more Westernized regions.

“It was one of the most telling representations that I came away with,” Lord said. “The ramps represented what I was studying. I don’t know that I would have thought of it if Dr. Hamilton hadn’t suggested it.”

One summer in that corner of the world isn’t enough to satisfy Lord’s curiosity. He intends to return in the near future in the name of the Pro Humanitate ideal; he combined work and research in the summer of 2012, assisting in a day-care center for the disabled and in a homeless shelter, among other places.

“My hope was that my research in Ukraine would remind us that even we still have work to do here.

“Any time you have greater cross-cultural understanding, there can be any number of benefits,” Lord said. “My hope was that my research in Ukraine would remind us that even we still have work to do here.

“In going over there, the response I got was, ‘Wow. This American, he actually cares about what we’re doing here.’ And they didn’t expect that. It was my hope that by working with them, even the extra manpower might encourage them to keep working.”

The research process transcends the knowledge for nearly every participant, but the process can be especially important for those who enter Wake Forest with little previous exposure to the University or its surroundings.

Yingying Chen (’15) came to Wake Forest from Shenzhen, China, a city 8,300 miles away and, at 10.4 million residents, 45 times more populous than Winston-Salem. Undergraduate research provided another way to connect with people, and so when URECA sent out a mass e-mail last year, Chen, then only a second-semester freshman, jumped at the chance.

“I had heard we had chances to work with professors and do research and I was interested,” she said. She noticed that Dr. Sarah Raynor was studying whether mathematical principles might help drivers mitigate traffic congestion — particularly in areas and circumstances when jams shouldn’t really occur.
Everybody can relate to this one, and Chen brought an important perspective. Her hometown is 25 percent bigger than New York City in population.

“She had a very applicable research project,” Chen said. “It’s a broad topic. She wanted someone to continue working on it and to expand the research.”

In the summer of 2012, Chen participated in a URECA-funded project in which she stayed on campus and met with Raynor daily. It meant limited time back home but a greater connection to her academic home.

“In many cases, they get to meet research participants, clinical patients or other people from the community,” said Dr. Shannon Mihalko, a professor in Health and Exercise Science and URECA co-director. “They get an opportunity to meet with people beyond Wake Forest and build confidence so that their efficacy for being independent rises when they’re engaged in research.”

No matter how it is achieved, the research process and faculty interaction gives students real-world skills and contacts.

“In a work environment, you’re not going to be given a project for which you know the answer,” Dean Fetrow said. “You’ll have to synthesize information and solve a problem for an employer. Independent work with a faculty member allows students to do exactly that. Because we don’t say, ‘Go read this textbook; the answer is in there.’ We say, ‘Here is the question. Now how would you answer it?’ And that’s more of what you’re going to find in a job-related situation.”

Dr. Rebecca Alexander, an associate professor of chemistry and URECA co-director, believes in every element of the research relationship and isn’t afraid to say the undergraduate who takes it seriously has an advantage in life after the bachelor’s degree.

“There are peripheral benefits: organizing time, making a plan, traveling to conferences,” Alexander said. “The recommendation letters I write for students who worked in my lab are so much more specific, so much more informative. I will not only write them a good letter; I can help them think through things. Where would be a good place for you? How could I help you get there? That’s a huge benefit that parents can appreciate.”

Over its next five years, URECA seeks the funding necessary to become an endowed and permanent element of the University community and to recruit and retain faculty for future participation.

“Part of that endowment would be to support the faculty who are spending time with students and to make sure that faculty from all disciplines have the opportunity — within the constraints of their disciplines — to engage students and to have the resources to do so,” Fetrow said. “We are talking about an endowment that will allow us to sustain, to grow and to support students and faculty across all disciplines.”