Current Projects

Conservation of Marine Resources

The Conservation of Marine Resources Creative Inquiry team participates in marine ecology research to benefit the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Current projects include studying (1) the impact of shelter loss on the survival of juvenile Caribbean spiny lobsters, (2) using acoustic telemetry technology to track the movement of Caribbean spiny lobsters, (3) estimating effects of structure on reef fish diversity and abundance, (4) studying the effects of coral disease on coral cover and reef fish communities, and (5) the impact of marine debris on reef communities in the Florida Keys.

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Courage and Positive Psychology Research

What is courage? Can people become more courageous? How can people lead better lives? The Courage and Positive Psychology CI team conducts scientific investigations into courage and other virtues and human well-being. 

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Insects of the Clemson Experimental Forest

Because of their amazing diversity, there are multiple ways to study the fauna of insects and their relatives. Students will investigate insects in the Clemson University Experimental Forest. Explorations for particular groups may be according to their taxonomic relationships (e.g., ants, spiders, flies, etc.), habitats (e.g., soil, foliage, water, etc.), behavior (e.g., nocturnal or diurnal activity, attraction to different baits, phototropism, etc.), or other characteristics. Students in this Creative Inquiry will ask one or more questions about some aspect of the fauna of insects and their relatives, provide testable hypotheses to answer that/those question(s), and design one or more field and laboratory experiments to test the hypotheses. Students may explore their questions independently or in teams over one to four semesters for 1 or 2 credits each semester. Results and conclusions about them will be reported by the students in professional venues.

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Lifestyle Medicine

This Creative Inquiry will explore the effects of lifestyle medicine in conjunction with traditional medicine practices on the patient population at the Joseph F. Sullivan Center. Lifestyle Medicine is an evidence-based approach shown to prevent and treat disease, using a whole food dietary lifestyle, regular physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, avoidance of risky substances and positive social connection as a primary therapeutic modality for treatment and reversal of chronic disease. 

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International Design Projects With Engineers Without Borders (EWB) for Sustainable Water Systems

Students participating in this Creative Inquiry will help to lead the design and development of sustainable systems to provide drinking water and associated water treatment for communities in developing countries as part of an official project with the Clemson University Student Chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

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Cyber Bullying

This project examines a variety of aversive interpersonal behaviors, most notably cyberbullying, hazing, and school shootings. People engage in a variety of aversive interpersonal behaviors. Some of these behaviors are more mundane, such as guilt-induction. Others, such as those that constitute the focus of this team, are more insidious in nature, and have potentially fatal consequences. One of the interesting things about these behaviors is that, as seemingly disparate as they appear, there is actually quite a bit of overlap between them. For example, our research suggests an overlap between bullying and hazing. Additionally, one of the key predictors of perpetrating a school shooting is a long-term history of rejection, manifested most often through a history of bullying. One focus of our team with all of these behaviors is not only understanding antecedents and consequences but also prevention and intervention strategies. 

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Testing Variables of Foods, Films, Antimicrobials and Surfaces Affecting Transfer and/or Survival of Bacteria

This team studies the transfer and survival of bacteria on various surfaces related to food. This team has tested numerous food-related surfaces and activities such as the 5-second rule, double-dipping and beer pong in the past. In the future we will investigate new topics related to food and bacteria such as transfer of bacteria by wiping table tops with cleaning cloths, sanitation of bottles and cans and transfer of bacteria while sharing snacks.

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Using Creative Inquiry to Investigate Food Advertising Claims

This CI team evaluates various Food Advertising Claims including those claiming to taste "better", last longer and meet a certain specification. Last semester the team tested the Alkaline water claim, which included sampling different types of alkaline water and also temperature effects on the pH of the water.

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Changing Dynamics of China's Development

This Creative Inquiry project systematically examines some of the most important issues facing the world – such as China’s economic development and its impact on international trade, the global supply chain, the US and ultimately the world.

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Robotic Systems Research

The team is to design and construct a robot which will compete in IEEE's Southeastcon conference hardware competition.

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Green Energy and Biodiesel Project

From Fields to Fuel, team members will be researching all aspects of sustainable biofuels production and engineering while facilitating biodiesel and ethanol production to be utilized by University Facilities. Projects will focus on facility optimization through relief of production bottlenecks, and research increasing biodiesel feedstock acquisition through cultivation of energy crops and harvest of waste lipid streams. Led by Biosystems Engineering faculty.

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Intro to Python Programming with Applications to Engineering Research

This project teaches the fundamentals of programming using Python as the starting language. It will introduce how python is being used in all modern research in artificial intelligence, data science, big data, and other engineering applications. The project also prepares students to learn other programming languages, especially C for hardware programming.

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Orthopaedic Retrieval Program (CU- REPRO)

Medical implant devices have been used widely for more than 50 years, and it is estimated that 8 - 10 % of Americans (20-25 million people) currently have such a device. Orthopaedic implants are medical devices made of biomaterials used to treat musculoskeletal disorders inside the human body with an intended lifespan spanning years. Although implant devices have produced great benefits, it must be recognized that implants sometimes must be removed or replaced. Bioengineers contribute to their continual state of development to increase their performance and extend their useful lifespan. This cross-disciplinary project applies fundamental concepts in bioengineering, materials science, and biological sciences to investigate orthopaedic implants after they have functioned in patients. Long-term data on the behavior of implant devices and host response are essential inputs to the development process, yet there are few systematic programs for the retrieval and analysis of implants in the USA. Independent and international data banks do exist however. The contributions to implant design provided by retrieval and analysis will benefit patients through improvements in implant performance. We can consider implants to be defined as having a minimum lifespan of 3 months, as penetrating living tissue, as having a physiologic interaction and as being retrievable. A number of barriers exist to the establishment of an implant retrieval program. Major impediments are the costs associated with such a program and fear of litigation affecting manufacturers, hospitals, physicians, and investigators. The long term goal of this Creative Inquiry project is to establish and develop a viable Clemson University Implant Retrieval Program and pursue hypothesis-driven research related to orthopaedic implants. The aim of this program is to provide a working repository for retrieved orthopaedic implants, and to develop the tools and techniques for the systematic evaluation of implant designs, materials, surfaces and function.

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Microfluidics and Lab-on-a-Chip for Point of Care Technology

In this Creative Inquiry project, we explore the use of electric, magnetic or flow field for the transport and control of biological and synthetic particles in engineered microchannels with lab-on-a-chip applications to chemistry and biomedicine for point of care technology. 

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Microbial Ecology and Bioinformatics

We know that microbes are the most abundant organisms on the planet and are found pretty much everywhere. However, we know very little about which microbes are present in different environments and what microbes are actually doing. The emphasis in our lab is to use genomics and transcriptomics of microbial communities combined with measuring environmental parameters in order to understand the global and local importance of microbes.  We focus on ecologically important concepts, such as functional redundancy.

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Interpreting Geologic Landforms

Interpreting the landforms around us lies at the heart of geologic exploration.  Through the use of low tech and high tech methods, we propose geologic processes that would explain the world around us.

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Exploring Microbial Communities in Food Products and the Environment

This CI project enumerates, isolates, characterizes and control microorganisms from a variety of environments and food products 

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Nutraceutical and Functional Foods Research and Product Development

In this CI project, students will learn to use state-of-the-art analytical instruments to analyze food components, such as vitamins, amino acids, flavors,  food additives, nutraceuticals, etc, which are the major nutritional and functional chemicals in foods. At the end of the research project, students are expected to be able to have gained critical thinking skills, learned basic principles of experimental design,  mastered one or more modern analytical instruments, learned how to perform basic statistical analyses and written a professional report.

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Meaningful Work in Medicine

This Creative Inquiry team will examine meaningful work as a buffer against the effects of stressors on emergency physicians, as well as determine interventions that should enhance meaningful work and therefore reduce stress and burnout. Students will gain experience in all phases of the research process.

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Exploration of Weight Gain and Obesity in Adult Populations

This CI will introduce students to the need for programs addressing overweight and obesity in adult populations and how to create and implement effective interventions. A review of existing programs for diverse populations will be included and the hypothesis(es) generated to plan an intervention for a local population reviewed. Students will be trained in anthropometrics and assessment measures such as blood pressure that often changes with weight gain. Students will plan/revise/implement an educational intervention and learn/practice physical assessments. The intervention component of the CI along with data collection and data analysis will occur. The project will culminate in a write up and presentation of the study results.

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A Nutrition Education & Life-Style Intervention for Type 2 Diabetes

This CI will introduce students to the incidence and prevalence of diabetes in SC, the US and worldwide as well as the resources available to individuals with diabetes locally. Existing programs addressing type 2 diabetes – prevention and treatment – will be researched and critiqued. An intervention specific for the population that we will work with will be created and implemented following a thorough literature review and hypothesis(es) generated which will facilitate development of an effective intervention for a local population. Students will be trained in anthropometrics and assessment measures such as finger sticks & glucometer use, physical assessments that are diabetes related such as skin changes, foot and eye changes. They will also learn how to assess HgA1C, breath and urine changes with uncontrolled diabetes in order to more effectively relate to and treat their clients. Blood pressure will also be monitored as cardiovascular changes occur with uncontrolled diabetes. Students will plan and develop an educational intervention and/or plan a media campaign and learn/practice assessments Fall semester along with conducting a pilot assessment. The intervention component of this CI will occur Spring semester 2020 along with data collection, analysis, and write up plus presentation of the study results.

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Nutrient Sensing in Protozoan Parasites

The Morris lab is focused on resolving the mechanisms that protozoan parasites use to sense and metabolize the important sugar glucose during infection of their human host.  Through these studies, parasite-specific components of the sugar sensing and uptake pathway have been identified and, in an on-going collaborative effort, small molecule inhibitors of the pathways with anti-parasitic activity have been developed.  While the team has historically focused on the African trypanosome, more recent work on the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and the brain eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri suggests that exploiting the sugar metabolism pathways of these single-celled invaders may also prove useful in the development of new therapeutics.  

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Healthcare Logistics: Data Analysis, Decision Making, and Modeling in Hospital Settings

Students involved in this Creative Inquiry project will be exposed to healthcare logistics during patient visits to the emergency department or on the day of surgery (from preop to recovery). The Departments of Emergency Medicine and Perioperative Services at Prisma Health have worked on process improvement initiatives where Clemson students have been able to contribute. One main driver in this research is the measurement of capacity planning, staff wellbeing and decision making in healthcare delivery. To support this research, students might have the opportunity to work with physicians, nurses, and other staff from data collection and observation at the hospital to model development and presenting results. Students will assist in data analytics and some healthcare modeling depending on the student's background. Our goal is to present project results at on-campus events, events sponsored by Prisma Health, or national conferences. Understanding how modeling tools are used to improve healthcare logistics will also be an underlying theme to this research.

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Molecular Dissection of the Spider Silk Self-Assembly Process

This Creative Inquiry group is studying the mechanism by which soluble spider silk proteins are assembled into a fiber. Understanding this process may provide insights that lead to the development of new biologically-inspired materials. 

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Projects for Sustainable Development in Recovering and Developing Communities

Spring 2023 The Sustainable Designs CI project is led by faculty in the Biosystems Engineering program. The project brings together students from a variety of majors in engineering and science to explore sustainable  options for fueling our world and restoring our natural resources and ecosystems- options that are particularly suited for developing communities and those that are recovering from natural disasters. In past semesters, solar water heaters and solar water distillation systems have been explored. More recently, the team has focused on two projects: 1) the biological production of hydrogen gas (H2) for use as a biofuel from waste agricultural products (section 1); and 2) the restoration of oyster reefs for reducing sediment loss in wetlands and improving ecosystem function (section 2). 1) The biological production of hydrogen gas using waste agricultural products is one way to produce biofuels in a sustainable manner. In this CI, students learned the lab-scale techniques (media preparation, inoculation and incubation) for the anaerobic bacterium Thermotoga neapolitana that is capable of converting sucrose, fructose and glucose contained in cull fruits to H2 gas, acetic acid, and CO2.   The team will investigate options for optimizing the rate of H2 production.3) Globally, 85% of the world's oyster reefs have been destroyed or harvested.  The CI team will investigate means to restore oyster reefs in the ACE basin in South Carolina, through the use of structures to provide suitable surface area for spat attachment.  The team will collaborate with SC-DNR personnel to design and install structures near Fenwick Island, SC in the ACE Basin. Also, the team has begun to focus on the restoration of a local threatened mussel species (Elliptio complanata). Lab-scale cultivation systems for Elliptio have been developed by current students.

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PackExpo Exhibit Design, Build, Research

One of the largest trade exhibitions in the country is PackExpo. Join us as we represent Clemson University in a large booth that involves human subjects research with eye tracking and facial coding. Students will participate in the experimental design, execution, and analysis of human subjects research while designing, building, and managing a large event.

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Applications of Geographic and Soil Information Systems

Soil is a critical component of land use planning. The objective of this project is to study and understand the properties of soils in relation to current and future use.  Individual student projects focus on evaluating the soil resources using soil sampling and testing, Web Soil Survey databases, as well as GIS and statistical software in relation to current or future land use plans.  Students are able to select an area of interest and perform a comprehensive assessment of soil resources in relation to potential real estate, agricultural, or forestry application.

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Tackling Social Issues: Advanced Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research in Applied Ethics And Ethical Debate

Critical examination of ethical cases largely taken from up-to-date newspaper and magazine publications.  Anticipation of critical questions that might be asked about the cases.  Research and development of responses to these questions and the best ethical resolution of the cases.  These responses are first developed in writing, and then are presented orally in a competitive debate-like format. Oral responses will be presented at the regional competition and, if chosen, at the national conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics.

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Geologic Properties

The properties of geologic materials such as rocks, soil, and water highly influence the placement and design of human constructs such as roads, dams, and buildings. Understanding these properties help us design more sustainable structures with less environmental impact.

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Physical Activity Promotion and Research

The goal of our CI project is to examine and promote healthy eating and physical activity practices among children and families participating in an afterschool program in a low-income, predominantly Hispanic community. This project is funded, in part, by a 21st Century community Learning Center grant awarded to the elementary school we serve in Greenville, SC.

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Landscape Ecology and Conservation in the Appalachians

Students in this CI are working to understand the influence of landscapes and land uses on snake movement ,ecology, and disease susceptibility. 

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Popular Science Journalism

The overall goal of this project is to produce a science column in the student body newspaper, The Tiger.  The name of the column is Tigra scientifica and is used to report on the hottest topics in scientific and academic research.

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Designing Medical Technology for the Developing World

Developing countries face healthcare challenges every day, whether it is lack of supplies or a shortage of healthcare professionals. Medical devices and equipment that are considered standard in hospitals in the United States can be hard to find and very expensive in developing countries, such as Tanzania. Tanzania has recently made significant advances with the quality of their healthcare; however, there are still many hurdles that need to be overcome. The goal of this Creative Inquiry team is to design and develop medical instrumentation and monitors that are robust, user-friendly, and low-cost for developing countries. The students on this team will be expected to work on electronics and instrument design.  These types of projects not only have the ability to improve the lives of young infants and families, but they can also impact the medical field in developing nations worldwide. In addition to doing design, students are expected to learn about Tanzania as a whole. Students will learn about Tanzanian culture, government and healthcare structure as well as some basic conversational Swahili.

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Digital History and Introduction to Cyberinfrastructure in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

In this current global digital age, this humanities project fosters students to research and independently design their own digital history projects.  As an introduction to cyberinfrastructure, students learn the basics of digital history and humanities and participate in ongoing database and web projects.  More advanced students can do statistical analysis as well as use the Social Media Lab to analyze media in a historical context.

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Exploration of Material Mechanical and Wear Performance

Industry, academic and national laboratories are all interested in understanding how to control the friction between sliding surfaces and avoid wear (loss of material). Work has shown that materials selection (surface materials chemistry and structure), surface topography (micro patterning), system parameters (velocity and force), etc. can all influence the wear rate.  Since all these factors play a role (and their roles are not always completely understood), the direct measurement is often desired for novel alloy types including high entropy alloys. We will look at surface deformation mechanisms, sliding contact and common test techniques used in this field. For Spring 2022, the materials systems we will be focusing will include additively manufactured CoCr or high entropy alloys. 

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Computational Design Group

The Clemson School of Architecture Computational Design Group engages in a critical exploration of emergent technologies and material science in architectural design. The aim of this group is to house several, more specific, research agendas concerning applications of computing methods in architecture under one, more general, classification of ‘computational design’. We are currently research 'Design-to-fabrication workflows with Extended Reality'. In 2021 our team is continuing a project initiated in 2020 with industry partner Autodesk where we are developing algorithms for accurate holographic-assisted physical component assembly. 

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Creative Inquiry in Marketing: Advertising Campaign Development and Execution

The students work two semesters for a total of 3 hours elective credit on a national competition sponsored by the American Advertising Federation and a national sponsor for a Spring event called called the National Student Advertising Competition. This two-semester project involves the students operating as a simulated integrated marketing communications agency.

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TAGA Journal

This project offers students the opportunity to design, edit and produce a technical journal showcasing student research in Graphic Communications as well as compete with schools internationally for recognition for the quality of their work. The team attends the international Technical Association for the Graphic Arts (TAGA) Annual Technical Conference to present their journals for the competition and to meet and learn from top researchers in the Graphic Communications industry.

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Synthesis and Modification of Metal and Metal Oxide Nanoparticles

Students will focus on understanding the structure-property relationships of magnetic nanoparticles. Specifically the team will investigate how size and composition change the magnetic properties of these systems. 

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Student Directors of the Annual Clemson Literary Festival

The Clemson Literary Festival is a student run, student directed, annual event featuring three days of readings by national authors, literary panel discussions, book fairs, and open mic events that seeks to bring students, faculty, alumni, and the surrounding communities together through a mutual love and appreciation for the Arts and Humanities. 

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Clemson ASCE Steel Bridge Team

This CI project prepares students to compete in the annual Student Steel Bridge Competition organized by the American Institute of Steel Construction. The student will design and fabricate a scaled steel bridge (about 15-ft long) to be compete in the annual regional competition (Carolinas and Georgia). At the competition, the team will be judged for efficiency of assembling the bridge under timed construction. The bridge will then be load tested and weighted. The scale-bridge is about 20-ft long and is expected to carry at least 2,500 lbs. Top ranked teams in the regional competition will advance to the national competition.

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Comparative Vertebrate Musculoskeletal Biomechanics

Research in my lab examines the patterns and processes of functional evolution in vertebrates. To understand the factors that have contributed to evolutionary transitions in function, we test the functional consequences of variation in biological design, primarily through experimental studies of vertebrate musculoskeletal biomechanics. We have extended these studies to include selection experiments on functional performance, allowing us to evaluate the impact of functional tradeoffs on structural diversification. Our three primary study systems have been examinations of (1) the load bearing capacity of vertebrate limb bones (and fish fins) during terrestrial and aquatic locomotion; (2) the functional performance of waterfall climbing gobiid fishes in a variety of behaviors, including climbing, predator escape, and feeding; and (3) the effects of differences in body structure on the swimming performance of turtles and tadpoles. These systems have allowed a diverse range of comparative studies that have provided insight into broader issues in the diversity and evolution of vertebrate functional design. Studies of these systems are complemented by investigations of other systems as new questions and opportunities emerge.

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Exploring Peptoid Proteins: Making and Structurally Characterizing Peptidomimetic Structures

Natural peptides and proteins are critically important in biology and medicine as well as increasingly in biotechnology and the chemical industry. Chemical structures mimicking the properties of natural peptides and proteins have been developed over the past three decades, with enormous potential for transformative impact in many fields. One handicap of these peptide-mimetic systems, however, is the lack of a broad scope of knowledge comparable to that available for natural proteins and peptides. Databases such as the Protein Data Bank contain structures for ~150,000 natural proteins, collected over the past ~50 years. These rich data sources enable whole fields of research, such as bioinformatics and protein engineering, that rely on having abundant data. Design of peptide mimics and hybrid peptide-peptidomimetic systems, therefore, relies on rational planning and design. This project involves both a structural component--synthesizing peptoids and other peptide mimics to study their structures and test predictions for novel secondary structures; as well as biomedical component--e.g., using the proven strategy of replacing proline residues in peptides with peptoid residues, as well as incorporating other peptidomimetic residues such as PEGylated amino acids into peptides of medical interest. 

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Democracy Building in Post-Conflict Societies: The Cases of Serbia, Kosovo, BiH, Montenegro and Croatia

Students are engaged in research of the history and causes of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia working in 5 teams, one for each country to be visited during study abroad. They present their findings and draft research papers which are then finished during Summer Study Abroad using primary sources. 

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Aquaponics: Maximizing use of a Biological System for Unique Production of an Aquatic and Plant Based Crop

This project stimulates undergraduate students' understanding of aquatic (fish, shrimp) production in recirculating systems and works to expand the unit for establishment of a dual or polyculture unit. The project will investigate methods for aquaponics and refine specific deficiencies of the system which include passive heating techniques to reduce costs, system design (airlift technology) considerations for efficiency and power dependency, automation for system productivity and bacterial control for food safety considerations.

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Heat Transfer Along the Human Arm in Electric Arch Phenomenon: Mathematical Modeling with Advanced Engineering Apps

Students enrolled in the CI will be utilizing what they learned in differential equations, calculus and numerical methods courses to model and explore the advanced engineering problems including the phenomena of an electric arc through the human arm and its effects.

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Experiencing Woody Plant Genomics and Biotechnology

The project aims to utilize genomics tools and advanced biotechnological approaches to improve plant health and enhance nutritional/medicinal values and production. The focus is on woody plants. Students are exposed to molecular techniques, bioinformatics, tissue culture, data recording and analysis, and greenhouse management. The project will cultivate students’ interests in plants and understanding of plants’ important roles plants in the food supply, the environment, and human well-being.

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China's Foreign Policy

This Creative Inquiry project systematically examines some of the most important issues facing the world. Students will be involved in on-going discussions and debates as well as engaged in direct dialogues with diplomats and business leaders, both Chinese and American. 

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Organelle Biogenesis in African Trypanosomes

African trypanosomes cause a number of human and livestock diseases. My laboratory is focused on resolving the mechanisms that regulate the biogenesis of essential organelles called glycosomes in these organisms. These organelles are parasite specific and essential making them excellent drug targets.

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Biology of Lipids and Lipid Droplets in Trypanosomes

We are investigating how the lethal blood parasite Trypanosoma brucei acquires and stores lipids from its host. Lipids can be used as a source of energy, key building blocks for cell membranes, anchors of cell surface proteins, and signaling molecules. In its hosts, T. brucei must use a combination of fatty acid uptake and synthesis to survive. We are interested in the following research questions: How does the parasite sense environmental sources? How does it take up fatty acids from its hosts? How does it "decide" where those fatty acids go int he cell? What role do these processes play in pathogenesis and immune evasion? We use a variety of genetic, molecular, biochemical, and cell biological approaches to address these questions in our lab.

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Relationship Between Toxoplasma Infection and Immune Responses in Cancer Development

Toxoplasmosis is a highly prevalent infectious disease among the human population with approximately one third of the people on the earth carry such infections. The causing agent Toxoplasma gondii widely spreads in the environment. The primary infections generally do not cause severe symptoms in healthy people owing to competent immunity; however, they can transit into latent infection and form cysts within the host’s brain by penetrating the blood-brain barrier or muscle tissue. When the host experiences compromised immunity, such as cancer development, the cyst can be reactivated to cause severe or even lethal situations. Moreover, a recent study has revealed that the infection of Toxoplasma can trigger a similar signaling pathway shared with cancer development. So far, many epidemiological studies have shown that the human population with cancer have a higher Toxoplasma infection percentage than the healthy control group. These findings suggest a positive correlation between Toxoplasma infection with cancer occurrence, and the cancer patients are more vulnerable to primary toxoplasmosis than healthy individuals. It is obvious that the immune system plays a critical role in the parasite infection and tumor development; however, the information about the immune regulation in Toxoplasma infection on tumor development is very limited. In this project, students will have the opportunity to investigate the relationship between Toxoplasma infection and the immune system on cancer development using in vitro assays.

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Investment Research Challenge

The CFA Research Challenge, organized by the CFA Institute and its member Societies, involves the valuation of a publicly traded company. Just like a Wall Street analyst would do for a research report, the team of students must come up with a one-year target price for the stock along with a Buy/Hold/Sell recommendation. The students must research the company, its industry, competitors, customers, and market trends to make assumptions that are used in a financial model projecting future performance. In this project, students develop teamwork, analytical, written and oral communication skills to write their report and present to a panel of investment professionals.

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Certified Financial Analyst Seminar

The CFA charter is the most prestigious certification available in Finance and Investments. Although students can’t completely earn the charter while they are still in school, they can begin the process with the Level I exam. The CI group helps students prepare for the exam by having the students develop written study materials (which are uploaded to Canvas) and present these topics to the rest of the group. 

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Drones for Natural Resource Management

Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become a critical tool for natural resource management.  This CI will focus on teaching students the skills and laws associated with legal use of UAVs for natural resource management.  Topics covered include: the various sensors and types of UAVs, data collection planning and methods, processing data and accuracy evaluation, safe operations of UAVs, and the legal framework for using UAVs for commercial and research purposes (under FAA Part 107 rules).  Students will typically focus on one related research topic during the semester that leverages the high spatial and temporal resolution of UAV data to address a research topic in natural resources.

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Implementation of Public Art for the Clemson University Campus

Clemson University's Public Art Program features the works of nationally recognized artists. We are dedicated to exploring opportunities where public art becomes woven into the campus environment. All artwork selected for projects will be intellectually engaging while demonstrating qualities that elicit questions and prompt discourse. Artworks are site specific and are commissioned through a competitive process. 

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Veterans Oral History Project

The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans, as well as U.S. Citizens who were actively involved in supporting war efforts (war industry workers, USO medical personnel, flight instructors, etc.) so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war. In order to assist the Library of Congress with this arduous task, Clemson University students will conduct interviews and collect other materials accepted by the project then facilitate their digitization for Clemson University records before sending the original materials to the Library of Congress.  

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Geologic Indicators of Climate Change

The goal of this project is quantify the difference between natural fluxes of carbon dioxide and anthropogenic sources. This is accomplished with a mobile eddy covariance tower and soil chambers.  Understanding human contributions to the carbon cycle will enable us to devise more sustainable solutions for the future.

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Human Factors Safety Research

This project is a continuing series of studies involving the assessment of factors impacting safety and performance in real world situations.  Principles of perception, conspicuity, and hazard identification will be applied in experiments assessing, for example, trips, falls, and similar incidents in both real-world and laboratory environments.

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Host-Microbe Interactions in the Gastrointestinal Tract

This research project will focus on various aspects of interactions between the normal (non-pathogenic) bacterial members of the human gastrointestinal tract and their human hosts.  The overarching focus is to identify conserved functions within particular groups of microbes that can be targeted with small organic molecules.  The goal is to identify potential new therapeutics that could be used to modify the gastrointestinal microbiome in a targeted fashion.  The current research is focused on investigating the possible involvement of Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron (and related species) in the development and/or exacerbation of diabetes, obesity, and colon cancer.

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Serious games to enable STEM research and education

This CI group will contribute to the development, testing, and evaluation of serious games as a tool to enhance STEM education, understand factors influencing decision making, and assess efficacy of discipline-specific game-based learning. By integrating cyber-infrastructure, earth systems science, and social science with game play, modern serious games can become a particularly powerful tool for communicating interdisciplinary concepts, such as environmental sustainability. This CI group will research the breadth of game mechanics utilized in existing serious (e.g., River City) and non-serious (e.g., Farmville) games, test and evaluate what features of these games are attractive to players, and contribute to the development of new serious games that can be used at Clemson and beyond for STEM education and research. 

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A Non-Viral Episomal Vector System for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (IPS) Production

Embryonic stem cells hold great promise for the cures of a variety of human diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's etc.. However, ES cell research has been hampered due to the ethical concerns of the use of human embryos. Recently, scientists have developed a novel way to convert somatic cells into ES-like cells through forced expression of four transcription factors key to the ES cell pluripotency maintenance. These cells are called induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS). The initial method used for IPS induction is based on retrovirus due to its high transfection efficiency. However, the potential dangers of retrovirus induced insertional mutagenesis and transformation pose great concerns for the applications of theses IPS cells in human. Therefore a great deal of research efforts have been put in the search of alternative delivery systems to create safer IPS cells, such as protein, mRNA, plasmid, and non-integrating viral system. My laboratory has been working with a non-viral episomal vector based on the sequence of mammalian scaffold/matrix attachment region (S/mar), which are sequences in the DNA of eukaryotic chromosomes where the nuclear matrix attaches. S/mar sequences function as architectural DNA components that organize the genome of eukaryotes into functional units within the cell nucleus. Plasmids incorporated with the S/mar sequence can be maintained as replicative episomal units within mammalian nuclei. We plan to clone the four transcription factors into this vector for IPS induction. This episomal vector system will not only reduce or eliminate the potentials of insertional mutagenesis, but also solve the problems of gradual loss from transfected cells encountered by regular plasmids due to the episomal replicative capacity of this plasmid.

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Aspire: Developing Peer Delivered Initiatives to Foster the Promotion of a Healthy Campus

Aspire: Developing Peer Delivered Initiatives to Foster the Promotion of a Healthy Campus works with the Aspire to Be Well Program, which is a 90-minute peer-led health- and safety-focused dialogue and CU 1000 requirement. The dialogue covers key areas to maintaining a healthy and safe campus including overall wellness, alcohol and other drug misuse prevention, mental health and suicide prevention, and interpersonal violence prevention. Students will gain an understanding of campus resources and learn how to help others in need through risk-reduction strategies and bystander intervention. Students enrolled in this Creative Inquiry will explore topics related to Aspire, receive extensive training on delivering the content to new students and research trends related to health and wellness in higher education.

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Bamboo Reinforced Concrete

This project was initially started following the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. Many concrete and masonry buildings collapsed during the 2010 Haiti Earthquake resulting in serious devastation and many casualties. One of the major cause of widespread building collapses was the lack of reinforcement (steel bars) in the buildings. Steel rebars are very expensive in Haiti. This project seeks to use bamboo as a replacement for steel to reinforce concrete and masonry structures. 

Team Leaders

Finding Your Voice Camp

This Creative Inquiry group will be responsible for planning, marketing, and evaluating an all-girls weekend camp at the Clemson University Outdoor Lab. The purpose of the camp is to introduce middle school girls to nontraditional physical activities as well as to offer educational sessions on topics such as self-esteem, body image, and college life. Research focused on the camp will address the following research questions:Does participation in a girls only camp impact middle school girls' body image? Does participation in outdoor recreation activities impact middle school girls' sense of physical self-efficacy? What are additional outcomes of participation in a girls only camp for middle school girls beyond potential impacts on body image and self-efficacy?

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Assessment of College Student Health

This research team is focused on assessing and evaluating college student health. Our primary focus is the analysis of the National College Health Assessment with both Clemson specific and National data. Student have the opportunity to learn key data analysis skills while exploring various topics that impact college student health. Student will also work on the projects to reduce high-risk activities, promote positive health practices, and foster healthy campus environments at Clemson University.

Team Leaders

The Development of Critical Thinking in Undergraduates

We conduct a continuing series of experimental and non-experimental studies examining the assessment and development of critical thinking skills in undergraduates. Team members review relevant literature, design the studies, collect data, analyze the data, and present the results and conclusions at local, regional, and international research meetings.

Team Leaders

Beaches and Deserts: The Microbial Cycling of Iron and Other Nutrients and Their Importance to Healthy Ecosystems.

Microbes are responsible for numerous ecosystem functions and processes. These functions and processes include the reduction and oxidation of biogenic metals as well as changing the form of non-metallic nutrients such as nitrogen. We seek to understand microbes and their communities involved in these processes in arid and coastal ecosystems.

Team Leaders

Novel Applications of Photovoltaics

The goal of this project is to demonstrate that 100% of the electric and thermal power needs of Anderson Research Park can be provided by photovoltaics and batteries at a cost lower than what the university will be paying to utility. 

Team Leaders

Hands on Tissue Engineering

Electrospinning is an often utilized lab technique to create extracellular matrix-like nanofibers for tissue engineering. Our group works to utilize electrospun nanofibers containing therapeutic agents in surgical sutures for targeted drug delivery. Departments of this project include: modifying/improving/maintaining the coating device, running laboratory electrospinning trials under controlled conditions, and performing validation testing including imaging, mechanical testing, and drug-eluting testing. 

Team Leaders

Geologic Field Trip Design and Implementation

It has been said that the best geologist is the one who has seen the most rocks.  The rocks in the southeast US contain only a small fraction of the overall geologic diversity and the wet climate encourages ample vegetation that obscures what is there.  The goal of this project is to engage students by researching locations to observe geologic features of interest, plan a trip, and go there.

Team Leaders

Marine Conservation and Genetics

Over-fishing, pollution, and habitat destruction are among the major issues affecting marine life and habitats. Marine ornamental crustaceans, i.e., wild caught species sought by aquarium hobbyists due to their aesthetic value (e.g., bright coloration) and/or ability to control/eliminate aquarium pests, are particularly impacted by over-fishing and habitat destruction and do require immediate attention. The ornamental fishery, a well-established multi-million dollar industry, often operates unnoticed due to their niche market, the frequency of product export, and the diminutive size of the target organisms. Little attention has been paid to them and they have been managed based on little to no life history information. The marine aquarium trade relies predominantly on wild caught species with > 90% taken from coral reefs and associated habitats. The industry has increased dramatically in recent years with a distinct focus on crustaceans (and other invertebrates) that provide “ecosystem services” for aquaria (control of aquarium pests). As these organisms are harvested for the services they can provide in an aquarium, those services are potentially lost from the ecosystem. Immediately after corals, crustaceans represent the most heavily traded ornamental marine invertebrate worldwide. Basic life history information critical to manage any fishery with the goal of sustainability is largely absent. Furthermore, the mislabeling of the species traded in the industry is rampant. The development of a genetic (COI and/or 16S) barcode for this economically and ecologically important group of shrimps is warranted for achieving the goal of fishery sustainability. This Creative Inquiry project aims at generating basic life history information about the most intensively traded species in the western Atlantic (e.g., shrimps from the genera Thor, Lysmata and Periclimenes, and crabs from the species complex Mithrax-Mithraculus). Furthermore, this project will setup the basis for the development of a genetic barcode for the most heavily harvested ornamental crustaceans.

Team Leaders

Imaginative Ligands and Unique Metal Complexes: A Marriage of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry

Organic chemists often are puzzled by metals, and inorganic chemists are often puzzled by organic chemistry, but there are great opportunities in uniting the ability of organic chemists to generate complex 3D molecules with the unique reactivities and properties of metals.  This project combines the expertise of an organic chemist and an inorganic chemist to design, synthesize, and examine the metal-coordination properties of ligands for commonly studied metal ions such as iron and copper, as well as more exotic metal ions such as lanthanides uranium, and plutonium (note: undergraduate students will not be working with uranium and plutonium!).  This project uses synthetically versatile new approaches in organic synthesis to generate ligands with applications in biological, catalytic, and nuclear applications.  Once made, a variety of techniques are used to examine the metal coordination abilities of these ligands, including electrochemistry, stability constant determinations, and DNA damage and cellular assays.

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Deep Eutectic Solvents based on Halogen Bonding for Energy Applications and as Tunable Reaction Media

Deep Eutectic Solvents (DESs) are relatively new alternative reaction media consisting of mixtures of two or more components (Chem. Rev. 2014, 114, 11060−11082) They are related to Ionic Liquids, and while both have advantages over conventional solvents in having much lower vapor pressure tunable solvation properties DESs are generally less expensive to produce and have much lower toxicity than either Ionic Liquids or conventional solvents. Weak intermolecular attractions between the components of the DES mixture are important for their unique properties and in all currently available DESs these attractions are based on either ionic interactions, hydrogen bonding, or both. Our research is focused on an interaction similar to hydrogen bonding, called halogen bonding (Crystal Growth & Design 2001, 1, 165-175), and we have recently reported the first example of a halogen-bonding-based DES (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2021, 60, 22983 – 22989). This CI project will involve a survey of halogen bonded materials for DES properties and when found, testing and characterization of their structure (liquid and crystalline) and thermal properties. Current technology in Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs) often relies on halogen bondined materials and our project will also explore whether our new DESs will lead to enhanced performance of DSSCs.

Team Leaders

Biochemical Analysis of Homologous Recombination and DNA Repair

Our laboratory studies the mechanism behind the repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). If not repaired, a DSB can result in genome instability and potentially, cancer. DSBs are caused by exposure to chemicals, radiation, oxidative reactive species generated during normal metabolism and damaged replication forks. The repair of DSBs often involves the homologous recombination (HR) DNA repair pathway. The heart of HR is the RAD51 and DMC1 recombinase. These enzymes catalyze the search for homology between the damaged DNA and the sister chromatid. The activity of the recombinases is modulated by a number of accessory proteins. We utilize a combination of molecular biological and biochemical techniques to determine the role these accessory proteins have in the modulation of RAD51 and DMC1 recombinase activity. The results of our studies will provide insight into the mechanistic underpinnings of HR and genome maintenance.

Team Leaders

Exploring New Materials for Advanced Lithium Ion Battery Applications

New materials will be explored for longer life and greater capacity of the next generation batteries. Metal-organic framework (MOF) solids are known for its propensity in host-guest chemistry relevant to gas absorption, ion-exchange, catalysis and cathode applications, to just name a few. Participants of this Creative Inquiry project will learn fundamental electrochemical (e-chem) skills and, with my supervision, are encouraged to formulate their own work in the exploration of MOF solids. We will employ the water-soluble polyoxometalates along with organic amines to build new MOFs through e-chem synthesis at room temperature. The resulting solids will be subject to ion-exchange reactions and surface area analysis. We anticipate that new solids featuring open-framework structures suitable for electrode applications will result.

Team Leaders

Exploring New Magnetic Solids for Quantum Computing and Information Storage

Exploring new magnetic materials revealing quantum tunneling phenomenon for the next generation quantum computing. A new class of inorganic solids will be synthesized by high-temperature (<500 oC) solid state methods. A typical example can be seen in one of our recent publications (Chem. Mater. 2014, 26, 1502-1504) where the synthesis of magnetic nanostructures in condensed matter is shown feasible for the formation of desired quantum tunneling phenomenon. The resulting new solids will be subject to single crystal X-ray diffraction studies, UV-vis spectroscopic analysis, and magnetic susceptibility measurements. We anticipate temperature-independent magnetic relaxation, a signature phenomenon for quantum tunneling, will be observed in these new magnetic insulators.

Team Leaders

Engineering the Intervertebral Disc

Herniation and degeneration of the intervertebral discs (IVDs) in our spine can cause significant pain, disability and economic burden on a global scale. Current surgical strategies to repair and restore function to the IVDs have limitations. Regenerative medicine-based approaches for IVD repair and regeneration using stem cells and scaffolds hold significant promise; however, an ideal scaffold that mimics the complex micro-architecture, biochemistry and mechanical properties of the entire IVD has yet to be developed. Previously, our CI has created a composite scaffold derived from cow tail IVDs that have had all the cow cells removed. The scaffolds have demonstrated similar physio-chemical properties compared to human IVDs and they support stem cell viability in vitro. Thus, the continued focus of the CI is to develop approaches to efficiently repopulate the scaffold with stem cells and to assess tissue regeneration on the IVD scaffold.

Team Leaders

Brain Tips

Students in this project learn more about the human brain and behavior. We find popular press and scientific articles that we think would be of interest to and help college and high school students and develop short, memorable tips to share using social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). Students learn about the brain and how it works by developing ideas that others can find useful and apply in their lives. https://www.facebook.com/clemsonbraintips/; https://www.instagram.com/clemsonsss/

Team Leaders

Mission Impossible? Teamwork and Team Composition in High Risk, High Stress Environments

How do we turn teams of experts into expert teams, especially when they are teams working in stressful and demanding environments such as the military, healthcare, sports, or outer space? We are currently investigating this question in the DIGITAL (Deriving Innovative & riGorous scIence for Teaming And Leading) Research Lab, as teams today face new challenges which may require different interventions and strategies than what seems to work in traditional teams. This CI team will involve conducting lab and field research with military teams, spaceflight crews, sports teams, and healthcare professionals to answer this question and expand our current knowledge of teamwork and leadership in culturally diverse, physically distributed, dynamic, and adaptive work environments.       

Team Leaders

Engineering for Modern Healthcare and Addressing Pandemic Health Disparities

One goal of this CI is to analyze community health data to determine how we can better provide COVID-19 testing and future services at Clemson University and its surrounding communities.Another goal of this CI is to develop a method to organize hospital stockrooms using a color-coding scheme that can be used universally throughout various hospitals and stockrooms.

Team Leaders

Community Supported Art

A Creative Inquiry Project by Ceramics Students in the Department of Art at Clemson UniversityClemson Community Supported Art is an initiative started by Clemson students and faculty to connect the community with local, emerging artists. Based on the Community Supported Agriculture model, our goal is to build relationships between local artists and art collectors, while creating a unique shopping experience. Our annual production of the CSArt share brings students from multiple majors together to research professional careers, entrepreneurship, and small business practices in Art. 

Team Leaders

Generation and Characterization of Radiation for Biomedical Applications

In recent years there has been a strong growth in the number of medical devices that use different types of radiation for treatment and imaging applications. There is also a growing interest in different fields ( e.g. medicine, biology, space research, electronics) to understand and utilize the effects of different forms of radiation. The effectiveness of radiation technology depends on the understanding of the interaction with the materials in question ranging from surfaces of solids to biological soft tissues.   The present research project lies on the borderline of physics and biology. The elementary physical processes of the interaction are well known, but their expressions in biological samples depend on the complex response of the system and its environment. Students in this project will explore different techniques to generate, detect, and characterize electromagnetic radiation, their uses in specialized medical devices, and their applications in research.    

Team Leaders

Lab-on-a-Chip and Microfluidics to Identify the Cause of Disease in Clinical Diagnostics

We investigate the use of electric fields to identify and separate different strains of Candida cells. This is very important in the context of healthcare diagnostics since Candida is the causative pathogen of candidiasis, a medical condition affecting 46,000 patients yearly in the US with a mortality rate up to 44%. Identifying the strain causing this condition is crucial since front line antibiotics are not necessarily effective on all strains. For example, front line antibiotics commonly used for Candida albicans, the most likely cause of candidiasis, are not effective to eradicate C. glabrata, an emerging pathogen. The technology we are developing is a microfluidic chipset that utilizes a phenomenon known as Dielectrophoresis to selectively trap and detect different strains of Candida. This is uncharted territory and we are generating excellent results in several fronts. Go to www.multiscalemanufacturing.net to see more information

Team Leaders

Origami for Carbon-based Multifunctional Materials

Carbonaceous materials such as glassy carbon and metal carbides are widely used as electrodes in many applications including sensors, batteries, and capacitors. The focus of this CI is to derive these materials from renewable resources and elucidate ways to control their structure at multiple length scales, from the nano to the centimeter scale, to tailor their mechanical and electrical performance. The aim is at deriving multifunctional architectures such as structural batteries, sensors and batteries. To this end, we emphasize the use of origami techniques to create complex architectures in pure or doped paper, which we then carbonize at very high temperatures without the presence of oxygen. In this way we can derive complex, porous, lightweight architectures of carbonaceous materials. This is a powerful concept since we can create 3D architectures of engineering value from flat paper films. More details can be found in www.multiscalemanufacturing.net  

Team Leaders

The DEN (Design and Entrepreneurship Network)

This CI allows student teams to be mentored by leaders in device design, development, marketing, patenting and small business development to forward student-led technology and ideas. Initially, this CI will focus on mentoring technologies that are being generated by other CI groups, as well as from other Capstone Design programs, but other “independent” teams and technical areas will be sought after the CI structure is established. Teams can include undergraduates and graduates, and preference is given to groups that have already formed around a topic or technology of interest. Mentors and guest speakers from industry, patent law, marketing and start-up businesses will work with student teams to take technology beyond the university development level.  The format will be very student driven, with small student teams presenting each week on some aspect of their technology development and business plans. These presentations will be the focal point for discussions, mentoring and advice.      

Team Leaders

Plant Biotechnology for use in Crop Genetic Improvement

Abiotic stress, such as salinity, drought, heat, cold and nutritional stress, is the major factor significantly impacting crop production. Understanding molecular mechanisms underlying plant response to various stresses will facilitate development of molecular strategies in genetically engineering crop species with enhanced performance under adverse environmental conditions. In this proposed study, we use molecular genetics and genomics approaches to dissect molecular mechanisms determining plant salt stress response, and will develop molecular strategies using agricultural biotechnology approach to modify candidate genes in transgenic plants producing new cultivars with enhanced salt tolerance. This will lead to genetic improvement of important crop species with enhanced performance under adverse environmental conditions contributing to increasing agricultural productivity.

Team Leaders

Sustainable Landscape Demonstration Garden

   Design, installation, and maintenance are essential to creating a sustainable landscape that is a display or model for education. Sustainability is defined according to the Brundtland report (1987) as the integrated use of social, environmental, and economic approaches to effect positive developmental change. Sustainable Sites Initiative (2009) is a working model for the creation of sustainable landscapes. Sustainable Landscape Demonstration Garden is a project that intends to alter the physical environment and enhance the landscape using environmental and psychological measures through the design and installation of a native plant garden.  Visit Sustainable Landscape Demonstration Web site: http://www.clemson.edu/cafls/demo/  and select "Meet the Team" to view past student experiences.                                   

Team Leaders

Clemson University Soil Judging Competition Team

 "The Muddy Tigers", Clemson University's Soils Team, "digs"deep into how South Carolina, regional and national soils play an important role in food, fiber, fun, and our future! The Muddy Tigers learn how to characterize soils, and evaluate the landscape in order to make sound decisions on what soil can be used for. 

Team Leaders

Insect Physiology

Insects provide excellent opportunities to perform basic and applied biological experiments at the molecular, physiological and organismal scales. They serve as model organisms for developmental and cellular biology, and are important vectors for human and agricultural pathogens. As a result, working with insects can expose students to numerous hard and soft skills useful in a range of life-sciences fields, from medical to agricultural biology, evolutionary and ecological to developmental and immunological. In this Creative Inquiry, students will develop and work on projects in two current areas: the identification and analysis of markers of gut stem cells in pest caterpillars, through quantitative PCR and immunological techniques including western blotting and microscopy, and by developing a recombinant virus vector for analysis of gene regulation in lepidopterans, through molecular cloning and fluorescence analysis in cell culture and caterpillars. Students will engage in scientific reading and analysis, develop a short proposal, and present in monthly group meetings and possibly on- and off-campus venues.

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Creative Play

Creative Play studies formalistic models for visual computation applied to creative disciplines, science engineering, humanities and art. This CI project will introduce the LEGO brick system as a catalyst for creativity in design and as an introduction to formal systems for visual computation. Topics include design creativity, formal composition, engineering problem solving, exploratory research, manufacturing and game theory.

Team Leaders

Design Morphology

Design Morphology studies form and structure of natural structures and processes to find applications in the build environment. The initial focus will be for structural applications using pre-cast concrete. Subjects of study include Geometry, Topology, Computational Design, Origami, Deployable Structures and Kinetic Design.

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Cities, Memories and Models

Cities, Memories and Models aims to create a collection of scale models to serve as visual catalog of significant architecture and urban environments in the most prominent cities in the US.

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The use of Medical-Grade Compression Clothing in Children with Autism

On this team, students will explore the effect of medical-grade compression vests on the behavioral responses of children with autism.  The use of compression clothing, widely employed in sensory integration therapy and marketed to parents of children with autism, is not supported (nor refuted) as a viable therapy option in any known published manuscripts.  In this study, the effectiveness of this therapy technique will be scientifically established.  Student researchers will video record the children with and without compression vests.  The video data will later be reviewed to determine the vests’ effectiveness. 

Team Leaders

Fire ecology and invasive plants

This project will help student gain knowledge about wildfire in forests, and how fire acts as an agent of natural selection affecting the ecology and evolution of plants, especially woody plants and trees.

Team Leaders

Microbes All Around Us

Microbes are all around us. They are in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil we walk on, the food we eat; they are even in and on us. Although this fact is generally acknowledged, we don’t always have a great appreciation for the roles these microbes play in our health.  Antimicrobial resistance for pathogens is clearly becoming a bigger and bigger problem, but there is also the potential for some classically non-pathogenic organisms to cause issues. This Creative Inquiry project will focus on investigating a variety of bacteria with various impacts on humans. We will use hypotheses generated by the student investigators’ natural curiosity or recent news stories as the driving force behind our experiments. This CI has investigated topics such as microbial contamination of lab coats during General Microbiology teaching labs and the potential for magazines in physician's waiting rooms to serve as sources of infection.  We have also investigated the antimicrobial activity of various novel compounds with collaborators in the Department of Chemistry.  The current focus of the project involves investigating the interactions between probiotic organisms (found in yogurts and other fermented foods) and their human hosts.

Team Leaders

Single Molecule Biophysics

In this project, students get the opportunity to explore and learn about single molecule biophysics, what it takes to do studies at the single molecular level and the methodologies need to prepare the samples, all while working at the interface of all basic sciences. Students select among various molecular systems that we currently work with in the lab, and learn how to prepare the samples, how to measure them and how to interpret the results.

Team Leaders

Future Manufacturing: Nano 3D printing using bacteria

Imagine using bacteria as tiny 3D printers to weave a material from the bottom-up. We know that many bacteria can synthesize useful materials. In this project we use 1) a bacteria that transforms sugar in its environment to high purity cellulose nanofibers with excellent mechanical properties, and 2) electric fields  to manipulate the bacteria in time and space. The project focuses on the study of the effects of electric field on the synthesis of bacterial cellulose, and the development of optoelectronic tweezers to manipulate single bacterial cells in designed trajectories. Go to www.multiscalemanufacturing.net to see videos

Team Leaders

Establishing a Clemson University-K-12 Research Collaboration/CU Investors

This Creative Inquiry group works with teachers from local middle schools, with an emphasis on under-resourced communities, to design and implement experiments that reinforce scientific theories and processes they learn in the classroom. 

Team Leaders

Research and Development for the National Dairy Council's Annual New Product Competition

Small teams of undergraduates create a new dairy product to enter into the annual National Dairy Council new product competition. Emphasis being placed on conducting sensory panels and understanding ingredient functions as is relates to dairy foods. 

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Experimental Cardiovascular System

In this project students will design and prototype a benchtop flow system which mimics realistic human cardiovascular physiology and anatomy. Such a system can be used for direct medical device testing and clinical training. The current phase of the project is designing a pressure-generating device for producing realistic blood pressure waveforms in an experimental system.

Team Leaders

Robotic Medication Dispenser

We will develop a reliable and robust medication dispenser to help mitigate complications and deaths associated with improper medication use. A number of robotic elements will be implemented to dispense the proper amount of medication to users at the appropriate interval with active reminders to take the medication.

Team Leaders

Converging Education and Research in Materials Discovery and Development

From the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and to today’s Silicon Age, fundamental discovery and development in materials shape major advances in human civilization, so much so that every historical era has been named after the material that led the technology at the time. The ability to connect fundamental knowledge of materials chemistry to real-world applications and to realize available STEM career opportunities is vital for undergraduate and middle school students. However, K-12 and undergraduate students, especially underserved minorities, or the public may have limited access to scientific literature and relevant resources. In addition, even though some literature resources are open access, science communication in forms of journal articles and talks cannot be easily understood by broader audiences. To address this, this CI project will focus on designing and creating inquiry-based storyboard and animation as a simple and flexible pathway to convey complex scientific concepts in an accessible and compelling manner. The goals of this CI project are to facilitate science literacy, to assist educators in teaching concepts in materials chemistry, functionalities, the meaning and practice of science for K-12 classroom, and to excite K-12 and undergraduate students about transdisciplinary STEM fields.  Through this multi-semester CI project, our team will generate e-learning materials, produce lesson plans and resources for teachers, and implement these activities in local and regional schools and summer camps in partnership with the College of Science Outreach Center.

Team Leaders

Physics-informed Deep Learning in Computer Vision

This Creative Inquiry project will provide an overview of the state of the art in deep learning and computer vision. Major topics include image processing, object detection and recognition, geometry-based and physics-based vision and video analysis, and physical and computational models in 3D reconstruction. Students will learn fundamental and advanced knowledge about deep learning, basic concepts of computer vision, computational photography, and hands on experience to solve real-life vision problems.

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Human Environments Interaction

Interactive Environments for Human HabitationStudents will participate in part of an ongoing focus area in research on interactive architectures and objects with multiple sub-projects focused on digitally enhancing and augmenting human environments. This is a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Architecture, Computer Science, Engineering, Biology, and Psychology. Projects vary but include tangible user interfaces, augmented reality and mixed reality visualization, mapping and simulations, modeling, fabrication, clinical studies, prototyping, and interactive architectures.

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Environmental Genetics & Genomics

In this CI project, we use environmental DNA (eDNA), which is DNA released by organisms into their environment, to push the boundaries of how we detect, monitor, and conserve biodiversity. Genetics and genomics-based methods using eDNA are increasingly used to assess biodiversity in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. This CI project is centered on the idea that environmental nucleic acids and DNA barcoding approaches have great potential for noninvasive monitoring of biological taxa of conservation, health, or agricultural importance. In this CI project, we explore hypotheses related to local biodiversity using environmental DNA data. Methods used include primer selection and optimization for DNA barcoding, eDNA or eRNA collection, preservation and extraction, quality control and amplification, DNA sequence data collection and analysis, and phylogenetic analysis of species’ relationships. Our overall goal is to understand and improve how taxa- or species-level presence can be inferred and monitored using real-world environmental genetic or genomic data.  It is anticipated that findings from this project will contribute to our understanding of how eDNA persists in the environment and its relevance and applications to new sequencing technologies and conservation genetic surveys. We will communicate our findings broadly to increase civic scientific literacy and appreciation for the use of environmental DNA in conservation.

Team Leaders

Organic Chemistry Outreach Program - Bonds that holds everything together

Through this educational outreach program, we aim to promote STEM education for local K-12 students.  We plan to focus on relaying the importance of organic chemistry in our lives.  Specific topics of interest include, but not limited to, strong/weak chemical bonds, building molecules, and catalysis. In collaboration with graduate students in the Kim Group, Clemson undergraduate students will focus on developing fun, engaging hands-on activities for the K-12 students.  

Team Leaders

Characterization of commensal Clostridia in the gastrointestinal tract

The indigenous microbes that associate with all multicellular hosts, or microbiota, provide necessary functions that benefit host health. This is particularly true for the gastrointestinal tract, which hosts a particularly diverse bacterial community. While newer sequencing methods have uncovered much of the taxonomic depth of the microbiota in the gut, many commensal microbes remain undercharacterized. This is particularly true for the anaerobic, gram-positive Clostridia, a class of bacteria commonly associated with beneficial functions provided by the human gut microbiota. This project aims to characterize individual Clostridial strains previously isolated from fecal material. Students will characterize phenotypic (morphology, growth conditions, spore formation) and genomic (phylogenomic, metabolic, potential virulence) attributes of different Clostridial species. This information can be used to formulate independent research questions focused on microbial interactions or function. Techniques used include anaerobic cultivation, in vitro bacterial growth assays, molecular assays such as PCR, cell culture assays to detect toxin activity, and bioinformatic analyses such as genome assembly and phylogenomic comparison. Students are expected to participate in weekly group meetings to discuss study results and relevant literature related to the project. We expect to present results at a local, regional, or national meeting at the conclusion of the student’s CI project. These results are expected to expand knowledge of commensal Clostridia in the gut, increasing our ability to develop methods to manipulate the microbiota for host benefit.

Team Leaders

Cultural Competency Inquiry

This Creative Inquiry project, Cultural Competency Inquiry (CCI) program, explores and identifies ways to help students develop cultural competence to study and work effectively as future healthcare professionals. This project will be instrumental in developing and increasing a new Clemson Comprehensive of Clemson University students. The CCI will provide resources and opportunities, such as the Intercultural Development Inventory, online cultural competency modules, cultural activities, and reflection as a group and individually, and help students to grow into well-rounded candidates for the health professions. This CI project aims to study literature around competency and skills needed for healthcare professionals, and evaluate these resources, tools, and contents that will maximize CCI participants' learning and cultural competency. 

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Every Campus a Refuge at Clemson

This CI will investigate the relationship between refugee migration and community building. Building on the work of an earlier CI project on "Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality," this new project will concentrate on the practical and conceptual meanings of refuge and residence in our highly local context of the city and campus of Clemson. The CI will learn about the structure of refugee resettlement in US cities, explore how peer colleges and universities are responding to the challenges of resettlement, and develop new community engagement projects that could improve the quality of refugee resettlement and help build more inclusive communities. 

Team Leaders

Echoes from the Past: Race and Reconciliation in South Carolina

What is the significance of the Echo Theater? The story of the Klansman and the African American pastor who reached out to change his life from one of hatred to racial reconciliation became the subject of a book by Courtney Hargrove titled: A Preacher, A Klansman, and a True Story of Redemption in the Modern South, published in 2018. The book was the basis for a motion picture by Andrew Heckler, Burden, (starring Forrest Whitaker as Rev. Kennedy) released in 2020. As the title of Hargrove’s books declares, it is a story of redemption in the modern American South: the redemption of a building from its racist past to a place for racial healing. It also represents an opportunity for a community to come together and begin to address and take steps toward healing its troubled past. The Echo Theater reflects the transformation of the South, from a strictly segregated movie theater, to an overtly racist hub of hatred occupied by Klansmen and American Nazis, to a center for diversity and reconciliation. Rev. Kennedy and Councilman McDaniel would lead a grassroots protest movement against hatred that eventually led to the closing of the Redneck Shop. What is also significant is the successful execution of a grassroots movement against overt racism in a rural upstate county with African Americans composing less than a quarter of the population. The Echo Theatre represents the transition from segregation and racism to redemption and towards racial reconciliation.  This project will collect  oral histories and engage in relation to those interviews.

Team Leaders

Next Generation Sequencing and Bioinformatics Analysis of Sequencing Data

The fast pace of the advance of the sequencing technology have enabled rapid sequencing of a variety of samples for many application needs. Examples of such sequencing needs are the sequencing of the transcriptome to identify gene regulation, the sequencing to identify organisms that possibly causing infection, the sequencing to track the variant of concerns. As such, we generated large database that requires trained bioinformatician to analyze the data. This project is designed to train the students with a background in coding to demystify the sequencing data base and extract the useful biological relevant information. The students will gain experience using Palmetto server, linux, R, and python under Conda environment.

Team Leaders

Improving Inclusion in Organizations

Over the past two years, the demand for diversity training in organizations has skyrocketed. However, many of these efforts fall short at improving workplace  inclusion climate. This CI team will use experimental and field-based research to explore new approaches to diversity training to better understand what makes diversity training work. Students will have the opportunity to gain experience designing and implementing research studies, developing surveys using Qualtrics, and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data.

Team Leaders

Design and Evaluation of a Novel Cable-Driven Ankle Exoskeleton

In this project, we will focus on developing and evaluating a novel cable-driven ankle exoskeleton. The exoskeleton is actuated via soft Bowden cables to provide ankle extension torque for assisting human locomotion. The entire exoskeleton system will be self-contained, where actuators, power units, control units, as well as necessary sensors will be integrated on a backpack to allow various type of locomotor tasks. 

Team Leaders

Wetland community ecology: what happens when fish arrive?

Wetlands provide valuable services to humans by filtering water and offering flood control. They are also critical to maintaining biodiversity - especially for amphibians, fish, and many invertebrates. While wetlands closest to streams often are easily colonized by fish, those further from streams provide habitat for amphibians and invertebrates. Changes in climate are likely to alter patterns of rainfall and flooding. This could lead to wetlands that are either more easily colonized by fish (in cases of increased rainfall) or less likely to be colonized by fish (in cases of decreased rainfall). Our CI will establish experimental wetlands within the Clemson Experimental Forest. We will stock these wetlands with different species of fish to understand how fish presence and fish species influence the other members of the aquatic community.

Team Leaders

Backyard box turtles: wildlife habitat use in developed areas

When land use patterns change, the number and kinds of wildlife in the area change as well. Some species retreat to undeveloped areas, while other species are able to persist under certain conditions. Box turtles are often seen in yards and parks within otherwise developed areas. We intend to characterize the habitat and movement patterns of box turtles in developed areas and compare that to the same measures in the Clemson Experimental Forest. 

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Sales Innovation Program Sales Competition Team

This CI incorporates advanced selling skills via sales competitions and advanced role play practices. The competition team travels to two in person competitions per year and also partakes in virtual sales competitions. 

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Dynamic Eye Tracking in Real-World and Virtual Environments

The computational power and specialized hardware required for eye tracking technology is becoming increasingly mobile, and hence shows promise in helping provide support in wayfinding situations. Similarly, Fiducial markers, QR-like codes to be read by computer vision like that used in eye tracking, are also becoming more widespread, and can be paired with eye tracking to provide situated environmental support for those technologically equipped to read them. These emerging technologies have untapped application potential to assist those living with some sort of disability or otherwise reduced ability. This assistance is especially needed for those such individuals who find themselves navigating unfamiliar places. This Creative Inquiry project is designed to support students' ability to participate actively in reviewing the literature and forming hypotheses, exploring the areas of Human Factors (the user) and Computer Science (the technology) to solve application issues that arise when using mobile eye tracking to provide environmental support to those individuals that need it when navigating and wayfinding indoors.

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From Trash to Treasure: The Chemical and Organic Recycling of Plastics to Valuable Materials

Plastics have become a ubiquitous item in almost every industry and household due in part to their durability and low cost.  However, this combination has resulted in an explosion of plastic waste that can be found in almost every ecosystem on earth.  Traditional recycling methods have only been successful at converting around 10% of plastic waste into usable material.  This creative inquiry course will explore chemical recycling and organic recycling (i.e. composting) that aims to convert plastic waste to usable chemicals and materials in a circular lifecycle.  Chemical and organic recycling has the potential to turn trash into treasure by valorizing waste, therefore creating incentive for its capture and reuse.  However, the conversion of plastic waste to usable chemicals comes with the challenges of high energy expenditures, additional chemical usage and difficult feedstocks composed of mixed and contaminated plastics.  This course will examine established techniques and those on the cutting edge in terms of lifecycle, technoeconomic analysis and feasibility. 

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Leveraging Diverse Energy Sources for CO2 Mitigation Reactions towards an Equitable Carbon-Neutral Future

The catalytic conversion of CO2 into energy-rich commodities is an effective approach of combating global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions while enabling the sustainable energy future. While the overall feasibility the technological routes can be estimated by thermodynamics, the uncertainties of operational efficiency and cost heavily rely on the choices of catalytic technologies. To ensure our transition to a clean-energy future can be truly equitable without leaving anyone behind, the catalysts for targeted reactions must be affordable and adaptable to energy infrastructure of diverse communities. Two of the major hurdles against this vision are 1) the high cost of catalytic materials due to the undue use of expensive catalytic metals, and 2) the limited options of reaction energy input from established industry process to provide tailored reaction engineering solutions. Therefore the goal of the proposed project is to prove the concept of designing CO2 conversion technologies with minimal catalytic materials and optimal energy input for those catalytic materials. The two main objectives are:1) Designing catalytic metal atoms with both 100 % material efficiency and high intrinsic activity as alternative to nanoparticles.2) Identifying optimal reaction energy input sources as thermo, magnetic, or electro to maximize the reaction activity and selectivity of the catalysts developed in Objective#1.We welcome students with diverse educational background to join the team to work on nanocatalytic materials development, reactor design, and technological economical analyses. Recruited students will have opportunities to present research work at various conferences and publish research articles on top journals.

Team Leaders

Predicting Protein Levels from mRNA Levels

The central dogma of molecular biology gives rise to the expectation that as mRNA levels rise and fall, protein levels will follow suit. However, it is now appreciated that this is an exception rather than the norm. For which human genes does such quantitative central dogma thinking hold? How well can we predict protein levels given measurement of mRNA levels? Are there classes of gene function that are enriched for adherence or non-adherence to the central dogma? This project uses analysis of large publicly available datasets to answer these fundamental biological questions. It is ongoing in the lab and is at the stage where it is likely to lead to publication. 

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Identification of Novel Feedback Loops Driving the Mammalian Cell Cycle

The molecular machinery that controls progression of the eukaryotic cell cycle has long been thought to be well understood for decades. Series of cyclin dependent kinases are turned on one after the other, after being initiated by external "growth factors". However, recent data from our lab has indicated potentially new feedback loops that superimpose onto this core known structure. This project will try to validate and characterize the nature of these feedback loops and understand their role in cell cycle regulation as well as how universal they are.

Team Leaders

Purifying Monoclonal Antibody Therapeutics with Phase Separation

Biologic drugs, particularly monoclonal antibodies, are rapidly increasing in their use and new FDA approvals. A recent example was the Regeneron treatment for COVID available well before the vaccines. A costly step in their production uses Protein A chromatography to purify the monoclonal antibodies after cells produce them. This projects seeks to develop an alternative to Protein A chromatography that could revolutionize this industry.

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Representations of Greek Life

This multi-semester Creative Inquiry project seeks to explore the experiences of Greek life and its representation in popular culture using feminist and sociological methods. This CI project will conduct surveys and/or interviews with students in Greek life to better understand students’ perceptions of and experiences with these enduring institutions. The CI project will consider how youth make sense of meaning, belonging, and their experiences within the context of Greek life and the current media landscape. What it means to be a member of Greek life in the twenty-first century and how this ties to the university experience and community broadly are of increasing significance and will be considered.

Team Leaders

Colorimetric Nanosensors

Modern scientific instrumentation and sensors are often bulky, expensive, and/or cumbersome to operate. Colorimetric sensors on the other hand offer a promising solution to these problems, as they can be analyzed with high spatiotemporal resolution by digital cameras or the naked eye. However, the performance of colorimetric sensors is typically inferior to the bulky/expensive alternatives as it can be difficult to convert small input stimulus variations into a large color response. This research effort seeks to address and overcome these problems and to open the door to new types of high-performance colorimetric sensors and biosensors, which are competitive with and/or offer greater functionality than the bulky/expensive alternatives.

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Best Is the Standard: Football Display Design

Join the newest creative team to help Clemson Football design interactive photo shoot displays for their recruiting weekend. Work alongside the Clemson Football Recruiting Office and creative team to brainstorm, design and build exciting and interactive backdrops and displays for recruiting events.

Team Leaders

Personality & Law

The aims of the research group are to study contributors to personality development and identify real-life implications of personality research findings. In particular, the group is interested in understanding how personality findings can be applied within legal settings. For instance, research suggests that personality impacts the performance of children as eyewitnesses during forensic interviews, as well as the perceptions of jurors when determining witness credibility.

Team Leaders

Trustworthy Artificial intelligence

AI has been applied in the real world and has become an essential part of our daily life. However, many undesired issues have been reported in current AI systems, e.g., bias against underrepresented groups, privacy leakage, the vulnerability to attacks. This Creative Inquiry aims to equip students with various AI skills and engage students in trustworthy AI research. Students will gain hands-on experience with AI model design and development by working on real-world challenges.

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Multi-catalysis: Accelerated synthesis of valuable chiral molecules

Access of valuable chiral molecules such as various therapeutic drugs, materials, and synthetic building blocks has been achieved through multiple-step chemical transformations. However, there is a need to improve the synthetic efficiency of these multiple-step processes since they often require isolation after each step and overall time to produce the final target is lengthy. To address these challenges, this project aims to develop a new multi-catalytic method that will enable the rapid synthesis of chiral molecules from simple building blocks. Through this work, one will learn how to make organic molecules and design catalysts.

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Mapping the Gay Guides

In this creative inquiry project students will work on Mapping the Gay Guides, a digital history project that seeks to digitize LGBTQ guidebooks from the 1960s through the 1990s. While on his frequent business trips around the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bob Damron wanted to find bars and other locales to meet other men like him. A gay man, Damron sought friends, companions, and safety at friendly businesses in the various cities he visited. He began jotting down the names of the spots he frequented, sometimes loaning out his notebooks to fellow gay friends to take with them on their own journeys. His prolific lists became the basis of gay travel guide he began publishing in 1964. In this CI Project, students focus on digitizing and mapping locations included within these historical documents.

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Women's Basketball Recruitment and Design

We have partnered with the Clemson Women's Basketball Recruiting Office to help design a mailer to send to potential Clemson Women's Basketball recruits. This  multidisciplinary team will meet to brainstorm, design and prototype a personalized 3D mailer that the recruiting office can send to high school basketball players in the recruiting process. The mailer is intended to promote Clemson Women's Basketball and get the student excited about the possibility of being on the team. This is an incredible opportunity for students to have a direct impact on Clemson Women's Basketball and potential incoming players.

Team Leaders

Improving Hospital Safety Reporting Using Machine Learning Approaches

Incident reporting systems are used in multiple industries to collect valuable data about safety, risk and adaptive performance. These data come in various forms including free text descriptions of experiences by frontline workers. While the free text format offers the advantage of providing contextual details, the analysis of such data is time-consuming and effortful. The goal of the project is to leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze the data for meaningful themes and patterns that could provide insights about adaptive performance in everyday clinical work. For example reports related to anesthesia airway management could be analyzed to identify frequent risk factors as well as strategies used by anesthesiologists to improve the safety of patients. Part of the challenge would be to identify appropriate classifiers and labels, and the choice of ML technique for the analysis. The project will provide students with experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.In addition to developing the algorithm, the project could potentially lead to insights on the design of self-reporting forms so as to make them better suited to data analytic and ML methods. Such work would be highly valuable in the area of organizational learning to improve healthcare quality and safety. 

Team Leaders

Trogossitidae (Bark-gnawing Beetles) of South Carolina

Members of the beetle family Trogossitidae (Bark-gnawing Beetles) are generally predacious on wood-boring beetles, including economically important bark beetles (Scolytinae). One invasive species, the Cadelle (Tenebroides mauritanicus) is an economically important pest of stored grain. Members of the family are poorly known in South Carolina. About 20 species are known or suspected to be in the state, but a firm species list, how to tell them apart, and where and when they are found throughout the state are all unknown. The presence of undescribed species or new invasive species is also unknown. Working with historical specimens (some nearly 100 years old) and newly collected specimens from a recent state-wide bark beetle survey, team members will curate and identify all South Carolina trogossitids in the Clemson University Arthropod Museum, approximately 1000 specimens. An illustrated key to identification will be made. For each species a state-wide specimen-level map will be produced and habitus photographs using high-resolution focus-stacking equipment will be taken. The final product would represent the most comprehensive view of trogossitids in eastern North America. 

Team Leaders

The YORKTOWN Project: Civic Engagement through Creative Inquiry

This civic engagement project will address a "local" problem involving the Charleston-based Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum, which is one of the state's most popular tourist attractions, the centerpiece of which is the USS YORKTOWN.Commissioned on April 15, 1943, the USS YORKTOWN was the tenth aircraft carrier to serve in the United States Navy. The historic ship saw action in WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The YORKTOWN was decommissioned in 1970 is now part of the museum. One of the museum's goals is to educate current and future generations about America's history, and one of the ways it does this is through oral history interviews. These interviews have become especially important to the ship's story since many of the war-time sailors have since passed away. Currently, the videos can range from 30 minutes to 75 minutes in duration, which is problematic according to research that suggests long duration videos rarely get much attention. The Patriot Point Museum's leadership wants to reduce the duration of these videos, thereby making them more accessible and engaging. However, there is a problem: the museum lacks the capacity to undertake this project efficiently. We believe that a Creative Inquiry project can solve this problem and thereby serve the museum and honor the history of the YORKTOWN and its sailors. Furthermore, students in this project will also benefit from this project rooted in civic participation, which is important for personal growth and identity formation1 as they engage in a purpose beyond the pursuit of individual gain.Depending on the interest and protocol of the Patriot's Point Museum, we may extend this two-semester project by one or two additional semesters. During this time, we would explore how to promote the museum via social media and possibly create standards-based online activities. 

Team Leaders

Fundamental Role of Temperature, Including Entropic Effects, in the Modeling of Dislocation-Mediated Plastic Deformation

Permanent deformation (plasticity) is mainly accommodated in metallic systems by the movement of linear defects denoted as dislocations. Such dislocations are elastic singularities that interact with local stress fields coming from internal sources (such as other dislocations or defects) and external solicitations. Therefore, predicting dislocation evolution relates to the knowledge of the materials deformation pathways. As such, state-of-the-art plasticity models at the mesoscale solve for the evolution of a dislocation ensemble responding upon external loading. These models, termed as dislocation dynamics (DD) methods, have been very successful reproducing physical trends and computing parameters for larger scale models at large strain rates, where the deformation is mechanically overdriven. However, these models are not actually dynamical, just drive the system to the closest elastic energy minimum, and hence, they cannot reproduce thermally activated processes dominating a large range of strain rates. Moreover, systems evolve in a free energy landscape, with energetic and entropic components, although current DD models systematically neglect entropic contributions.This proposal intends to overcome these critical limitations adding missing thermal effects in current mesoscale DD models, including also entropic contributions in the description of the free energy landscape. These developments will significantly impact the field of dislocation-mediated plasticity, potentially modifying the predicted deformation pathways (to better match experimental observations), hardening and embrittlement processes in diverse applications.

Team Leaders

Design, Development, and Validation of Molecular Techniques for Infectious Disease Diagnostic Testing

Sensitive detection and identification of pathogens is critical for effective patient treatment and pandemic prevention. Early identification requires quick testing for a pathogen of interest in a multitude of potential high-risk sites. This project will focus on the development of panels that will be suited for clinical diagnostics of common viruses. Panel screening of common circulating viruses with similar symptom onsets can be rapidly adopted for surveillance purposes. In addition, we will further develop point of care diagnostics for the viruses to address the issues on health care disparity and inequalities. This will benefit rural places where health care and lab facilities are unavailable. With the ready to implement and easy to apply test kit and devices, we will ensure the underprivileged areas are covered for pathogen surveillance and ultimately to prevent future outbreak.  

Team Leaders

Patient-centric clinical trial design

Early-stage clinical trials (CTs) aim to establish the recommended dose of an investigational drug for subsequent trial phases. Clinical investigators (CIs) face significant challenges in recruiting and retaining patients in early-stage CTs, resulting in substantial delays and expenses. Because the toxicity profile of new investigational drugs is little-known, early-stage CTs frequently employ dose-escalation methods, in which consecutive groups of patients receive increasing doses until dose-limiting toxicities are noted. However, patients with different characteristics may experience disparate access to therapies. Terminally ill patients who have exhausted all other options often volunteer for early trials, in which the doses prescribed are low and nontherapeutic, whereas relatively healthy patients may postpone their appointments to wait for a more therapeutic dose. Owing to the complexity of deploying alternative model-based CT designs for new therapeutic agents, these overly conservative dose-escalation methods are still widely employed. This research will build a patient-centric trial design framework for early-stage CTs to achieve equitable, and effective dose allocations. The CI delegates to patients and their physicians the task of choosing therapy times and doses. Patients’ optimal stopping decisions are influenced by prior treatment outcomes (patient decisions), resulting in an intricate learning process of beliefs regarding dose efficacy and toxicity in this dynamic game. In addition, to identify the optimum biological dose for the general population, the CI intends to explore the dose-response curve by testing doses uniformly. This goal may conflict with patients’ dose selection equilibrium solution, which might concentrate within a small dosage range. We propose a pseudo-market mechanism that balances the dose selection that obtains the maximal utility for current participants with the dose exploration that obtains the maximal utility for the general population. The performance assessement of new trial designs with patient choice will be informed by CT data. 

Team Leaders

Immune responses profiling through antibody detection and immunosequencing

Exogenous pathogens or nucleic acids that codes for a functional molecule can elicit innate and adaptive immune responses.  The adaptive immune response is specific to each stimulus and usually starts after 6-8 days after infection or administration. The adaptive immune response involves two types of white blood cells: T cells and B cells.  This project explores the feasibility of profiling immune response through measuring total antibody, neutralizing antibody, and T-cell receptor profiling.  Direct measurement of total antibody and neutralizing antibody reflects the overall antibody mediated defense mechanism. T-cell receptor profiling will provide a snapshot of the T-cell immune repertoire.  For a given pathogen and new medical intervention, immune response profiling will provide critical information on how the body immune system reacts to foreign pathogens or therapeutic methods. This will allow rapid design of the antibody therapy and cell therapy in response to extant and emerging pathogens.  

Team Leaders

Immediate Responses of Bats to Prescribed Fire

This project is focused on determining whether bats are attracted to sites they have received a prescribed fire or whether they avoid them. If they are attracted or avoid these sites, is it because of a change in their insect prey base or a change in the forest structure? To answer these questions, the students will work with a graduate student to place bat detectors in areas before and after they are burned and in control sites. They will also place insect traps in these same sites and measure the vegetation structure. Students will have an opportunity to learn about prescribed fire, bat behavior, identify bats from their echolocation calls, count insects, measure vegetation, and analyze the data. Data collection will occur on the Clemson Experimental Forest and the Sumter National Forest near Mountain Rest, SC.

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FLORECE: Future Leaders Obtaining Research and Extension Experiences

This project aims to prepare undergraduate students to become globally engaged professionals with world-class research and extension skills that allow them to identify critical factors that impact the sustainability of agricultural systems. Students perform field and lab research and will interact with researchers, extension specialists, stakeholders, and other students. Through this project, we expect these students will (i) increase their knowledge of global agricultural challenges, (ii) realize the value of extension programs and stakeholder-driven research, (iii) gain experience in problem identification, (iv) acquire technical, professional and leadership skills, and use them in their future careers, and (v) improve their perception of careers in food and agricultural sciences

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Evaluating the Impact of Green Infrastructures on Storm Runoff and Flooding

Implementation of green infrastructure (GI) is an effective measure for mitigating the effects of stormwater runoff. This proposed research project aims to create a joint modeling and optimization framework to model the stormwater quantity and to determine optimal types and location of GI practices. We investigate (i) how to estimate runoff reduction effectiveness as a function of location, type, and size of GI practices; (ii) how to create a stochastic optimization framework that adaptively integrates the estimated runoff reduction to help decision-making to reduce flooding impacts; and (iii) validate and test the proposed framework and solutions.

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Start With One: Designing and Prototyping Technologies for Persons with Disabilities

Google's "Start with One, Invent for Many" process is one where a small team of designers is joined by a person with a disability or older adult (referred to as a co-designer) to design an impactful technology intended to make a meaningful difference on the life of this disabled or elderly co-designer. In this creative inquiry, students will learn about accessibility and will use Google's "Start with One" process to explore the design of technologies to support the needs of persons with disabilities and older adults. Students will design technologies that may focus on personal mobility, health, wellness, or other topics using a user-centered design framework intended to guide the research process.

Team Leaders

Viruses in peach pollen: A sticky situation

Peaches and other fruit trees can be infected by damaging viruses. In the Southeast, the major viruses of peach are Prunus necrotic ringspot virus and prune dwarf virus. They are both transmitted from tree to tree through infected pollen. The goal of this project is to understand various aspects of this pathosystem. For example, how do bees and other pollinators affect transmission of these viruses? How are wild stone fruit trees (like wild cherry or cherry laurel) involved- do they serve as sources of virus inoculum near peach orchards? This research may involve field and greenhouse work, as well as molecular lab research. 

Team Leaders

Population and Community Ecology of Herpetological (Amphibian and Reptile) Systems

Herpetological systems are ideal for studying population and community ecology. This is because of the highly varied life-histories of reptiles and amphibians. Because reptiles and amphibians have such diverse biology and ecology, we can use them to ask a lot of questions about how populations and communities are structured. This is true both of herpetological communities themselves, and of the microbial communities that call amphibians and reptiles home. In this CI you will study a range of different population and community ecology questions in salamanders and also in whiptail lizards. These are two diverse, model systems where both the animals themselves, and the 'microbiomes' that they harbor can tell us a lot about the ways in which biological populations and communities are organized.

Team Leaders

Spaceflight mission planning and rocket experiment development

Students will have a hands-on experience going through the steps of space flight design that will eventually involve launching a small rocket. Students will also gain experience developing scientific instruments and other hardware that will fly on a NASA sounding rocket.

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Data-Driven Infectious Disease Modeling and Control: Covid-19

Retrospective evidence suggests that current trajectory predictions of emerging infectious diseases are inadequate and may lead to poor policy decisions with potentially severe negative consequences. This proposed research project aims to create an adaptive learning and optimization framework to model the evolution of an infectious disease and determine optimal mitigation strategies to contain it. Specifically, focusing on COVID-19, we investigate (i) how to estimate the number of infected and susceptible individuals as a function of mitigation strategies; (ii) how to create a stochastic optimization framework that adaptively integrates the estimated infected and susceptible individuals to help decision-making to control the infectious disease; and (iii) validate and test the proposed framework and solutions.

Team Leaders

Clemson Advocacy in Nursing: Investigating the Role of the Nurse Advocate in Addressing Implicit Bias

Clemson Advocacy in Nursing (CAN) is a research team of undergraduate nursing students dedicated to creating awareness around diversity and inclusiveness excellence issues that support patient advocacy. The purpose of this CI will be to:assess how undergraduate nursing students evaluate themselves and their attitudes to determine if implicit bias is present in their daily interactionsexamine how personal biases may impact patient care outcomesshare tools and resources to help eliminate /reduce implicit bias in clinical practice.

Team Leaders

Real-time building energy and comfort parameter data collection using mobile indoor robots

The overall goal of this project is to create the scientific foundations that will enable effective collaborations among a team of multi-sensor fused mobile robots to achieve high-granularity monitoring of indoor environmental quality for benchmarking and control of large built environments.

Team Leaders

Precision Supplementation in Ruminants

Agriculture systems including ruminant animal production are being discussed as contributors to climate change. The EPA estimates that 11% of greenhouse gas emissions are contributed by agriculture. Ruminant animals can convert feedstuffs that are not edible by humans into high quality protein products (i.e. meat) for human consumption. There are inefficiencies in the process of this conversion which result in losses in efficiency and methane production. Precision supplementation of ruminants can help to synchronize nutrient availability and lower methane production. Our research evaluates how precision supplementation alters animal growth, feed efficiency and meat quality. @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-469750017 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}

Team Leaders

Driving simulation & eye tracking for human performance research

Access to transportation is a major contributing factor to adults’ ability to stay engaged in their work, family, and personal life. Current developments in driving automation can make transportation safer, more comfortable, and more accessible to all adults, including those that have greater needs. Often instrument design is aimed towards the typical individual, or a range of typical individuals, rather than those who may have barriers to overcome in using a particular tool. Our focus as a lab is to conduct research that improves human interactions with transportation through simulation, automation, and human-vehicle interaction studies; especially with older adults. This research project is to develop and test a Traffic Jam Assist feature using one or more driving simulator platforms. This will include both younger & older adults in the design process, and look at measures of trust, stress, and attention. As a CI student, you will help to conduct quantitative and qualitative research, including: interviews, virtual interface refinement, and exploration of analysis tools for traffic simulation. We will collect geographic data on high traffic-accident and fatality areas in the US. High risk cities and roadways will serve as a basis for further analysis and the design of virtual roadmaps and traffic scenarios. As a lab assistant, you will be taught some set of data gathering techniques, roadmap modelling, simulation design, and interview methods. Here is a link to our lab website which goes further into detail about our lab equipment and capabilities :) https://sites.google.com/g.clemson.edu/staar-labs-clemson/home

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Creating an in silico mammalian cell model

Large-scale or whole-cell mechanistic, computational models enable the study of phenotypic responses with intuitive reasoning. An increase in the availability of big datasets confers an excellent opportunity to build such models. However, there is not much consensus or community standards for creating and sustaining such large models. Our lab created one of the largest mechanistic cellular signaling models in the literature, and now we plan to generate the mammalian in silico cell model. To do so, we need to gather, annotate and analyze available publicly available experimental data. This task will require self-motivated students and teach them about computational modeling, data analysis, and a flavor of (cancer) biology.

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ClemsonX

Humanity appears to be on the verge of a dramatic new era of exploration and development in outer space. Driven by multiple innovative agile companies operating on a remarkable design timeline; technologies to explore and develop a sustainable human presence in space are rapidly emerging. In December 2019, Elon Musk unveiled Starship Mark I, and less than 18 months later after several successful prototype flights, an orbital vehicle may be flown as soon as August 2021. Companies such as Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corporation, RocketLab, Relativity Space, and others are driving innovations in the space industry at an unprecedented rate of development. Increasingly, what was once a science fiction dream of expanding humanity throughout the solar system appears to be within the realm of scientific fact. This creative inquiry seeks to imbue a similar level of enthusiastic agile innovation amongst its participants. Formulated along the lines of the 1975 summer NASA workshop with Gerald O'Neill that led to designs for space colonies, this creative inquiry will form student teams to propose design solutions for future space exploration initiatives. The selection of exploration and development initiatives will be determined by the participating students, but once selected, design teams will be expected to develop practical engineering solutions to their projects. Want to design a space elevator for the moon? An Earth-Mars cycler spacecraft? The first colony on Mars? An exploration probe to Triton? The first space colony? The first asteroid mining mission? All of these are possible projects for teams within the creative inquiry. As part of the creative inquiry, students will be engaged in the current developments of the aerospace industry and will be expected to develop a YouTube channel which will include a mixture of commentary on current events in space exploration and discussions of future visions, including those developed by the students themselves. The purpose of this platform is to engage a broader community of interest in space exploration, to promote scientific education about space exploration to the general public, and to promote the ideas of the students in the CI, as well as the CI and Clemson University. The CI design projects will emulate the rapid, agile progress using approaches demonstrated by SpaceX and other innovative space company startups. 

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Mitochondrial Genomics

In this CI, will learn about mitochondrial genomes. Mitochondria are organelles of utmost importance in 99.999% of uni-cellular and multi-cellular organisms. Students will be exposed to the scientific method and will learn to think critically. We will be using various mitochondrial genomes as examples to improve critical thinking skills and information literacy skills.

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AI in Biomedicine: Machine Learning Models for Prediction and Annotation of Novel Disease Genes

In the human genome, most genes actually do not encode proteins; they are noncoding RNA genes. The largest class of noncoding genes is known as long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), which are transcripts greater in length than 200 nucleotides, but with no protein-coding capacity. While some lncRNAs have been demonstrated to be key regulators of gene expression and 3D genome organization, most lncRNAs are still uncharacterized. Thus, we have been developing new machine learning and data mining approaches for the functional annotation of human lncRNAs, as well as circular RNAs (circRNAs), by leveraging the vast amount of genetic and genomic data ("biological big data"). Our recent studies demonstrate that genomic data mining can give insights into RNA functions and provide valuable information for experimental studies of candidate lncRNAs. This CI project will focus on the identification and functional analysis of novel candidate lncRNAs (or circRNAs) associated with human diseases, including autism, intellectual disability and cancer. 

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Fish ecology and Traits

The variation in life history traits of organisms, such as timing of spawning, fecundity, and rate at which individuals reach maturity, allow for successful reproduction and recruitment across habitats and environmental gradients. Water temperature is a critical habitat variable for freshwater fishes, influencing various aspects of their ecology and life history. However, little is known about how changes in water temperature affect the intraspecific variation of key life history traits, such as egg size, age of sexual maturity, or speed of growth. The objective of this study is to understand the effects of altered thermal regime on fish life history. In this study we will assess the changes in life history traits of redbreast sunfish (L. auritus), bluegill (L. macrochirus), and green sunfish (L. cyanellus) along a temperature gradient in Lake Keowee. The results of this research will help inform fisheries management by providing insights on how alteration of water temperature changes basic life history of native and non-native fish species, providing much needed information to predict the responses of fishes to climate change.

Team Leaders

Improving Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in rural counties

State counties and local municipalities increasingly utilize Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to support administrative needs such as documenting land ownership and property boundaries, utility mapping, infrastructure management, and citizen engagement. In South Carolina, counties, especially those with large urban populations, have deployed infrastructure to support many functions, including access to public records and geospatial data management. In many instances, rural counties need more funding and expertise to deploy such systems and utilize GIS across county departments in an integrated manner. Chester county in South Carolina is one such rural county seeking to understand the staffing, costs, and infrastructure requirements to update its current GIS capabilities. This CI will initially focus on engagement with an enthusiastic local citizen championing engagement and collaboration to upgrade existing GIS systems and knowledge. We will engage with county staff to document existing capabilities, needs, and requirements and develop recommendations in a final report focused on improving county GIS systems. This project may include options for summer work either on campus or in Chester County.

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Materials Exploration in Orthotics and Prosthetics

Foot orthotics and prosthetic socket liners use various combinations of materials and geometries to help reduce pressure hot spots across the orthotic/socket. The goal of the project is to determine a patient's ability to feel pressure differences when standing on various combinations of materials. Students will identify appropriate materials and characterize them based on measures such as hardness or stiffness. They will then develop a human subjects trial that will explore the relationship between the subjects level of comfort and the pressure generated due to various material combinations.

Team Leaders

Cancer Biology and Development

This Creative Inquiry project investigates the cellular events that occur in breast cancer and the common events in mammary gland development. Specifically, we are focused on what directs a healthy cell to become a cancer cell. Research suggests the early developmental pathways in the mammary gland are reactivated in some types of breast cancers. In order to understand these developmental signals, we are evaluating mammary gland gene expression in human breast cancers and using the pre-pubertal swine as the non-tumorigenic model.Global collaborative collections of human tumor samples with matched normals are available in databases for research analysis, however this approach requires tools capable of analyzing extremely large data sets. We will utilize a bioinformatics approach to investigate our research-based questions. The field of bioinformatics is the intersection of biology, statistics, and computer science. We will build networks to indicate similar gene expression patterns comparing our swine samples to the human database. In addition to breast cancer, we will investigate other diseases including but not limited to colon, pancreas, prostate, and uterine cancer.   We will use open source software for the analysis of genes and intersecting networks. Visual graphics will be created in order to illustrate gene expression patterns between the human cancers and swine mammary models. In addition, we will utilize laser microdissection techniques to collect specified areas of interest for RNA extraction and analyses, and conduct immunohistochemical procedures for artificial intelligence studies.     

Team Leaders

Bridging Materials Gaps to Combat Climate Change

We propose a fundamental research plan to dramatically reduce and/or ultimately eliminate the use of supply-deficit platinum group metals (PGMs) as strategic resources in critical catalytic materials for purifying transportation emissions as well as enabling negative CO2 emissions, which can ultimately reverse the climate change caused by pollution emissions. Our atoms-to-emissions approach aims to design and synthesize novel supported metal catalysts with atomic precision that can simultaneously achieve ~100% material efficiency and high intrinsic catalytic performance, thereby enhancing the status of the US energy security and sustainability. Students in various engineering and science majors will be recruited to participate and lead the project in research fronts of materials development, energy device construction, reaction tests, and advanced characterizations. We envision rich opportunities for students to engage conversations with relevant industry. Through the cutting-edge research training, the program aims to prepare Clemson students with diversified skill sets and embracive mind sets to capitalize on the state-of-the-art industry infrastructure as well as to create new opportunities in an era of fast-changing energy landscape to tackle some of the most exciting global challenges.

Team Leaders

Making Sense of Gait: Integrating Biomechanical Feedback into a Lower Limb Prosthesis

This project will focus on developing several sensor prototypes that can detect critical events during walking with the long-term goal of using them to control a lower-limb prosthesis in development in the Bioengineering department. Students will learn about gait biomechanics relating to anatomy and physiology of the lower limb and the compensatory mechanisms that occur with lower limb prostheses through literature and collaboration with clinicians (and Certified Prosthetists and Orthotists) at Prisma Health. They will have the opportunity to learn about types of sensors that can track biomechanical metrics as well as work hands-on with several types of sensors and biomechanical testing equipment used for movement science. With graduate students and clinical collaborators, students will incorporate chosen sensors into a clinical setting through testing and development of chosen sensors on able-bodied individuals and lower limb amputees. 

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CI LAUNCH: Basic Wet-Lab Etiquette

This project will serve as an introduction to the skills, techniques and procedures needed to work independently in an experimental (i.e. wet) laboratory. Satisfactory completion of this project will result in the student being competent in directly setting-up well controlled experiments individually and independently conducting these experiments without any extra assistance from other laboratory personnel. This CI will provide the foundational knowledge and skillsets for undergraduate students to work on more advanced CI projects by allowing them to later thrive in various bench science research environments. 

Team Leaders

Circuit Cellar

In this CI, students will have the opportunity to learn hands-on activities related to circuits and electronics based on integrated circuits (ICs) and discrete components. We will discuss various practical techniques complemented by simulations. Students may take this course sequence over multiple semesters to work on various aspects of hands-on skillset. Within the scope of this project-based learning, a student may work on a semester long project or on a project that spans over multiple semesters. Skillsets learned here include but are not limited to circuit analysis, electronics design techniques, PCB design and manufacturing, EDA tools, etc. We will conclude the semester by designing and implementing an electronic project based on the student’s personal interest.  

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What makes a book worth sharing? A Review of Children's Literature

This Creative Inquiry project brings together education majors to answer the question, "What makes a book worth sharing?" First, we will read scholarly work that informs ways we can identify quality children's literature. Then, project members will select several books to analyze and evaluate. Finally, each member will write up a brief review of at least one book to share in a children's literature review column for Literacy Matters, the state journal of the Palmetto State Literacy Association. Reviews will inform PK-6 teachers and other literacy professionals in South Carolina and surrounding states.

Team Leaders

Confronting extremism and defending democracy

This project explores the origins and consequences of political extremism. Students will conduct independent investigations of specific factors they believe cause or could help reduce political extremism. Student researchers will formulate hypotheses, construct literature reviews, develop research plans, and collect data, including social media content analysis and in-person qualitative interviews.

Team Leaders

Hunting for novel antibiotics from the soil – an introductory biology research opportunity

The arms race between antibiotics and resistant bacteria existed long before the widespread use of antibiotics. Antibiotics were once considered as the “magic bullets” for treating infectious diseases, but the balance of victory has shifted in favor of antibiotic-resistant bacteria (commonly known as “superbugs”) due to the over-reliance on antibiotics by human beings in the past decades. Antibiotic resistance is a problem described by the World Health Organization as "one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development today." Novel antibiotics are in need! As a partner of the Small World Initiative (SWI) – crowdsourcing antibiotic discovery, we invite everyone interested in tackling the challenge to join this creative inquiry team. During the semesters, students will collect soil samples, search for antibiotic-producing bacteria, characterize the antimicrobial activities, and contribute the findings to a database shared by a network of student researchers from over 300 other institutions worldwide. This research opportunity will provide students with a hands-on learning experience and is open to students from all backgrounds and disciplines. Students will also have the chance to develop their own creative projects to raise awareness about the antibiotic crisis and participate in the annual Do Something About Antibiotics Challenge™ in November.

Team Leaders

Detection and Treatment of Cancers and Other Genetic-Based Diseases

This project explores the feasibility of novel biomarkers for early disease diagnosis, specifically in cancer diagnosis. The presence of small RNA molecules such as long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) and microRNAs can be characteristic of disease development. Additionally, students will explore different treatments for genetic-based diseases, such as radiotherapy techniques for cancer or mRNA transcript delivery for treatment of spinal muscular atrophy. The collective efforts in these projects will advance molecular diagnostics and save lives. Students will have an opportunity to learn hands-on skills such as RT-qPCR, cell culture, and mRNA transcript design. Students will also develop analytical thinking skills while solving problems in the experimental process. 

Team Leaders

Occupational Health Psychology

The goal of this CI team is to conduct research addressing issues in the field of occupational health psychology (OHP). Our lab will focus on topics such as the general nature of well-being at work, how aspects of the changing nature of work and nonstandard work arrangements (e.g., gig work) affect occupational health, economic stressors (e.g., job insecurity, underemployment) and organizational (e.g., organizational climate) and individual (e.g., personality) characteristics that influence the quality of workers' experiences at work. Currently, the CI team is working on three projects.  One project is focused on understanding the nature of well-being at work through an extensive review of past literature on workplace well-being.  The second project is an empirical study focused on how exposure to nature influences work-related well-being. The third project will focus on a to-be-determined contemporary occupational health concern; team members will collaborate on this work from project conception through data collection and analysis.

Team Leaders

CX Research and Service Design

This Creative Inquiry offers students an experiential learning opportunity in the fast growing field of customer experience (CX) research. Students will work with clients to develop and prototype new services designed to improve the lives of South Carolinians. Students will work with faculty to identify opportunities for peer-reviewed research publications.

Team Leaders

The Dangers of Online Inauthentic Media

This project will explore the relationships between susceptibility for various forms of inauthentic media (e.g., phishing, deep fake videos). Explicitly, we will investigate if there are any psychological factors that predict multiple forms of inauthentic online media.

Team Leaders

Multiscale modeling analysis of the Lithium metal/electrolyte interface properties in solid-state batteries

The goal of this project is to develop a multiscale modeling methodology to understand the interface properties between electrode and electrolyte in solid-state batteries. Solid-state batteries are promising energy storage devices with superior energy density and safer features compared to traditional Li-ion batteries. Li metal is the main candidate for the anode and we will focus on oxide materials as potential electrolytes. We will analyze the atomic structure of the solid-solid heterophase interface to fundamentally understand the role of misfit dislocations, generating due to the lattice mismatch between the different materials, on the nucleation and growth of voids and dendrites, which eventually lead to the failure of the component. Such fundamental understanding will help design principles to improve materials properties and broadly deploy solid-state batteries for the benefit of the entire society. Molecular dynamics simulations will be used to predict the structure of the interface and the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of carriers and defects. This knowledge will inform Monte Carlo methods to compute transport properties and nucleation rates for voids and Li dendrites. Using artificial intelligence methods (mainly machine learning) we will correlate these outputs to the oxide electrolyte properties to select the oxide material that optimize the battery response.

Team Leaders

The Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language Project

This CI is designed to conduct research and development on the signed language community outreach project that aims to serve various constituents ranging from residents to business owners on Martha’s Vineyard. Through the research and collaboration with the community partners from the island (e.g., Martha’s Vineyard’s Signs Then & Now – a project under a public access MVTV station, town libraries, and the Chamber of Commerce), the researchers and the partners will lead in a variety of projects. The purpose of this research is to educate the community partners, business owners, and residents about signed language and help them experience the practical solutions signed language can bring to its community and everyone. The goal of this research and development is to learn more about how collaboration works and to make it a model for creating society a signed language-friendly environment. 

Team Leaders

C.C.A.R.E Special Research Group: College Students, Our Lived Experiences, and the Research to Help Us Thrive

The purpose of the C.I. is to aid the Coach, Connect, Appreciate, Retain, Evolve (C.C.A.R.E.) initiative. The C.C.A.R.E. initiative began as a program to coach college freshman on how to embrace their new college lifestyle and truly thrive during their years in college. C.C.A.R.E. connects students with one another to share their lived experiences in a place that is intended to be safe and open for vulnerable conversations. This creative inquiry team will research topics related to the lived experiences of college students, including social media and self-perception, and work overload and procrastination. This interactive lab will feature related discussions and content production on college students and the college lifestyle. Our lab will also integrate related interpersonal activities, mindfulness, and play.

Team Leaders

Facility Layout at Lash LInx

Lash Linx is a local order fulfilment center for false eyelashes and related products. As business has grown, the need to design the order fulfillment center has become more acute. This CI team will undertake this facility design project from data collection and identifying the functional requirements to a final design and, hopefully installation and testing.

Team Leaders

Research and Education in Disease Diagnosis and Intervention (REDDI) Creative Inquiry

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a particular interest in the global health profession, as well as a demand for experienced front-line healthcare workers. As a result, the REDDI Lab, Clemson's first CLIA certified laboratory, is now ready to facilitate education and exposure of clinically-based diagnostic techniques as well as professional development for students interested in pursuing careers as health professionals. Students will learn about and be exposed to a variety of diagnostic testing methods, data analysis techniques, and professional practices within a clinical lab setting. Finally, students will participate in outreach opportunities to help educate the community about disease diagnostics.

Team Leaders

The Coffee Can Radar

In this project, students will plan, build and test a "Coffee Can Radar" using coffee cans as transmit and receive antennas, basic RF components and a laptop for digital radar data analysis. The students will learn basic radar principles and operation, to include the radar range equation, basic radar waveforms, and basic signal processing techniques. The students will create a project plan, to include a schedule, a bill of materials, and a test plan. They will build a working radar using an open-source design and test both analog and digital operation. Once the radar is operating correctly, the students will execute their test plan, measuring detected object range, velocity and a synthetic aperture radar imaging mode. The students will document their experience in a presentation to peers and faculty.

Team Leaders

Woodland Cemetery Preservation and Memorial Project

Students will conduct research and participate in community engagement activities to assist with the development of the preservation plan and memorial for Woodland Cemetery. In February of 2020, two Clemson students visited the Fort Hill Slave and Convict Cemetery and found it in a state of disrepair. They worked with faculty and staff to clean up the site and install a memorial. Further research led to the team to learn that there was a larger African American burial site on the west side of Woodland Cemetery. Using ground penetrating radar, 667 unmarked graves, believed to be those of African American enslaved persons, sharecroppers, convicted laborers, and wage workers, were recovered in the cemetery. Clemson Trustees established a trustee task force and Legacy Council in late summer 2020 to develop a preservation and memorialization plan for the burial ground, including a memorial. Students will complete genealogy research, conduct archival research, conduct and create historical tours, create social media posts, assist with developing memorial design, participate in dramatic performances, record oral history, proctor surveys, and write biographical narratives.

Team Leaders

AI Security and Privacy

Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are powering various technology fields including autonomous driving, Internet-of-things (IoT), graphics and gaming, robotics, AR/VR, economics, smart grids, cyber-physical systems, and even structural biology. As technologies become more intertwined with our daily lives, it is important to understand the implications of AI on system’s security and privacy, and investigate vulnerabilities and countermeasures. Being aware of these potential risks and the known solutions to defend, or mitigate, such attacks is a critical skill for future AI developers. This CI project is designed to introduce students to the field of modern artificial intelligence from the security and privacy perspectives, and prepare students for careers as AI or security professionals. The CI team will identify vulnerabilities and propose new protection methods to ensure the trustworthiness of AI techniques.

Team Leaders

PLM Processes and CAD/CAE Tools with Application to Vehicle Component Design

The growth in product lifecycle management (PLM) strategies and computer software has enabled businesses to standardize their design and manufacturing processes, optimize data management, improve field and enterprise support activities, and streamline supply chains. For engineers and scientists, these tools encompass computer-aided-design (CAD), computer-aided-engineering (CAE), and additive manufacturing. They also allow for virtual work environments to digitize innovation. In this creative inquiry course, multidisciplinary students will work with the PLM Center at Clemson University to gain insight into digital processes and tools. For application, system components will be designed, analyzed, and integrated into a Digital Twin representation of an electric ground vehicle to accommodate individual personal mobility needs.

Team Leaders

Pet minds -- how people coordinate with and buy for animals

People spend a lot of time thinking about what their pets think. This is especially true if they compete with their pet (i.e., dog owners that do agility or hunting trials, horse owners that jump or barrel race) and, more commonly, when they buy things like food, toys, or medical care for their pet. In this project, we will examine how attributing humanlike minds to pets affects how owners coordinate their behavior with their pet's and how they spend for their pet. The aim of this CI is to collect and analyze data, submit one or more conference proposals, and submit one or more academic journal articles.

Team Leaders

Turning Teams of Experts into Expert Teams: From Farms to Space and Everywhere in Between

Whether it's your local farm offering apple picking, scientists researching space travel to Mars, or even healthcare workers rounding on patients, teamwork is at the center of it all. But how do we turn teams of experts into expert teams? This CI team will involve conducting research to answer this question and expand our current knowledge of teamwork and leadership in various settings. 

Team Leaders

Human Factors in Healthcare

As technology evolves, changes and challenges among the interactions with humans and machines emerge, especially in the healthcare domain. The theme of this project is to leverage sensing technology, such as those measuring physiological signals, to understand and augment human performance. 

Team Leaders

Bioleaching of arsenic-contaminated soils by the native fungi Aspergillus niger

This CI is led by Biosystems Engineering faculty and graduate students to address the problem of arsenic contamination in agricultural soils. Arsenic is a trace metalloid that is ubiquitous in almost every environment. Increasing concentrations of arsenic in soil and water is a problem the world is currently facing with the multiple arsenic inputs by anthropogenic sources such as mining, milling, agricultural use, and coal ash. In 1993 the World Health Organization provisional guideline for arsenic was reduced from 50 micrograms per liter to 10 micrograms per liter. Since then, arsenic concentrations above acceptable standards were detected in many countries, such as the United States of America, China, France, and Germany.It is a natural process by which biological processes and the anatomy and physiology of plants reduce the arsenic concentration in soil and water. Plants need a necessary supply of nutrients, including arsenic, to grow and immobilize the arsenic through the biological processes mentioned. Certain species of plants have a higher tolerance to an excessive collection of arsenic in the soil. They could make an efficient, low-cost solution to reducing arsenic concentrations to below provisional guidelines.

Team Leaders

Nanotechnology

In this CI course, students will be introduced to the fundamentals and applications of Nanotechnology from Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) perspective. Nanotechnology is the art, science, and engineering of designing materials, devices, and systems at the nanoscale from bottom-up and/or top-down approaches. The role of this technology in ECE has been the driving force behind the information technology revolution over the past few decades and is further expected to be the enabling technology behind the next technological revolution in robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence. The course is structured around some introductory lectures, followed by student-driven research on a topic of student’s choice. This CI experience may lead to publication of a review article, if a student takes the sequence over a few semesters. 

Team Leaders

Designing motile synthetic cells: Structural Biomaterials

The remarkable ability of cells to control shape, interact with their environment, and migrate directed through chemical and mechanical cues are some of the key features that set living systems apart from most synthetic systems. In this creative inquiry project, we will investigate minimal model cells, made from emulsion drops supported by a thin biological material shell. We will explore how stresses are mechanically stored and released in the biomaterial structure, resulting in emulsion drops that migrate! Research will investigate basic physical mechanisms of motility, elucidating how to control whether motion is sustained or intermittent and direction and speed in these minimal, bio-inspired, robot-like drops. Students from a variety of backgrounds are welcome to join and will gain experience in quantitative analysis and experimental techniques, and learn to be collaborative researchers as part of an interdisciplinary team.

Team Leaders

Black Bass Reservoir Ecology

Black Bass populations in reservoirs support important recreational fisheries across North America. However, many North American reservoirs are now over 50 years old. Fish habitat quality in reservoirs tends to decline with reservoir age due to sedimentation and decomposition of natural structures submerged during reservoir filling. A common management approach to compensate for declining fish habitat quality is to install natural (i.e., trees, rock piles, stump clusters) or artificial (i.e., man made) structures in older reservoirs. Such installations have become common across North America and there is evidence that installed habitats can attract and hold fish while increasing angler catch rates. In recent years the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources has been engaged in a large-scale habitat enhancement project on Lake Hartwell aimed at improving habitat for native sportfish, including Largemouth Bass. However, non-native Alabama Bass are also present in Lake Hartwell. For SCDNR to successfully enhance native fish habitat more information is required on habitat use and selection for native and non-native fish in Lake Hartwell. This Creative Inquiry project will work closely with SCDNR and Clemson University faculty and graduate students to use acoustic telemetry to quantify habitat use and movement patterns in native Largemouth Bass and non-native Alabama Bass (also known as Spotted Bass) in Lake Hartwell. The goal of this project is to identify locations and installed habitat types that be preferentially selected by Largemouth Bass and show little benefit to Alabama Bass. Students working on this project will assist with overall project objectives and will also develop an independent project that investigates hypothesis-driven questions regarding fish habitat use in reservoirs.

Team Leaders

Gender Equity on College Campuses

The goal of this creative inquiry is to better understand the current resources devoted to gender equity on college campuses. In Fall 2021 the focus will be on developing a 'use case' for a GEC on Clemson's campus.

Team Leaders

Creating a Textbook for the College and Career Professional Development Course

CCPD 1400 is a College and Career Professional Development course for Physics majors and transfer students. College and Career preparation is an iterative process. It is important to learn and develop new skills and participate in new experiences throughout college. By investing time in college and career preparation activities during their undergraduate experience, students will be successful, high achieving college students and they will also be ready to carry out an effective, thoughtful job search when the time comes. Currently, there is no textbook for this course.  The goal of this project is to develop and design a textbook for the course that the students will use for instructional purposes.

Team Leaders

Clinician Well-Being and COVID-19: Fostering Resilience Using Authentic Connections Groups(ACGs) Among Undergraduate Students in a Prelicensure Baccalaureate Nursing Program

Fostering Resilience Using Authentic Connections Groups(ACGs) Among Undergraduate Students in a Prelicensure Baccalaureate Nursing ProgramThe physical and psychological demands inherent in nursing education have been associated with vulnerability to burnout (a psychological syndrome that occurs in response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors) and can begin long before the student is a professional registered nurse. The levels of burnout are alarming and may adversely impact professional development, jeopardize patient safety and place undue strain on the physical and mental health of student nurses. Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, many already faced symptoms related to burnout syndrome as well as stress, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and even suicidality. Now this global pandemic crisis is presenting even greater academic and personal hardships that are very likely to exacerbate existing levels of burnout syndrome and related mental health problems.

Team Leaders

Developing Medical Devices for Intervertebral Disc Repair

The objective of this CI is to design and develop medical devices that can be used for repairing the herniated intervertebral disc.

Team Leaders

Soft Matter and Complex Fluids

This creative inquiry will enhance students’ ability of computational thinking by offering computational research projects on soft matter and complex fluids. Soft matter represents soft materials that are easily deformed by thermal fluctuations and small external forces, while complex fluids refer to multi-component soft materials that can flow but display non-Newtonian rheology. Gels, liquid crystals, polymers, colloids, emulsions, foams, lipid membranes, cell suspensions, and many biological systems fit this description. Soft matter and complex fluids are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in many industrial and biological applications, from soft construction materials, food processing industries, to biomimetic soft materials and artificial tissues. 

Team Leaders

Modeling Solid-Liquid Interface Properties in High-Entropy Alloys for Additive Manufacturing Processes

Advanced designs in many applications require the development of materials with improved properties to cope with the increasingly harsh environments that such applications pose. Advanced manufacturing processes, such as additive manufacturing (AM), can deliver parts with complex geometries, minimal waste material, and limited post-processing. However, AM microstructures can vary considerably from those produced by traditional metallurgy. It is essential to characterize and control the microstructure and properties of AM parts such that they may be qualified for use in critical applications. Furthermore, the combination of these advanced processing techniques with novel compositions, such as high-entropy alloys, can potentially generate invaluable knowledge to grow optimized materials. We will use atomistic modeling tools to analyze the solid-liquid interface properties that control the solidification process and dictate the morphology of the microstructure. We will combine molecular dynamics with Monte Carlo methods to sample the correct composition in the solid, liquid and interphase. We will compute the interphase stiffness relying on the capillary fluctuation method and the kinetic coefficient for different compositions and undercoolings.

Team Leaders

Gero App Development

This project will work with the Study of Health Aging & Applied Research Programs (SHAARP.org) lab to develop, test, and refine a smartphone application. This application will assess the cognitive, psychosocial and everyday functioning of older adults.

Team Leaders

SHAARP Lab Experience

The Study of Health Aging & Applied Research Programs (SHAARP.org) laboratory examines cognitive, sensory, lifestyle, and physical predictors of everyday functioning among older adults. We then examine how different interventions (such as brain training and exergaming) impact health (such as dementia and cognition) and everyday functioning (such as driving mobility, crashes, falls, and Complex Instrumental Activities of Daily Living). 

Team Leaders

Blockchains, Security and Privacy

Blockchains can be viewed as digital models of fiat money and business contracts in decentralized networks where distributed ledgers provide data integrity and smart contracts allow automatic execution of business logic.  The goals of project include: Learning the basic concepts and cryptographical tools used in blockchains and crypto-currencies, (b) Learning programming experience on smart contracts (in Ethereum), (c) Work as teams on projects in various business applications. Ideally each team consists of students from Math, CS, ECE and business school, a mixture of graduate and undergraduate students.

Team Leaders

Fish Ecomorphology

Phenotypic plasticity can give rise to intra-specific phenotypic variation, which can lead to unique phenotypes between or within populations. Phenotypic plasticity provides an excellent opportunity for ecologists to study habitat induced phenotypic divergence as well as phenotypic disparity of ecologically different species. Body shape has been shown to be an excellent surrogate for the ecology of fish species and is known to be strongly influenced by water velocity. However, studies of intra-specific body shape divergence among habitat types have focused geographic separated habitats such as lakes and rivers. Only one study has been done looking at body shape differences between lotic and lentic habitats within a stream. By examining the variation in body shape, it may be possible to understand how some individuals are able to take advantage of different flow regimes and habitats. The objective of this study is to test for intra-specific body shape differences between high and low flow micro-habitats within streams. In this study we address three hypotheses: 1) individual fish occupying high water velocity habitats will have significantly different body shape from fishes in low water velocity habitats. 2) individual fish occupying high water velocity habitats will have more fusiform body shapes and deeper caudal peduncles fishes in low water velocity habitats. 3) All fish species will show similar responses to water velocity. 

Team Leaders

Creative Medical Device Solutions for COVID Needs (CMeDS)

The emergence of COVID-19 has created unpresident demand of medical device solutions that can rapidly address clinical and patient needs during this pandemic and beyond. In bioengineering, the opportunity to collaborate with clinicians in the design of biomedical devices is challenging, and with COVID, these opportunities are both more in demand and more challenging than ever. But they are critically needed. Clinicians continue to be an essential contributor to the design process, in that they are both the users of biomedical devices, and often the first point of contact for problems that occur in their use. Typically, students explore design related issues, and recruit clinicians to support their work. In this new CI, clinical collaborators that have critical COVID-related needs will work with students to create the next generation of biomedical devices during this pandemic and beyond. This CI will be open to all undergraduates, and projects will be multi-semester, to support the development of long-term innovations to address COVID challenges.

Team Leaders

Recognizing Behaviors of Cognitive Impairment

Every 69 seconds, someone in the U.S. is newly diagnosed with Alzheimers. In this project, students will participate in educational sessions that will provide tips and tools for recognizing behaviors associated with  cognitive impairment and how to effectively communicate with individuals in public and in family contexts.

Team Leaders

Creating A Smart Phone APP for the Clemson Extension Health Program's WalkSC Step Initiative

WalkSC is a 12-week program that encourages participants to walk the equivalent of the length of South Carolina without actually making the trip. Based on a step challenge, and developed by Clemson Extension, participants who sign up gain access to a private Facebook group and receive a two-to three-minute video each week about a diet or exercise topic and flier with nutrition, exercise and health tips. There have been four WalkSC cohorts and initial data is very encouraging that the program is having a positive impact on participants’ movement habits and health outcomes.This creative inquiry project willexamine the current data sets and future data sets with the goal of developinga smart phone application to facilitate and improve the WalkSC experience.CI students will conduct literaturereviews regarding the benefits of Step programs for health; Gamification ofhealth habits and Use of Smart Phone Technologies to improve human behaviorsand habits.The cross-disciplinary team willdevelop an APP to use on smart phones that leads participants through theWalkSC experience. This APP will be piloted with upcoming WalkSC groups anddata from these pilot groups will be compared with past WalkSC groups andfuture control WalkSC groups that do not utilize the new APP. Data will becollected and analyzed to determine the effectiveness of the APP to increaseadherence to the WalkSC program. Participant digital surveys will be conductedto gain insight into creating a final version of the WalkSC APP.The final goal will be to publishand consider the future use of the WalkSC APP for promotion, income generationfor the WalkSC program and development of future iterations of WalkSC typeinitiatives for Clemson Extension Health Program.

Team Leaders

Ionospheric Radar Data Analysis and Instrument Development

In this CI, students work with data collected by high power- large aperature incoherent scatter radars in the polar region, specifically to address questions associated with high latitude ionosphere and thermospheric physics. We also develop low power ionospheric sounding radars using software defined radios within my lab and associated analysis software. 

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Rising to the COVID-19 Challenge with Buoyant And Magnetic (BAM) Assays Sensitive, Rapid, On-Site Testing in Saliva

    We are developing an elegant diagnostic assay technology for ultrasensitive, rapid onsite detection of covid-19 and other diseases. This builds on a CI project that won the 2020 COVID IMPACTs challenge, finished second in the 2021 challenge, and second place poster in the 2023 CI showcase.     Most rapid tests often miss positive patients especially early in the disease and there are times when a more sensitive test would be useful to manage the disease or reduce transmittance. For example before visits to vulnerable family or at urgent car facilities. Quantitative PCR has sufficient sensitivity, but uses centralized facilities which are ill-suited for rapid onsite detection. Like rapid lateral flow assays, our buoyant and magnetic (BAM) assays use antibody-coated microparticles to detect disease biomarkers, but by using glass microbubbles that can be counted with a camera and magnetic microbeads that provide magnetic manipulation, we can detect much lower concentration using single-particle counting techniques.     The team will work on simplifying the setup and protocols, simulating reaction kinetics, optimizing reaction and video capture conditions, and writing up results for publication as well as pitch competitions. Finally, while we are focusing on COVID-19 detection, the underlying technology could be used as a platform for multiple other diseases.

Team Leaders

Design Justice in Architecture

This research focuses on architecture and space within marginalized communities. It will question rules implemented and institutionalized by entities in power.  Namely, sections of architectural history in which practices followed such directives without questioning the effects those actions had in our culture and society will be analyzed. Students will use architecture and urban design as lenses to highlight the truthful consequences of government sponsored displacement, exclusion, segregation, racial inequality, social injustice, redlining, as well as policies that have fortified racial discrimination. The research will provide students with sources to develop projects and initiatives through design to combat these injustices with an emphasis on the notions of city, architectural pedagogy, and architectural practice. 

Team Leaders

Media Forensic Hub

CU Media Forensics Hub (https://www.clemson.edu/centers-institutes/watt/hub/) is part of the Watt Family Innovation Center. By “Media Forensics” we mean the development and application of state-of-the-art techniques to broaden and deepen our understanding of all media types, while working to increase the capacity of our students and community to apply them. The “Hub” accomplishes this by spanning multiple disciplines and approaches, from history and case studies, to AI and machine learning, to experiments in the lab and the field. We connect widely-spaced entities with a common interest from across disciplines, centers, institutions, and perspectives.  

Team Leaders

Digital Wellness Nurse - Applied Biomedical Sensing and Machine Learning in Nursing

The Digital Wellness Nurse (DWN) is an ongoing collaborative project aimed at developing an interactive, digital assistant for healthcare professionals engaging a diverse patient population. The project will feature the development of an artificially intelligent chat interface that collects patient data from multiple sources, including previous health data, wearable sensor data, and patient interviews. The combination of these data can be used to develop a patient wellness profile, which can be monitored overtime to assess progress toward a healthy lifestyle over time. The DWN will be designed to interact with electronic health record systems to access patient health and medication history. Students participating in this project will engage in human subjects research during the design and implementation of a DWN prototype. Research will include usability studies for an interactive patient software application, machine learning applications to develop autonomous patient interviewing and data management, and wearable sensor integration to enable continuous patient monitoring.

Team Leaders

Transgene Containment and Removal in Important Perennial Grasses

Turfgrass and switchgrass are among the most important perennial grasses significantly impacting agriculture production, agriculture economy, sustainable energy and environment. Like in many row crops, genetic engineering of both switchgrass and turfgrasses using transgenic technologies offers the opportunity to incorporate many economic and agronomic benefits that are difficult or impossible to achieve through traditional breeding techniques. However, the risk of transgene escape and the unforeseen environmental consequence by the use of transgenic technology in perennial grasses require development of strategies for transgene containment. We propose to develop and evaluate an integrated approach that combines a dual site-specific recombination system and total sterility induction mechanisms for transgene containment and removal in switchgrass and turfgrass, producing transgenic products self-contained for desirable transgene, but free of undesirable foreign DNAs.

Team Leaders

Assessing Impact of miR-33a, ABCA1, and ABCG1 Expression on Cholesterol Efflux in VSMC

Atherosclerosis is driven by cholesterol accumulation in vessel wall cells, which primarily consist of endothelial cells, vascular smooth muscle cells, and macrophages. Vessel wall cells can remove excess cholesterol via cholesterol efflux. Three main genes which regulate cholesterol efflux are ABCA1, ABCG1, and miR-33. While these genes have been extensively studied in endothelial cells and macrophages, there is scarce data on the impact of these genes when expressed in vascular smooth muscle cells. Therefore, this CI will assess the impact of these three genes on cholesterol efflux in vascular smooth muscle cells.

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Culture's Influence on People's Interactions with Others and with their Environment

This project investigates the influence of cultural background and cultural values on various psychological processes related to interpersonal relations as well as to environmental attitudes and behaviors. 

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Engaging in Qualitative STEM Education Research

This creative inquiry course will focus on applying qualitative research methods to two ongoing research projects involving 1) infusing empathy content into first-year engineering courses, and 2) the impact of undergraduate research. Students will have the opportunity to engage with both projects over the course of the year. Students in this project will learn how to perform qualitative research and gain valuable experience with data collection, coding and analysis with Taguette/MAXQDA. 

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Developing a Sustainable Equine Composting System

Animal waste has been successfully converted to compost for several decades in a way to efficiently dispose of and utilize as a resource. The Clemson University Equine Center houses anywhere from 60-70 horses in which each defecates an average of 30 lbs. daily with no ecological or economical disposal benefits. Our goal is to determine how to effectively convert horse manure into organic compost, sustainably package it through used feed sacks and market the product to the public.

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Signals, Sensors, and Machine Learning to Improve Psychotherapy Outcomes

This Creative Inquiry project is an interdisciplinary collaboration led by engineers, a computer scientist, and a social scientist. The team will work together to create training tools for therapists to improve session outcomes, especially using the Motivational Interviewing framework. The team will be assisted by clinical psychologists from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and Florida State University, who will provide content knowledge of the therapy setting. Engineering and computing students will develop instrumentation and data processing techniques that will allow the therapists to be physiologically monitored, adding important information to the session records, which can be improved for better patient outcomes.

Team Leaders

Development of a Zebrafish Model of Parkinson's Disease to Analyze Novel Treatment Methods

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that causes balance and coordination problems that eventually lead to death and affects nearly 10 million people worldwide. As of today, there is no definitive test to diagnose and track the progression of PD This increases the need for a reliable biomarker to diagnose, track, and ultimately, treat the disease. PD has been linked to lysosomal storage disease characteristics. A potential biomarker has been discovered in a lysosomal storage disease, GM1 Gangliosidosis. This biomarker connects lysosomal enzyme upregulation to impaired autophagy. Between the connection with PD and LSDs, it is hypothesized that a similar biomarker can be found in PD. There are many PD cellular models that are used in disease research. These models typically are not all inclusive of the disease, but model a specific aspect of the disease, such as degeneration of dopaminergic neurons, the aggregation of a-synuclein, and accumulation lewy bodies. This project will explore potential biomarkers of PD and if one or more aspect of the disease is directly related to enzyme up regulation. Team members in this Creative Inquiry will research different cellular models of Parkinson’s Disease in order to determine potential biomarkers that can help diagnose and track the disease.

Team Leaders

Invasion Ecology of Non-Native Ornamental Trees

Virtually all non-native trees in the United States were originally introduced as ornamentals and landscape trees. Their escape into natural and managed areas has been associated with declines in native biodiversity and alterations in food webs. We will look at the most common non-native ornamentals (e.g. Callery pear, privet) and their impacts on various native species from plants to pollinators, leaf litter arthropods, and twig borers. Students will design experiments to test hypotheses related to these potential impacts, collect and analyze respective data, and present the results in presentations and publications.

Team Leaders

Software Engineering Bots for Newcomers Onboarding to Open Source Projects

Onboarding refers to the process of teaching newcomers (new workers) the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in their positions. It serves as a way to integrate new workers into the environment both so they can understand how to succeed in their position but also integrate with their coworkers so they can work effectively as a team. It is during this period that programmers become familiar with a new project, its source code, and its team. While it is considered a necessity, it is also very costly and error-prone. Open-source software (OSS) projects leverage the coordinated effort from globally distributed stakeholders who build high-quality software. To remain sustainable and to evolve, several projects rely on the onboarding and retention of newcomers. However, attracting newcomers and engaging them are not easy tasks. Previous work shows that the barriers posed during the joining process may lead newcomers to give up on contributing. Joining an OSS project is a complex, multi-stage process, and this complexity could push newcomers away from the project.We propose to create a conversational bot that could help newcomers with finding open source projects that they can contribute to and guide them throughout the process. Newcomers face difficulties when onboarding to new projects. We believe that a bot that guides the newcomer, offering help when there is no activity, provides resources and recommends experienced developers for assistance, the newcomer will feel more confident and will be poised to have a successful contribution.

Team Leaders

Smart and Healthy Buildings

Buildings are generally considered as static objects with limited capability to adapt to varying environmental and operational conditions. One important aspect is the flow of users, which can vary significantly during a typical day. This project consists of developing and testing the technology necessary to identify and quantify the flow of users in a building, and even track the location of each user in real time. It is anticipated that once users can be tracked, the building operating conditions, such as HVAC conditions and lighting, can be altered to create the necessary conditions for optimal comfort. Several technologies are under development including the analysis of signal strength of mobile devices from wireless access points. The students involved in this CI project will work with industrial partners to test various technologies in several buildings on campus, including the Watt Family Innovation Center.

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BeakerBox: Science Education in Middle Schools

Help design fun activities for K12 science classrooms! Through this CI, small teams will generate lesson boxes (“kits”) and activities to help local teachers communicate concepts in biology for the 6th-8th grade classroom. The goals of this project are to promote understanding of concepts, science literacy, and excitement about STEM for middle school students. Students in this CI enroll for multiple semesters and develop grade-appropriate inquiry-based activities and generate class resources for teachers. Team members in marketing and graphic communication will create branding materials, assist in generation of classroom materials, and design and establish communication materials such as flyers, websites, and social media. This CI coordinates with a second BeakerBox team that brings these activities into the classroom.

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RCA Product Development Competition

Student teams will develop a proposal for food products based on the criteria set by the Research Chefs Association (RCA). Teams will develop both a gold standard and the corresponding manufactured item formulations. If selected, teams will compete in the Student Culinology® Competition at the RCA's annual conference. 

Team Leaders

Microbial Transfer in Hospitals : Empirical Research Study of Contact Transfer via Nursing Personnel

Healthcare associated infections are deadly and costly in our medical practice. They negatively impact patient outcomes, while increasing length of patient stay and widespread antibiotic exposure, all of which in turn can increase chance for opportunistic infections, medical errors, deterioration and muscle wasting. Reducing bioburden by altering surface materials has been shown to significantly decrease HAIs. Current options for this are limited solely to copper bed linens. This research study is designed to identify and quantify contamination and spore transfer that occurs in daily nursing practice. This study will provide a basis for the development of new materials, fabrics, and linens in the form of copper and silver scrubs. 

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LGBTQ+ Learning Communities: Queering University Spaces

The purpose of this creative inquiry project is to provide students with an opportunity to answer the broad question: How are universities deployed (or not) as queer spaces? The project involves an initial sequence that provides an overview of lgbtq+ studies and reviews the literature related to queer(ing) space on campus. Then two semesters of research experiences will be dedicated to introducing, designing, and implementing a participatory action research project that describes queer space as it pertains to Clemson University. Students will have an opportunity to design a study and collect, analyze, and present data in a variety of formats, including scholarly presentations and community education exhibits.  

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Moot Court Competition

This CI involves legal research addressing a defined hypothetical problem.  Participants will do research on legal issues and write a legal brief.  Teams will present their briefs and defend them orally in an intra-university competition at the end of the Spring.  Then in the Fall, they will again compete at a qualifying competition for a slot in the nationals the next spring.  The Spring will also involve another intra-university competition in preparation for the next year’s nationals.

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Addressing Social Determinants of Health in Pregnant Women with Substance Use Disorders

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a significant public health issue and pregnant women with problematic substance use are at substantial risk of comorbid health and mental health problems. In addition there are increased risks to the baby's health and poor birth outcomes. This project aims to address the social determinants of health related to worse outcomes in pregnant women with substance use disorder and improve screening, brief treatment and referral in this population.

Team Leaders

New Ideas of Making Driverless Vehicles Better

Driverless vehicles use advanced in-vehicle and transportation infrastructure sensors and electronic controllers, wired and wireless communication (vehicle-to-everything (V2X)), human-machine interfaces, data management infrastructure and advanced analytics tools to enable the safe and secure longitudinal and lateral movements of driverless vehicles. A substantially improved surface transportation system, in terms of both safety and efficiency, is the result. This course will provide students with a comprehensive overview of concepts and hands-on experience related to new ideas to make driverless vehicles and their surrounding environments much safer, more secure and more efficient than what is envisioned today.

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Research Topics in Mineralogy

This CI project encompasses research related to mineralogy including crystallography, crystal chemistry, mineral occurrences, and mineralogical applications in petrology. Students will develop skills in hand sample identification, compositional and morphological characterization of minerals, as well as atomistic scale investigation of composition, structure, and mineral stability.

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Team Research in Computational Environments

This creative inquiry research project seeks to further our understanding of how humans work and interact with artificially intelligent agents in a team environment. The Team Research in Computational Environments lab group conducts and reports on multiple experiments supporting this field every semester and this creative inquiry allows Clemson students the opportunity to learn how to conduct such research and conduct their own study on human-autonomy teaming.

Team Leaders

Stress, Health, & Well-Being

This CI team focuses on three common health behaviors: sleep, physical activity, and nutrition. Research projects can include objective and subjective measures such as performance, activity, exercise, sleep logs, affective/emotion, satisfaction with life, circadian rhythms, self-control, and other daily functioning tasks/scales. The broad goal of this research is to develop and document intervention strategies to improve performance, health, and well-being in college students and in workers.

Team Leaders

Deconvolving the Southern South American Dust Production Pathways

Glacial action in South America over the past ~1 million years created a tremendous amount of dust (airborne rock power). This South American dust influenced Earth's global climate over this time period, but our understanding of HOW Earth's atmosphere and hydrosphere were effected is hampered by a limited understanding of when and where deposits of glacial dust came from. In this project, students will use detrital mineral geochronologic methods to determine the bedrock sources of large dust deposits throughout South America.

Team Leaders

Engaging citizen scientists to explore flower color diversity across the Southeast

The natural world abounds with diversity in coloration. Flowering plants have evolved enormous variation in petal coloration among different species, as well as among populations of the same species. This project involves exploring population-level flower color diversity across the ranges of four Southeastern native plants. Citizen Science offers a host of educational, research and community benefits. CI students will manage this citizen science project, collaborating with members of Native Plant Societies across six Southeastern States to do the following:1) Coordinate with and train naturalists to collect standardized photographic data spanning the ranges of 4 native southeastern plants. 2) Test whether flowers may evolve to be more conspicuous to pollinators against the local background color.3) Test for geographic and bioclimatic associations with flower color. 4) Present project updates and results at Native Plant Society meetings and maintain a research blog for citizen scientists.

Team Leaders

Gene Editing in the Brain via Nanotechnology

Although a vaccine and several treatments exist for Hepatitis B, chronic cases remain a public health concern. Chronicity is due in part to large numbers of non-infectious particles, produced alongside the virus, which exhaust the immune response. In this project, we will focus on treating Hepatitis B by using targeted polymer amphiphiles to assembly around virus particles and removing them from the body. We will also study the effect of flowing fluid on directed self-assembly, in order to mimic blood flow conditions in the human body. Self-assembly of nanoparticles is an area of intense focus in nanomedicine, but relatively little attention has been given to either directing self-assembly around a free-floating target and the effect of flow on nanoparticle formation. As a result, these areas potentially hold broad interest for nanotechnology.

Team Leaders

Humanities Prison Initiative

This CI will allow students to research, discuss, and understand the complexities inherent in the U.S. prison-industrial complex. This course builds on “Narratives of the Incarcerated”; however, this new project will focus on the design and maintenance of inclusive quality learning-centered educational programs for those who desperately need access. In the spring of 2022 the outreach program, Clemson Humanities Prison Initiative, was born. This organization currently engages in dialogue at Phillips State Prison in Buford, Ga. and teaches and tutors at Greenville Detention Center in Greenville, SC. This CI will function as a team of designers to expand this initiative through grant funding and the creation of new programs. This CI advocates for and supports efforts to create an inclusive prison education program at Clemson that reaches incarcerated people in the state of South Carolina.

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Entrepreneurship in Science: from Idea to Market

This Creative Inquiry project is for Fall 2023 and Spring 2024. In the Fall semester, the project will focus on entrepreneurship. In the Spring, students will generate ideas, form the Catalyst Competition teams, identify the team project mentor(s), facilitate workshop participation, present at the Catalyst Competition, and post-competition analysis and feedback.

Team Leaders

Physics of Sports Laboratory Development

In this Creative Inquiry project, we will be involved in the creation and development of the laboratory component of a new general education course focused on the physics of sports. We will collaboratively design and test new laboratory exercises and deploy these exercises into the new lecture course associated with this project. Potential topics  include Coefficient of Restitution, Deflategate and Materials Advantages in Sports. 

Team Leaders

3D Printing and Graphic Communications

This Creative Inquiry project introduces students to the core technologies, applications and production processes of three-dimensional printing. Students will learn 3D design, design for print production and apply their knowledge in hands-on project work that will allow them to produce 3D objects of their own. We intend to use Mimaki 3duj-553 color 3D printer to study print quality and to create special 3D effects.

Team Leaders

The Effects of Radio-Frequency on Biological Cells

This project studies the effects of radio-frequency (RF) fields on cell growth, including cell growth rate and cell viability.  The targeted frequency is from kHz to low GHz.  Future 6G communication frequencies will also be considered. The unique features of the RF technologies developed in this effort include uniform electric fields across the targeted cell samples, the capabilities to identify frequency components that are most likely to induce RF effects, and real-time online monitoring of biological processes.  We will begin with yeast cells and move on to neurons or other type of cells. The obtained results are expected to help understand the effects of cell phone signals on human health and point to new biomanufacturing technologies as well as new bioelectronic medicine.

Team Leaders

SAE Layout Design

Provide recommendations for the SAE Formulae 1 and Baja work areas that address issues/opportunities identified by last year's CI team.

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Cancer Systems Biology in the Birtwistle Lab (LAUNCH CI)

This is a creative inquiry that broadly catches research projects going on in the Birtwistle Lab. In general, we do both basic and applied research at the interface of engineering and cancer biology. We specifically focus on cancer systems biology from both experimental and computational / theoretical perspectives. The purpose of this CI is to get first time undergraduates familiar with the lab, who we are, what we work on, and how we do it, so that they can enter more specific projects subsequently.  If you are interested in the wet lab, I accept students twice a year. Send an inquiry on Dec 1 for Spring, and on July 1 for Fall. For the computational (dry) lab, I accept students to specific projects on a rolling basis. Inquire anytime. 

Team Leaders

Archaeology from the Era of Fort Hill Plantation and the Revolutionary War

This project gives students the opportunity to work with archaeological data from Fort Hill Plantation and Revolutionary War Era fortification of Ft. Rutledge, both located at the core of Clemson’s campus. Students learn archaeological laboratory methods through working with the artifacts excavated by Clemson students during the 2021 Clemson Archaeological Field School, analysis of materials related to the landscapes and people that lived and worked on what would later become Clemson University. Students can be involved in original scholarship about enslavement, indigenous life, the revolution and the history of the Upstate region. Project components involved analysis and curation of historic period artifacts, 3D virtual reconstructions of artifacts, and Portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) componential analysis of coal and soil deposits.

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Forest Herbicide Applications

This project will investigate the effects of herbicide treatments on vegetation in various types of forested stands. The research study will involve various herbicide applications may include site preparation, timber stand improvement, and seedling release sprays to deaden competing vegetation around preferred trees and seedlings. Study sites will be near Andrews, SC and the Clemson Experimental Forest which are located in Georgetown County along the coast and near campus, respectively.

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Clemson Metapopulation Research

The Clemson Metapopulation Research Creative Inquiry team conducts spatial ecology research on a local green salamander population to address the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources' 2015 State Wildlife Action Plan. Current projects include (1) derive estimates of abundance and survival at the subpopulation-scale using a capture-recapture study, and (2) estimate population connectivity, inbreeding, and the liklihood of bottlenecks across subpopulations. 

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Tangible genomics

This Creative Inquiry project will center upon genomics. The focus will be on structural variations with emphasis on mobile elements. Mobile elements, discovered by Barbara McClintock, are also often referred to as jumping genes or transposable elements.They are abundant in many genomes --e.g. more than 50% of the human genome is comprised of mobile elements. Transposable elements are associated with certain genetic disorders not only through insertion but also via recombination between elements. As part of this project, we will investigate different aspects of mobile element biology and how genomes evolve with respect to transposable elements. This Creative Inquiry has computational including programming as well as some wet-bench aspects. Furthermore, we will explore new approaches on how to visualize genomes with regard to mobile elements. This includes the developments of tangibles for data interaction.

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Tiger Tea Kombucha

Tiger Tea is a data-driven product development project where students develop beverage formulations, design labels, execute human subjects research, and analyze data to iteratively improve delicious and nutritious kombucha for the marketplace.

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DeepGreen: Modeling and Boosting Energy Efficiency on Liquid Immersion HPC Systems

This project aims to comprehensively understand the opportunities enabled by liquid immersion cooling, and explore its full potential to boost energy efficiency for high performance computing (HPC) under various thermal and power constraints. Improving energy efficiency, i.e., the ratio of performance to total power consumption, is crucial to sustain performance growth and realize exascale computing within 20 MW of power. HPC systems consume tremendous amounts of power for not only computing but also cooling to keep compute components within their thermal limits. In this project, we investigate liquid immersion HPC systems to optimize overall energy efficiency. we propose to develop machine learning models and system software to understand and optimize energy efficiency and reliability for workloads running on liquid immersion HPC systems. Our experimental platform is a Submer SmartPodX immersion cooling system.

Team Leaders

Engineering Nanobiomaterials for Delivery of Cancer Therapy

Advances in cancer research together with advances in biomaterials and nanotechnology, have enabled the development of micro- nano-scaled drug delivery systems for cancer treatment. The goals of delivery systems for cancer treatment are (1) delivering cancer therapeutics efficiently to the tumor site, (2) enhancing uptake of therapeutics by tumor cells, and (3) minimizing non-specific uptake of therapeutics by healthy cells. The design of effective delivery systems for cancer therapies will require optimization of micro- or nano-based delivery systems, cell-specific targeting, and mechanisms for effective drug release. Targeted delivery may be enhanced by both active and passive targeting mechanism. Targeting moieties that bind to overexpressed receptors on malignant cells can be conjugated to particles to increase cell-specific uptake, thus enhancing the efficacy of treatment. Additionally, environmentally responsive polymers can be used to achieve efficient and/or controlled release of therapeutics under physiologic conditions. The goal of this CI is to develop innovative drug delivery systems to advance cancer treatment.

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Diversity Outreach in Bioengineering

We aim to improve retention and matriculation of students of color into bioengineering by building their identity as engineers. Targeting incoming freshman, this CI will function as a diverse cohort of minority students enrolled in bioengineering. We will connect underrepresented upper classmen and grad students with the freshmen as they work together on a multidisciplinary engineering project. The potential being that underrepresented students can build a community of fellow bioengineers for support and fellowship that will aid in developing their identify as engineers early in their college careers. In the second year, students will design their own hypothesis based study based on their foundational year of research on the team. In addition, they will use their project to outreach to new general engineering students and K-12 students in our state.

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Visual Exploration of Scientific Data (SciVis Contest)

This Creative Inquiry aims at exploring scientific data by means of interactive visualization techniques. The project is developed in conjunction with the SciVis contest, a visualization challenge hosted every year at the IEEEVIS conference (http://ieeevis.org/).Students should expect to enroll in the CI project for 2 semesters. During the Fall semester, students will learn the basics of scientific visualization by working with Paraview. During the Spring semester, students will develop a new project based on the dataset published in the SciVis contest. High-quality projects will be submitted to the SciVis contest and, if accepted, students will have the chance to attend the IEEE VIS conference for presenting their work.

Team Leaders

In vitro fertilization and embryo culture

Successful reproduction of livestock is critical for the economic livelihood of farmers and affects the consumer cost of meat and other animal products [1]. In vitro-production of embryos is one of many assisted reproductive technologies having a positive impact on bovine production systems. This technique has several advantages over the recovery of in vivo-derived embryos, but in vitro maturation (IVM), in vitro fertilization (IVF) and in vitro culture (IVC) procedures need further improvement. In the bovine system, in vitro production of blastocyst (the embryonic developmental stage that is commonly transferred into a recipient cow to obtain a pregnancy) has plateaued at around 40 %; however, the in vivo embryonic development rate is in the range of 85 to 95%. Among the many steps for in vitro embryo production, oocyte cytoplasmic maturation is a critical factor determining the success of subsequent embryo development (oocyte is the ovum or “egg”) [2]. In this project, we propose to use light stimulation to enhance oocyte cytoplasmic maturation. Based on reports in other cells and tissues, the light wavelength, time, and frequency of exposure may have different effects on cells, ranging from null, to stimulating, to detrimental. We will test different light protocols during oocyte maturation, and measure the subsequent changes in blastocyst production. A significant increase in blastocyst production will make the in vitro production system more efficient, reducing costs for bovine producers and their customers. In the process, we will also increase our understanding of the basic physiology of the oocyte, the maturation process, and the effects of photostimulation in general.[1] USDA/NIFA. Animal Reproduction Overview. In: Animals & Animal Products, vol. 2014. Washington, DC: National Institute of Food and Agriculture; 2012.[2] Data reviewed in the overview of W3171: Germ Cell and Embryo Development and Manipulation for the Improvement of Livestock

Team Leaders

Application of Machine Learning to Science and Engineering

In this project, students will learn and work on applying machine learning methods to science and engineering problems, including 1) predict the material properties from the material composites; 2) predict skin cancer using images; 3) understand social behavior using social media data.

Team Leaders

Evaluation of Forage Production and Quality for Livestock Production Systems in the Southeastern United States

A major challenge for producers in cool-season grass systems like tall fescue is the quantity and quality gap of forage production that usually occurs during mid through late summer. Warm season annuals can complement perennial cool-season systems and extend production during this critical summer months. High level of nitrogen fertilization are usually required to maximize summer annual grasses production, but  summer annual legumes have the potential to provide high forage quality and fix atmospheric N that will reduce fertilizer cost. In recent years, stored forage in the form of baleage has become more popular in the southeast. Legumes-grasses might present some challenges for a proper ensiling process due to the commonly lower sugar concentration in the resultant forage. Thus, evaluating the impact of the ensiling process of this forage mixes is warranted in order to generate producer’s adoption of these forage sources.Although alfalfa has been grown in the Southeastern USA since the late 1800’s, it has not attained the status in this region as in other parts of the nation mainly due to problems with alfalfa weevil and an abundant supply of inexpensive nitrogen fertilizer that reduced the need for leguminous crops to boost soil fertility. However, the cost of fertilizers has risen and modern well-adapted and pest-resistant alfalfa varieties are available in the market. Information about productivity and management of alfalfa, generated locally, is needed in order to demonstrate, educate, and ultimately re-introduce and advance the utilization of alfalfa as part of diverse forage systems and crop rotations for livestock farms in the Southeast USA. The goals of this project are to evaluate: 1. How summer annual grasses alone or in mixtures with annual legumes affects yield and nutritional value of fresh and ensiled forage. 2. The impact of growing new alfalfa varieties on plant persistency, forage yield and quality.

Team Leaders

Building an Academic Dashboard/Case Study of Black Students in Engineering

Many students don’t realize that there are multiple degree paths to most careers, especially in engineering.  As part of an NSF-funded project, students on this Creative Inquiry team will help design and develop a prototype “Academic Dashboard” to help put students in the driver’s seat of their education.  The dashboard will include information about major choice and activities to develop and track adaptive decision-making skills.  The project will focus on two main tasks: 1) designing the dashboard structure, and 2) modeling academic pathways in engineering.  The purpose of modeling academic pathways using longitudinal data is to identify indicators of “overpersistence” and alternative strategic pathways.  This information will be incorporated into the dashboard to help students make informed decisions about their path forward.  

Team Leaders

Disposable Point-of Care Home Testing Platform for Metabolic Disease

Nonketotic hyperglycinemia (NKH) is a rare, pediatric metabolic disease caused by mutations resulting in the deficiency of the enzyme complex that breaks down the amino acid glycine. The resulting abnormally high levels of glycine in the body leads to severe medical issues starting in infancy, including uncontrollable seizures and problems with breathing. There are currently no tools available to monitor levels of glycine in patients while at home, which is necessary for drug and diet-mediated regulation of glycine levels in the body and preventing seizures. The objective of this CI is to develop a low-cost, disposable, stand-alone point-of-care diagnostic and monitoring system to enable caregivers of NKH patients to monitor glycine levels at home, adjust the patient’s drug treatment schedule, and improve the patient’s quality of life as well as clinical outcomes.

Team Leaders

Servant Leadership Abroad

Servant leadership is an essential concept for future business leaders to acknowledge; it considers how an organization affects the growth and well-being of the people in the local community. This Creative Inquiry project will explore crucial business issues that affect Puerto Rico in the wake of a major hurricane through the lens of what it means to be a servant leader. The research topic for this year is the global logistics of humanitarian aid and we will work with Samaritan’s Feet, a non-profit organization based out of Charlotte, N.C., called to identify an issue pertinent to their operations. Samaritan’s Feet serves underprivileged children worldwide by providing them with a pair of new shoes and words of hope for future opportunities. During this project, students will have to identify, collect, and analyze the data necessary to address the issue identified, and propose an innovative solution or operational improvement which they will present to the managers and other stakeholders of Samaritan’s Feet. This CI will require travel to Puerto Rico during Spring Break 2020 to examine first-hand the on-the-ground operations of a Samaritan’s Feet mission trip. The location of the travel portion may change each year depending upon the needs of the organization and communities abroad.

Team Leaders

Education and Entitlement: Improving Learning Environments through Student Input

How does student feedback manifest in instructional change? Can student voices make a difference in their own education? What are the boundaries between student input and instruction design? These are the questions we seek to answer in this Creative Inquiry. With a focus on how and when student voices can impact design education, specifically in undergraduate education in general, we seek to understand how student feedback can inform and contribute actively to the learning environment. This is our opportunity to be proactive in the learning process and shape the course evaluation procedures in order to make our voices impactful.

Team Leaders

The Role of Acetate Metabolism in Fungal Pathogenesis

Invasive fungal infections cause nearly one and a half million deaths annually, accounting for nearly 50% of all AIDS-related deaths. Cryptococcus neoformans, an invasive opportunistic pathogen of the central nervous system, is the most frequent cause of fungal meningitis. Exposure to C. neoformans is common, as it is an environmental fungus found in the soil that can enter the lungs through inhalation and disseminate to the central nervous system in susceptible individuals. An increased rate of infection occurs in individuals with impaired cell-mediated immunity, particularly those with AIDS and recipients of immunosuppressive therapy. The widespread availability of antiretroviral therapy in developed countries has helped improve the immune systems of many HIV patients to decrease their susceptibility to infection. However, cryptococcal meningitis is still a major problem in resource-limited regions of the world such as sub-Saharan Africa where HIV prevalence is high and access to healthcare is limited. The CDC estimates the yearly burden of cryptococcal meningitis to be nearly one million cases with more than 190,000 deaths. Despite the global significance of cryptococcal meningitis, current treatments are inadequate as the gold standard therapy is based on half century old drugs that have a wide range of liabilities and shortcomings. Metabolic adaptability and flexibility are important attributes for fungal pathogens to successfully infect and cause disease. Although carbon metabolism is critical for virulence in C. neoformans, very little is known about which carbon sources are utilized during infection. Our long-term goal is to provide a better understanding of how Cryptococcus can adapt its metabolism to survive in the changing environments encountered during infection. Developing a more in-depth understanding of the metabolism and physiology of this pathogen during infection may facilitate identification of suitable targets for new antifungal therapies.

Team Leaders

Science and Values in Environmental and Radiological Health

The objective of this project is to develop effective tools within the context of environmental and radiological health for emphasizing the interwoven nature of science and values and making ethics accessible for everyday decision making. This project also provides an introduction to the responsible conduct of research.

Team Leaders

Health Literacy in the American Sign Language Community

This CI is designed to explore ways to alleviate the communication barriers between healthcare systems and the deaf people who use American Sign Language (ASL). Through conducting research in the community, the researchers analyze a variety of data and information that addresses the existing health literacy issues being provided in ASL for deaf people. The purpose of this is to ensure that these individuals have the access to information pertaining to awareness about health welfare. The goal of this research is to create a better understanding for delivering health and medical information via ASL for deaf people with different educational backgrounds and to ultimately break down the prevailing communication barriers that they face in today's society. 

Team Leaders

Maze Following and Cell-to-Cell Communication in Slime Mold.

Slime molds are known to follow mazes in laboratory settings. Students will explore how to grow, maintain, and use various species of slime molds for experimentation, replicate existing maze following experiments, and use the results to generate new hypotheses related to maze following and cell-to-cell communication in slime molds.

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Creation of Museum Exhibits and Displays

Students will be trained in creating permanent and temporary exhibits and displays, as well as creating outreach programs and tours of the museum. Students will gain skills in data management, working with museum management software, animal identification, scientific writing, photography, identifying key anatomical structures, public speaking and team-building. Students will be given the opportunity to create displays inside and outside the museum, working closely with university landscape workers to develop an environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing exterior that will benefit native wildlife and promote awareness of native plants and animals.

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Deer-Coyote Interactions

White-tailed deer are an important game species and coyotes may be impacting their populations in South Carolina. There is evidence that coyotes eat deer fawns, but this may depend on deer density and habitat. This CI will involve learning about deer-coyote interactions and how we are quantifying them, processing wildlife camera photos, performing limited field work, and developing/executing/presenting a research project. This CI will require a 2 semester commitment.  

Team Leaders

Affordable Automation for the Entertainment Industry

For most touring theatre productions, the locations of production elements are marked by hand using a tedious measuring and checking system. The objective of this project is to develop an affordable new tool for the entertainment industry called the PlotBot, a programmable robot that will accurately mark the locations of production elements such as scenery, overhead or rigging based elements, seating and the parameters of the space in which they are to be installed. The PlotBot will utilize a CAD-based interface and the user would input the configuration of the stage space, then overlay the ground plan plot for stage elements. With this information, the PlotBot would physically plot the points on the deck, similar to how a laser cutter or CNC router work. There are robots that serve similar functions that could be adapted to house this technology but are cost prohibitive for much of the industry. This four semester project will be completed in three main phases: (1) Planning and Design, (2) Fabrication, and (3) Testing and Improvement. During the third phase, we plan to allow tours to use the PlotBot and provide feedback as tours provide a controlled laboratory for testing and improvement. Near the end of the project, we will present the prototype at the USITT conference. In addition, we will also publish on the development and design of the PlotBot, the educational experience of a diverse student team, and additional applications of the PlotBot (e.g., tradeshows, construction, real estate, sporting events, street festivals, etc.

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Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Brain development is a carefully choreographed process orchestrated by many different cell types in the brain. The laboratory studies the cellular and molecular events that control brain neural stem cells and their progeny. The goal of this Creative Inquiry project is to provide insight into how these events normally occur and what goes awry in neurodevelopmental diseases.

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The Mary Bruce Project: Women and the Golden Age of Tropical Medicine

The turn of the last century was marked by a golden era in tropical medicine. British doctors and researchers working in the British Colonies in Africa and the tropics made major discoveries, including elucidating the infectious agents that cause malaria, sleeping sickness, and schistosomiasis. However, the stories of women and their contributions to the history of tropical medicine are largely untold.Sir David Bruce was a Scottish doctor working for the British Army in colonial Africa and the tropics. One of his major discoveries was working out that sleeping sickness was transmitted by the tsetse fly. In Bruce's papers, there are illustrations of the trypanosomes drawn by Bruce's wife, Mary Bruce, who was working alongside Sir David in the field. In a number of Bruce's papers, Mary Bruce is even listed as an author! Our starting hypothesis is that Mary Bruce contributed in significant ways to the scientific research of her husband David Bruce. This project seeks to answer the following questions: What was Mary Bruce's role in Sir David Bruce's many discoveries? What is Mary Bruce's own story?With the aim of telling Mary Bruce's story (and the stories of those like her), this project has two goals: (1) To expand the online presence of information about women in the golden age of tropical medicine via Wikipedia entries, a publicly accessible Mary Bruce Project blog, and generation of a dedicated online archive; (2) To generate and submit for publication at years' end at least one popular science article arising from our research.

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Substance Abuse and Cognition

  Substance Use Disorder (SUD) is a chronic, complex condition that is among the most prevalent of mental health disorders. To evaluate effective treatment approaches, it is important to first assess risk factors for relapse and barrier to recovery. While potential individual risk factors have been identified, there is currently no research aimed at systematically investigating how these factors together establish an individual’s risk for relapse. Thus, the purpose of this investigation is to identify specific risk factors for relapse and barriers to addiction recovery in individuals who are hospitalized at Greenville Memorial Hospital due to complications from SUD.  This research is a randomized control trial that will examine how neurocognitive, health, and personal risk factors as well and social, financial, and situational barriers influence recovery. Additionally, this project will evaluate which barriers a recovery coaching intervention can overcomes and what risk factors recovery coaching can mitigate. Students will be involved in working with patients at Greenville Memorial Hospital to collecting all survey data, cognitive assessments, and neuroimaging measures.

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Immunity and Infections in Zebrafish

Infectious disease is an increasing problem, and the overall goal of our research is to better understand how our innate immune system combats pathogens. We use zebrafish as a model host for infection studies to investigate mechanisms of infection and immunity. Projects include investigating the role of specific genes and pathways in immunity, modeling human patient conditions, and understanding how anti-fungal drugs affect the host immune system.

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Data-driven Disaster Relief Logistics Planning

This proposed research project aims to understand the dynamic evolution of a hurricane's forecast and how to mobilize disaster relief commodities to address the immediate needs following a hurricane. Specifically, we will investigate (i) how to utilize historical data on hurricane trajectory, intensity, and affected areas as well as their rolling forecasts to estimate the forecast errors/uncertainty; (ii) how to create a stochastic optimization model that incorporates the forecast errors/uncertainty to support disaster relief logistics decision making; (iii) how to visualize the disaster relief logistics solutions using visualization tools such as ArcGIS.

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Engineering Biology of Arthropods

We explore structural and organismal features of insects from the physics and materials point of view looking at the physical determinants of the materials performance and evolution of insect fibrous materials. We are interested in mechanisms of nano and micro fluid movements, sensitivity of insect antennae, mechanisms of silk formation by insects and analysis of structural and physical properties of insect fibrous materials.  Check out these videos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JCIOOWm8w8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHDbdKj8NuM  

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Advanced Manufacturing by Ultrafast Lasers

This project includes hands-on participation to learn the state-of-the-art ultrafast laser and use it for micro-manufacturing, material strengthening, and multi-functional surface processing. 

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Breaking the Resolution of Optical Microscopy

Biophotonics is a multidisciplinary field, which combines biology, photonics, and electronics to further our understanding of cellular biological processes within functional and dysfunctional tissues using optical microscopic techniques. This CI was created to allow students to design and build an optical system which pushes the limits in optical microscopy resolution to observe cellular events that would be undetectable using current techniques.

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Design and Implementation of the Human Machine Interface for the 2030 Autonomous Vehicle

This project is designed to engage undergraduate Clemson students using an innovative educational method that allows Engineering and Psychology majors to apply academic knowledge and skills to the area of autonomous vehicles. During the semester students will focus on the design and implementation of the human machine interface for the 2030 self-driving car which will provide user experiences related to personalization, digital trust and usability.     

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Technology Commercialization: From Lab Bench to Business

Building a successful business around a new technology takes more than just a research discovery. Commercialization requires creating a customer base, determining value proposition and building a business model. Every new commercial product, besides being great, requires someone who buys it. Therefore, the road towards commercialization starts with customer interviews. Over the years successful entrepreneurs developed a uniformed approach to generate robust, repeatable, scalable business model. It is called business canvas. In this project the PIs, who are successful entrepreneurs themselves, will guide you through the process of generation and completion of business canvas.

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Environmental effects of co-contaminant exposure

Ecotoxicological studies traditionally determine or model effects resulting from single pollutants, yet no environmental contaminant is ever truly the sole toxicant in a contamination scenario. This project seeks to characterize the uptake, distribution, and/or effects of multiple environmental contaminants at different levels of biological organization. Students will study stress markers such as reactive oxygen species (ROS), gene expression, DNA methylation, and visual changes to determine if traditional ecotoxicological models sufficiently predict the effect of combined exposures.  

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Frontline Service Robots and AI

This Creative Inquiry is designed to provide business, psychology, and engineering students with an opportunity to empirically explore issues related to “frontline service” robots and artificial intelligence entities. In other words, robots and AI’s designed to assist customers rather assist with the manufacture of products. Relevant topics include services marketing, social psychology, human-computer interaction, and strategic HR. 

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Social Media Listening Center Digital Analytics

SMLC Digital Analytics CI: This CI will use the software associated with the Social Media Listening Center to monitor, listen and engage with social media for CU clients/partners, as well as complete weekly projects using social media analytics. Members of the CI, will have the opportunity to work collaboratively on assignments for companies, individually on personal assignments and gain a deeper understanding of leveraging analytics in the digital sphere. Members of the CI will refine their digital presence, contribute to collaborative projects, participate in webinars, and contribute to weekly analysis reports. 

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Embodiment and Race Conference Organization

The conference on Embodiment and Race (November 4-7, 2021) is a two-day interdisciplinary conference that will explore the issues of race and embodiment from the perspectives of critical-race theory and phenomenology. The aim of the conference is to open a space for Clemson University and the local community where we can extend and deepen our understanding of recent debates on race, racialization, and being an embodied agent of a minority group. This conference will bring together academics who work on race and embodiment to share their studies and discuss different approaches to these issues. In my teaching I explore the issues of philosophy of racism and racial embodiment focusing on questions: What role does embodiment play in the experience of racism and/or racial harm? How do various social policies benefit or burden people classified as being a given race? Does racism harm the racist as well as the victim? 

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All In: Football Recruiting Design

We have partnered with the Clemson Football Recruiting Office to help design a mailer to send to potential Clemson Football recruits. This  multidisciplinary team will meet to brainstorm, design and prototype a personalized 3D mailer that the recruiting office can send to high school football players in the recruiting process. The mailer is intended to promote Clemson Football and get the student excited about the possibility of being on the team. This is an incredible opportunity for students to have a direct impact on Clemson Football and potential incoming players.

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Autonomous Vehicles and Users with Disabilities

Persons with certain motor or cognitive disabilities like paralysis of the extremities or autism may face significant obstacles to gainful employment and social inclusion due to difficulties in operating conventional motor vehicles. Proponents of fully autonomous or “self-driving” vehicles argue that the emergence of this technology may address this issue. Advocates for disabled persons are concerned, however, that the needs of persons with disabilities are not being adequately considered in the design of this technology.  As a result, it is argued, self-driving technologies are being developed that will ultimately prove inaccessible to persons with a range of disabilities, ultimately undermining the potential mobility benefits of the technology. There is, therefore, a critical need to determine a model of interaction that will support efficient use of this technology by persons with disabilities. The proposed research is being initiated to determine the needs, preferences, and concerns of persons with motor, cognitive and other disabilities in interacting with self-driving vehicles, a model of interaction incorporating context-specific methodologies and the development of tools to support accessible interaction.

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Building Elder Care Services

Students work with the professor to assess caregivers attitudes, knowledge and benefits about the care of persons with cognitive impairment.  The students will do community based action research and consider policy changes that could improve the health of elders and those who care for them.

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Sullivan Center: Programs Evaluation

In this creative inquiry, students will gain hands on clinical experience working with the Joseph F. Sullivan Center (JFSC) while assisting with the development and evaluation of lifestyle medicine projects. The JFSC is an academic, clinical learning facility that operates on Clemson's campus, and has many satellite locations throughout the upstate. Additionally, the JFSC operates a mobile health clinic statewide to transform SC's rural and under served populations. The JFSC addresses root causes of disease by whole person clinical interventions, recognizing the spectrum of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors, supporting individual, family and community vitality.  Students will be responsible for collecting data from patients directly, including vital signs like height, weight and blood pressure, during the patient visits. Program evaluation will be performed at various levels, from patient to population. Students may be responsible for analyzing data on single patients or analyzing larger data sets to ensure efficiency in case management services, depending on the student’s interests and current programs running at JFSC. Past research projects that students have assisted with include lifestyle medicine individual case studies, quality assurance, quality control and quality assessment measures for Best Chance Network patient’s lab results, and cohort studies on a population enrolled in FirstLine Therapy for 12 months or more.

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Advancement of Assisted Reproductive Technologies for Cattle and Other Species

Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) are utilized for both humans and cattle; however, ART has been and will continue to be used to save species from extinction.  Most advances used in ART currently used in all mammalian species were developed at least partially using cattle as a model. Assisted reproductive technologies commonly used in bovine reproduction are artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer.  This project will focus on methods to increase bovine fertility and examine the putative microRNA markers associated with early pregnancy and early pregnancy loss in pregnancies produced by in vitro fertilization or embryo transfer.  The team will meet weekly to coordinate and plan activities for the week which would include  estrous synchronization of cattle, estrous detection, embryo transfer, blood collection and processing, ultrasonography, ELISA, RNA isolation, qRT-PCR, and cell culture.

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Something Very Fishy

Something Very Fishy is a musical theater production paired with a hands-on marine science exhibit for elementary school children. This collaboration between Kathy Prosser (Educational Entertainment LLC) and Michael Childress (Biological Sciences) will bring to together local elementary school classes with Clemson student volunteers in a unique arts and sciences (STEAM) outreach program with a focus on marine conservation and our changing climate. Members of this creative inquiry team will develop and present hands-on marine science exhibits to enhance the experience of children attending this musical theater adventure following lives of a young marine biologist and a local fisherman who must set aside their differences to work together to save their local marine animals. Members of this creative inquiry team will develop hands-on exhibits, demonstrations, grade-specific experiments, class resources for teachers, and activities in support of the general theme of marine conservation. Team members will also care for and exhibit live marine animals in portable touch tanks, demonstrate the use of cameras and diving gear used by marine scientists, and lead students through basic experiments demonstrating the importance of water quality. Photo backdrops, reusable bag coloring stations, and continuous videos of underwater exploration will give the participating children an immersion experience like no other. CI team members will also have an opportunity to learn about ongoing marine science research through their partnership with the Conservation of Marine Resources and Marine Ecology creative inquiry teams. This will include reading and discussing the current marine conservation literature and assisting in the analysis of field data. Team members will also be expected to create a digital poster and promotional video about the Something Very Fishy production for use in advertising and promotion of future productions. By bringing together education, biology and environmental science majors with local artists and performers, this promises to be an enriching experience for everyone.

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Falls Prevention in Older Adults Initiative

Falls are the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries to individuals over the age of 65 years old, and the risk of falls increases with age. Causes of falls are multifactorial, and rural-dwelling older adults are typically at a higher risk. The purpose of the Ready for STEADI? Fall Prevention Initiative is to reduce fall risk factors among rural community-dwelling older adults through improved screening and through an education and balance training intervention. This creative inquiry focuses on determining the efficacy of the intervention.  The intervention, held once a week (Thursday 12:30pm-3:30m) consists of coach training certification and research in balance and aging, implementation of the 8-week evidence-based falls prevention program (Matter of Balance). Data collection will involve psychosocial surveys and program evaluation.  Students will gain hands-on experience working with older adults in a community setting, assist in implementing a falls prevention intervention, assist with developing and implementing a falls screening protocol, data collection and program evaluation.

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Multiplexing Using Spectral Imaging and Combinatorics (MuSIC)

A genetic screen is the process by which every gene in an organism is disrupted to determine what role it plays in a particular phenotype. A genetic interaction screen is similar, except it asks that question for every possible two-way combination of genes. Genetic screens on human cells at genome scale, around 30,000 genes, is routine now with CRISPR technologies. However, this is only on a cell population level, looking at bulk effects in millions of cells, not on a single cell level, which is the fundamental unit of most phenotypes. Genetic interaction screens are severely limited due to the sheer number of combinations possible. This project explores the use our recently developed MuSIC technology to enable single-cell genetic screens at high-throughput, and genetic interaction screens on scales far greater than currently possible.

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Network Inference from Gene Expression Noise

Gene regulatory networks underlie much of how cells function and adapt to varying conditions. However, their structure is surprisingly largely unknown. A major reason is that it is difficult to infer the unique connections between genes using current methods. This project seeks to understand the extent to which natural fluctuations in gene expression, primarly due to low copy number reactions involved in epigenetics and transcription, can be used to infer gene regulatory network structure. If gene A regulates another gene B, would fluctuations in the expression of gene A leave a unique fingerprint in the expression of gene B? Under what conditions would this be possible if so?

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Building and Probing Simple Neuronal Circuits With Combined Optical Tweezer and Microelectrode Array Experiment

The human brain is perhaps the most complicated system in the known universe. It is comprised of 100 billion individual neurons with about 80% of the brain mass in the cerebral cortex, which is the site of human cognition. There are massive efforts underway to understand how the brain works. What is memory, attention, perception, thought, language self-awareness, consciousness, etc.? To even begin to answer these questions, much fundamental science must be done. In this creative inquiry, we intend to build and study simple neuronal circuits, in vitro. We will use a combined optical tweezer and microelectrode array system to manipulate simple neuronal circuits, to electrically excite the circuits, and to probe the response of these circuits. We will build and study simple model logic gates out of rat or mouse neurons.

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Infant Cranial Remodeling

Infant cranial helmets are used when children, under the age of 1, are diagnosed with a cranial deformity. The helmets help to direct the growth of the infant’s head, in order to restore proper head shape. Students involved with the Head Start! project will work to improve the current helmet designs by using pressure mapping technology to identify proper pressure values within the helmet. All testing will be done on head molds, so no human subjects will be used.

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Design for All Abilities

There are many individuals with physical and/or cognitive disabilities in the world, but their needs are often overlooked in the design of everyday things. This project will guide students through research on principles of universal design, identification of a project with a local impact, and development of prototype solutions to improve the accessibility and utility of the Clemson campus. Students will participate in activities that allow them to gain first-hand experience with some of the challenges individuals with disabilities face on a daily basis.  This experience will enable students to empathize with people different from themselves, providing a unique design perspective and ability to think outside the box when developing solutions to meet the needs of a wide range of stakeholders.

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Stream Fish Mercury Dynamics in Managed Forests

Southeastern forests contain large pools of mercury in the terrestrial leaf litter and understory vegetation. The majority of the mercury in southeaster forests is from atmospheric deposition, meaning that even remote forests far from industrial activities may have elevated levels of mercury stored in the soil, leaf litter, and living plant biomass. Common forest management practices intended to reduce fuel loads (e.g., controlled burning, mechanical thinning) may also release mercury from soils, leaf litter, and living plant biomass into downstream aquatic environments. Mercury bioaccumulation in aquatic ecosystems, particularly in fish at the top of aquatic food chains, has been well documented in a variety of systems. However, we know very little about how fish and invertebrate mercury burdens are affected by fuel reduction practices. For example, does the amount and type of mercury (methyl versus inorganic) released into downstream aquatic systems differ between controlled burns and thinning? Additionally, how do nutrients, which are also released during forest management activities, affect stream food webs and, subsequently, mercury bioaccumulation? Students in this project will participate in collection of fish and invertebrates from forest streams in the Clemson Experimental Forest and the Santee Experimental Forest (part of the Francis Marion National Forest near Charleston, SC). Students will learn techniques for backpack electrofishing, invertebrate collections, diet analysis, and age and growth techniques using otoliths and scales. Students will also be encouraged to develop specific research questions and to develop hypotheses that could be tested with real-world data collecting during the course of this project.

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Creating a Health Hub for SC Rural Communities: Prosperity, SC

This Creative Inquiry Project will facilitate the creation/expansion of a Health Hub that includes a community garden, greenhouse, and health education center on Hwy 76 in Prosperity, South Carolina.  This initiative will be associated with a well established medical practice in the community. 

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Restoration Ecology: From Coastal Wetlands to the Appalachian Mountains and Back

Wetland RestorationStudents in the CI will assist with research related to a wetland restoration at Brosnan Forest in Dorchester, South Carolina. The Brosnan Forest is a 14,400-acre preserve near Charleston, SC, and is currently restoring a 200-acre wetland on the property. Students will help with vegetation surveys, growing plants in the greenhouse and learn about seed viability and germination. Students will gain valuable skills in wetland plant identification, wetland seed bank knowledge, and fieldwork. Piedmont Prairie RestorationStudents will work on a prairie and understory restoration in the Clemson Experimental Forest. Students will learn to identify native and invasive grasses, sedges, and forbs. They will also learn to survey vegetation and other field techniques.

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Basic and applied virology

Given that viruses are obligate parasites, we often think of them as "bad". However, they can aid humans through their negative effects on organisms that in turn negatively affect us - the enemy of my enemy, so to speak. In this Creative Inquiry, students will investigate a group of viruses known as Nudiviruses, which infect crustaceans and insects, typically by ingestion, resulting in gut infection and ultimately death. However, an apparently atypical nudivirus known as HzNV infects the pest moth Helicoverpa zea. HzNV is transmitted sexually and induces sterility in 30-70% of infected individuals. Why isn't it 100%? What are the mechanisms that underlie this latency vs sterility "choice"? How widespread is this virus, and are there others like it? To address these issues, students in small teams will examine HzNV prevalence in SC through PCR screening, use molecular biology techniques and cell culture to generate and test expression constructs of HzNV genes and generate recombinant viruses, and attempt to isolate novel nudiviruses through classical virology techniques. The results will greatly enhance our understanding of nudivirus biology, potentially contributing to better understanding of a virus group that may serve an important role in the future in controlling significant agricultural pests, and expose students to not only molecular biology and virology techniques, but also enhance communication skills.

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Human Factors in Medical Device Reprocessing

Human factors engineering focuses on understanding how people interact with technology and studying how user interface design affects the interactions people have with technology. U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines identify human factors engineering as essential for maximizing the likelihood that new medical devices will be safe and effective for the intended users, uses and use environments. Therefore, incorporating human factors engineering into medical device design and product development can be a key factor for meeting regulatory standards and launching a successful product. The long-term goal of this Creative Inquiry is to introduce the tools and techniques used in human factors engineering and to apply those skills to medical device design. Students enrolled in this CI interact with industry professionals and a cross-disciplinary team of faculty and students, using human factors and usability testing to inform medical design decisions with a focus on devices in end-use conditions and during their reprocessing. Students conduct the testing on commonly used medical devices and medical device prototypes and use hypothesis-driven research for improving upon medical device designs. Undergraduate students looking to join this team are expected to be involved for 2-4 semesters.

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Estuarine Fish Ecology I

As transitional zones between freshwater and marine environments, estuaries contain a diversity of habitat types and experience highly variable abiotic conditions. Variation in salinity has long been recognized as a factor controlling estuarine fish distributions, through its effect on behavior and physiological processes. Despite this, the ecological consequences of habitat-specific residency patterns on foraging and growth of freshwater, estuarine, and marine fish species is still not well understood. As estuaries serve as essential habitats for many recreationally and commercially important fishes, a more complete understanding of how habitat-specific estuarine conditions affect growth and survival of fishes is needed to provide managers with better information for habitat-specific management actions (e.g., protection, restoration efforts). This CI aims to explore relationships between habitat-specific residency patterns, foraging, and growth in estuarine fish populations. Students will work on team-based projects that require critical thinking, data collection, quantitative analyses, and presentation and publication of results. Students will gain essential knowledge and skills for processing samples in the lab including otolith aging, diet analysis, stable isotope analysis, preparation of gonadal tissues for histological analysis, and identification of estuarine fish and invertebrates.

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Bat Ecology and Management

Students in this creative inquiry will work collaboratively with faculty, staff and graduate students to study the ecology of bats on and nearby Clemson's campus.  A major component will be assessing bat behavior and space use in response to land use change.  This will provide student with experience in radio-tracking, acoustic monitoring, experimental design, data analysis, and project management.

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Unraveling the Mystery of the Rare Rocky Shoals Spider Lily

Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies are an important part of South Carolina’s natural heritage and probably existed along most Piedmont streams prior to hydropower development of shoals and sedimentation of creeks and streams due to agricultural practices. The watershed for Stevens Creek is forested and mostly undeveloped allowing us a glimpse of what plant, fish, and even mussel populations may have looked like prior to European influence. There is a population of Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies that runs approximately 150 yards along Steven Creek on the Naturaland Trust Property.As a part of this CI, students will research and characterize the Stevens creek run where the Rocky Shoals Spider Lily occurs and at least two additional sites where historic populations existed to determine why the Rocky Shoals Spider Lily has such a robust population along this stretch of stream. Students will collect water quality data using the SC adopt a stream protocol and characterize the sites. They will additionally put out game cameras as one hypothesis is that deer herbivory is impacting Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies. Students will also work to propagate Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies in greenhouses at Clemson so that we will have a population we can attempt to introduce to other suitable stream stretches. By using the SC adopt a stream protocol, students will be adding to a database of stream health for the state and they will be able to compare Stevens Creek to other SC streams to determine what is different about Stevens creek that allows the Rocky Shoals Spider Lily to persist.

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Controlled Environment Agriculture: Innovation of Distributing Food to Urban Environments and Food Deserts

The project will provide an atmosphere for the design and evaluation of a moderate sized controlled environment container to yield animal protein, vegetables to supplement fresh food in an urban environment.  Urban areas, also called food deserts, have limitations to fresh food and previous research has proven that, if available, people would welcome the choice of fresh food to prepare in their household. People are also reassured that the products being produced are fresh and free from harmful chemicals. Transportation is limited for these people so getting to a grocery store is somewhat restricted, so the idea of bringing a food production unit to the area is widely accepted.  Presently these portable controlled environment units are available and expensive, however economics performed usually show limited to no revenue.  The CI will investigate what is needed for the unit to produce food but on a more economical scale.  This would also benefit school systems by providing fresh food to supplement the cafeteria needs for fresh food and at the same time becomes an effective teaching tool that can be positive reinforcement for understanding science, math and economics topics in an enjoyable and dynamic atmosphere.

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Sugar High? How do different sugars and sugar substitutes in soft drinks impact the oral microbiome?

Dental cavities are a major health problem worldwide. To better understand what causes tooth decay, we need to examine the microbes living on our teeth. This community of microbes are known as the oral microbiome. The bacteria that live on our teeth form a biofilm commonly known as dental plaque. The microbes in the tooth biofilm survive by feeding on sugars and starches consumed in our diets. After feeding on these sugars many of the waste products expelled by bacteria are acidic, causing tooth enamel erosion, and eventually, tooth decay. The goal of our research will be to compare how different soda types influence the oral microbiota. Students involved in this CI will conduct genomic and microbiological research on the oral microbiome. Student’s will complete DNA/RNA extractions of plaque biofilms, complete PCR amplifications, prepare samples for DNA/RNA sequencing, and will learn how to use Next Generation DNA sequencing technology. Student’s should expect to enroll for at least 2-4 semesters. 

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Dinosaurs to Birds: Ontogeny and morphogenesis

The long- to short-tailed avian dinosaur transition occurred 125 Mya. The tail underwent a considerable morphological change from the long, reptilian-like ancestral condition to Pygostylian birds' short, distally fused tail. We are interested in understanding the developmental and genetic changes that occurred to the morphology of the tail and the fusion of the synsacral vertebrae, both adaptations for flight. Understanding these processes will provide insight into vertebrate morphogenesis and the basis of morphological adaptation.

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Animal Personality and Behavior

Animal personality is an increasingly studied concept within the field of animal behavior. Studies in animal personality often focus on two traits: boldness (how animals to respond to novel or threatening situations) and aggression (how animals react to other animals). Crayfish are frequently used as a study species to investigate boldness and aggression as these traits have been shown to directly influence their ability to invade ecosystems. 

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High-Performance Cluster Computing

Parallel computing is often a topic covered until the senior year for undergrads. Moreover, large-scale computing is becoming a fundamental tool to researchers in many fields of science and engineering (e.g., business, chemistry, physics, biology). This CI is dedicated to opening up parallel computing to all levels of undergrads in relevant fields of computational science and engineering. Through this CI, we explore how high-performance computing (HPC) systems impact various disciplines, how HPC systems are constructed, what it takes to program parallel applications, how to run parallel applications on an HPC system, and how to optimize applications.This CI is intended to introduce undergraduate students from various STEM disciplines to parallel computing early in their undergraduate experience. Skills and knowledge gained through hands on activities, research, and training will prepare students for undergraduate research, provide skills to help students stand out and succeed in graduate school, and provide students an opportunity to test their skills against teams from all over the world at the annual Supercomputing Conference's Student Cluster Competition.Each year the annual competition's scientific domain changes (e.g, geophysics, bioinformatics, molecular dynamics, hydrology, climate); therefore, this CI is open to STEM majors who can serve as domain scientists to help interpret scientific results produced by the HPC applications.

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LEAD Forward

Each of you already have a full academic schedule with required curriculum requirements. Each of you though are also positioning for future co-ops, summer internships and full time jobs following graduation. What will differentiate you from your peers as you seek those employment opportunities? Demonstrated leadership skills will make a difference.Register to be part of LEAD Forward, a unique opportunity to learn leadership skills and how to apply them now and in the future. Email Emily Budlong at leadforward@clemson.edu to learn more about this opportunity and how you can apply to be a part of this program!

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Statistical and Mathematical Models in Weather Forecast

This is an interdisciplinary project in which students will gain access to both statistics and mathematics. The students will record temperatures in certain regions and try to use statistical models to find seasonal patterns in the recorded numbers. The patterns and numbers are used to forecast weather in the future. Students will then use computer software to analyze the prediction errors. Students will also perform similar activities in the context of number theory.

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New Drug Targets in Bacterial Genome

Drug resistance to current antimicrobials is a major health concern in the 21st century. This project will focus on discovery of new target sites in the genome of pathogenic bacteria.  The project will involve looking for new sites of intervention in the bacteria genome, and approaches of targeting nucleic acid and enzyme targets selective to bacteria.