Attendees browse student displays during SetGo research presentations at the Bowen Thompson Student Union at BGSU. (Photos: Enoch Wu/Sentinel-Tribune)

Question: What do the bird brains and Lake Erie bacteria have in common?
Give up?
Answer: They were just some of the topics explored by students at the 2012 SetGO
Summer Research Roundup Friday at Bowling Green State University.
The SetGO (Science, Engineering and Technology Gateway Ohio) roundup caps a 10-week
research program for science and math majors allowing them to complete
scientific research in collaboration with a faculty mentor. The students each
receive a $3,500 stipend as part of the program.
More than 35 projects from BGSU and partner Owens Community College were presented at
the roundup, covering the areas of biology, neuroscience, computer science,
engineering, and beyond.
Junior Biology major Kathryn Rapin – with her topic "Investigating the Origins
of Ice Nucleation Active Bacteria in Lake Erie" – focused on the bacterium
known as ‘pseudomonas’.
She worked with faculty members Drs. Mike McKay and Hans Wildschutte. It’s believed
that the bacteria is responsible for ice formation on Lake Erie, and the team
decided to work and determine where the bacteria itself came from. Through
sampling, she discovered that they come into the lake from its tributary rivers.

For Rapin, the project was an oportunity to move out of her academic comfort zone.

"I’m more marine biology, and not as much micorbiology," she said,
indicting that her work allowed her to learn more about the tiny worlds existing
under the microscope lense, and about the high technology involved in working
with it.
Sophomore Jonathan Yoo, also a biology major, also worked with Wildschutte, and with
the same bacteria, but on a different question – varying varieties of
pseudomonas are found in water and soil samples throughout the area. How, they
wondered, do they get there and survive in these disparate places?
Yoo collected the bacteria from soil samples in the Bowling Green area, and also
water samples from the central basic of Lake Erie. The work, he said, is
ongoing.

Matt Kovach (lower left) and collegue Dr. Wei Ning (lower right) chat in front of their SetGo research display display during presentaitons at the Bowen Thompson Student Union.

"We’re just right now trying to identify the populations," and to determine
"why, how did they adapt to certain water" and soil environments.
For Yoo, who hopes to continue as a researcher when he graduates, "this is my
first time doing a research internship."
"I had a blast, pretty much."
Other researchers allowed their scientific interests to take flight – literally – by
identifying how pigeons navigate.
Junior Environmental Science major Preston Stevenson worked with Drs. Cordula Mora
and Verner Bingman to try and understand the importance of the "trigeminal
pathway" nerve in permitting homing pigeons to steer themselves around the
globe.
Humans, he said, need two things to navigate on the earth’s surface – a map and a
compass. Homing pideons, on one hand, can use the angle of the sun to help them
steer, but they also use a "magnetic compass" based on the magnetic
field fo the earth. But how does this compass work and where in their brain is
it located?
To help find out, Stevenson’s work included building a special arena for pigeons to
test their nagivational ability, and then conducting surgery on some of them to
cut the trigeminal pathway. Those birds who had the pathway cut did indeed have
difficulty using magnetic navigation, showing that the pathway is instrumental
in their ability to travel.
"I think the pigeons trained me as much as I’ve trained them," he said of
the experience with the birds.
Merissa Acerbi, a junior psychology and neuroscience major who worked with Mora and
Bingman, too, also used surgical techniques on pigeons to look at how they
handled nagivation, essentially by turning off the center of the brain
scientists believe the birds use to navigate. Without that portion of their
brain, she said, the birds faltered.
These findings, said Acerbi, could have applications in such wide-ranging areas as
alzhermer’s research, and even helping with travel in the event of wide-scale
power failures where navigation technology such as GPS would be useless.
"Im so thankful the university funded me for this," she said.
BGSU President Dr. Mary Ellen Mazey, who toured the symposion, called the event
"exactly what higher education should be doing today" – getting
students involved in research early in their academic careers and pairing them
with faculty in their fields.
"It’s all about student engagement, student involvement," she said.