If you are currently a UWM undergraduate and are interested in getting involved in a faculty-led research experience, you can start by looking through this database of over 500 projects that represent the kind of mentored work students are involved in all across campus. You can search research projects by school or college, major, or key word. You may add up to seven projects to your list and submit them with our simple form.
Please note, this is not an application, it is an interest form notifying us that you are ready to get connected to research. We will follow up with you shortly via email with next steps! Faculty and academic staff can post a project by filling out this form.
Staff working in the anti-trafficking sector are exposed to highly distressing narratives of human suffering and exploitation. While preliminary research affirms trauma exposure amongst staff in high trauma professions is common and can have lasting psychological impacts mirroring primary trauma symptoms, more research is needed to build sustainable solutions for staff care and wellbeing. It remains critical to understand the impact of trauma exposure for anti-trafficking professionals from their own perspectives, as well as to identify strategies that could enhance their ability to carry their work with greater emotional flexibility. While the inherent costs of high trauma work will never be fully mitigated, there is the potential to transform the way these burdens are carried, communicated, and processed – both at the individual and organizational levels.
This exploratory research study will focus on the mental health needs of staff working in anti-trafficking agencies. The research team will conduct focus groups and key informant interviews with staff from several anti-trafficking agencies in the greater Atlanta area, collecting qualitative and quantitative data. Data collection will be focused on asking not just how staff are impacted by trauma exposure, but how they feel about that impact, where they struggle to accept the burden of their work, how they make meaning of the emotional cost, and where they find strength to continue. Data will be transcribed and analyzed using a thematic analysis approach and the results will be shared back with participating agencies as well as submitted for publication to contribute to the larger conversation around staff care, wellbeing, and sustainability in the anti-trafficking field.
The Rice Farm archaeological site (9DW276) in the north Georgia piedmont was occupied by Native Americans during the Middle Woodland period (c. 300 B.C. – A.D. 600). Fifty-nine pits and over 1000 posts were identified and excavated at the site between 2018 and 2022. Careful investigation of the refuse from these pits can contextualize the past environment as well as human diets, social networks, and the shift from foraging to food production. This research project will explore the contents of six pits. One undergraduate student will identify and analyze macrobotanical remains recovered from the pits. They will examine carbonized seeds, nutshell, and charcoal recovered as light-fraction from previously processed flotation samples. Sorting the previously dried and jarred light-fraction from the six pits will facilitate identification of seeds and nutshell, among other ecofacts, preserved in each of them. Analysis of these carbonized remains can reveal details of environmental conditions, human diets, subsistence patterns, and complex social behaviors. After sorting the remains, seeds and nutshell will be identified to taxon and quantified. This data will be paired with previously collected radiocarbon dates and pollen data to contextualize each pit and to interpret broad patterns of past human behavior at the site.
In mathematics, network science is often referred to as “graph theory”. A graph is a set of vertices together with a set of edges that join pairs of vertices. A subset, D, of vertices is said to dominate the graph if every vertex in the graph is in D or is joined to at least one vertex in D. One research question is to consider special graphs where the size of a minimal dominating set is not known. Finding the size of a minimal dominating set is difficult. This parameter is called the domination number. There is a family of graphs that we will consider for the SURF project that are related to data analysis of grade assessment of students. The nodes of the graph we will consider correspond to all possible grade distributions. We will define two distributions to be joined by an edge if a single student grade can be moved one step up, or one step down to obtain the other distribution. The shortest path in this graph between two nodes is called the Earth Movers Distance. We call the graph EMD(g,n). We would like to obtain a simple way to compute the domination number for EMD(g,n).