Dr. Amelia Atwell’s research project will assess the impacts of regional growth in the Spartanburg area by examining benthic macroinvertebrate communities and water quality across multiple sites within two local watersheds. At each site, the team will evaluate chemical water conditions using a suite of instruments, characterize instream habitat and collect benthic macroinvertebrates to address the following questions: (1) How has recent development in Spartanburg County influenced the current benthic macroinvertebrate community compared to historic data? (2) How do water quality measurements collected through citizen science methodologies compare with those obtained using newer instrumentation? All team members will become certified South Carolina Adopt-A-Stream volunteers, and the resulting data will be shared with nonprofit and government organizations invested in Lawson’s Fork Creek, particularly those focused on water quality, conservation, public access, environmental education and riparian restoration.
Dr. Justin Bailey’s collaborative project will examine how Wofford faculty use evidence-based teaching techniques to support student learning. Research strongly supports strategies like retrieval practice as highly effective, yet few students apply them and most faculty don’t deliberately teach them. Through interviews with both students and faculty, the project aims to: 1) gauge current awareness and use of research-backed techniques at Wofford; 2) identify barriers to adoption and develop strategies to address them; and 3) create simple, adaptable activities that faculty and students can readily incorporate into their courses.
Dr. Laura Barbas-Rhoden and Dr. Christine Dinkins will each mentor a team of students for the second phase of “Living with a Disrupted Climate,” a bilingual (Spanish-English), qualitative, place-based research project on household-level implications of a disrupted climate in Spartanburg County. The summer 2026 work will build on qualitative data collected by undergraduate research teams in 2025, transforming that raw data for dissemination to diverse public audiences in formats that are accurate, ethical and accessible. The 2026 teams will become familiar with the 2025 qualitative data; review quantitative data for Spartanburg and the Upstate from sources like Climate Central; and orient themselves to climate communication messaging using tools from the Yale Program for Climate Change Communication. Barbas-Rhoden’s team will focus on dissemination (1) to environmental and planning agencies, nonprofits and grassroots groups and (2) in Spanish; and Dinkins’ team will focus on dissemination to institutional and grassroots groups focused on health, including mental health, and on addressing disparities.
Dr. Lyla Byers’s project. (Description coming soon!)
Dr. Matt Cathey’s collaborative research project brings the modern tools of data science to bear on a 19th-century mystery: What was the nature of the illness of King George III of Great Britain? Throughout his reign, King George III suffered through several bouts of “madness,” symptoms of which included hallucinations, extreme irritability and personality changes. Attempts have been made in the last 60 years to retroactively diagnose the King’s disorder; guesses have ranged from porphyria to bipolar disorder. By building a database of his symptoms and treatments, based on the diaries of one of his attending physicians, the participants can carry out novel analyses that might tease out hidden connections across the years of King George III’s illness and treatment that might shed some new light on this old question.
Dr. Kelli Carroll’s project focuses on the genetic and molecular factors regulating embryonic development using zebrafish as a model system. Her work has two main directions. First, she is collaborating with researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas to develop a new imaging system using zebrafish to screen common medications for their potential to induce unintentional cardiac arrythmias in patients. The goal of this project is to prospectively identify potentially arrhythmogenic drugs so that patients taking them can be carefully monitored for cardiac abnormalities. Second, she is using whole-genome sequencing data from patients with unidentified genetic diseases. In many of these patients, potentially problematic mutations in poorly understood genes have been identified. Her lab is studying the expression patterns and function of the genes in developing zebrafish in the hopes of better understanding human disease.
Dr. Cato’s research seeks to identify the molecular changes that help symbiotic algae withstand heat stress, a key factor in coral bleaching. Because corals depend on these algae for energy, understanding algal thermal tolerance may provide insight into reef resilience in a warming climate. His work analyzes mutations in heat-tolerant algal lines and predicts how resulting amino acid changes affect protein stability across hundreds of proteins. A subset of these predictions is then tested experimentally using protein unfolding assays and molecular dynamics simulations. By linking genetic variation to protein behavior, Dr. Cato seeks to advance understanding of coral-algae symbiosis while providing undergraduates with training in modern biochemical research.
Dr. Deidra Coleman’s project. (Description coming soon!)
Professor Abby Dillard’s project. (Description coming soon!)
Dr. Allison Douglass will be working with an undergraduate peer consultant in the Writing Center, Amelia List, to investigate differences in how students and faculty perceive our work at the center across varied disciplines, asking how scholars in particular fields understand the relationships and boundaries between forms of writing, and how their experiences with field-specific genres impact their ideas about the utility of the support offered by the Writing Center. Writing center research involves team-based self-study into the sessions we conduct every day during the academic year, so this initial phase will involve digging into the existing literature connecting writing centers to Writing Across the Curriculum programs and designing the research the entire staff will carry out, likely involving both survey and interview methods, throughout Academic Year 2026-2027. Though there is significant existing research on student and faculty perceptions of writing centers, that research is inherently local in nature, and there is little existing research that looks at those perceptions as they differ across disciplinary perspectives, and even less that has been written from the perspective of small liberal arts colleges with their interdisciplinary orientation. The Writing Center will also use this opportunity to imagine the ways our peer service for student writers can cooperate with Wofford’s Quality Enhancement Plan, Write Across Wofford, which is working to build many kinds of structural support for writers in the disciplines.
During the last decade, Latinos have played an important role in shaping the cultural, political and economic landscape of the U.S. South. This impact is indeed salient across the U.S. South in general and in the state of South Carolina in particular. At the local level, Arcadia Elementary School, for instance, features a Hispanic-majority student body and a vibrant multilingual community of people. This transformation in the Upstate of South Carolina has led to institutional changes such as the creation of the Centro Latino at USC Upstate to the incorporation of the Spanish language in all communications to parents at Greenville County Public Schools. This social change draws attention to several important research questions. What is the sense of belonging among Latino/a college and university students in the Upstate of South Carolina? How is this diverse demographic group of young people defining itself and asserting itself civically and politically during this age of social change that is being impacted, in part, by cultural wars and Bad Bunny? Dr. Ramón Galiñanes’ collaborative project will address these questions.
Dr. Victoria Gilbert’s collaborative research project focuses on an armed group which experienced a meteoric rise in Syrian politics and currently runs the country’s interim government. This project explores the ideological changes of Hay’at Tahrir ash-Sham over the course of the Syrian civil war (2011-24). The goal of this project is to analyze discourse produced by the group to look at how this armed group’s ideology shifted and how it changed which identities (religious, national, etc.) it appealed to over time. The goal is to assess which domestic and international pressures best explain the timing of its transformations, contributing to a growing literature on the ideology and identities of nonstate actors.
Dr. Natalie Grinnell’s collaborative study focuses on the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on popular culture, specifically through an analysis of seasons 3 and 4 of “Star Trek Discovery.” She and her student co-author will use trauma theory to explore the ways that the characters in this program suffer and attempt to heal from a natural disaster that causes the temporary suspension and disintegration of civilization and how those efforts reflect similar challenges in the post-pandemic world.
(Description coming soon!)
Dr. Stephanie Holt’s faculty-student collaborative research project examines the relationships between jails (criminal detention facilities) and immigration detention facilities across the Carolinas, including both existing and proposed sites. By compiling and analyzing this information, the project seeks to document the current landscape of immigration detention and its expansion in the region. It also evaluates the financial costs to taxpayers, the effects on local communities and incarcerated populations, and the level of public transparency surrounding these facilities. In addition, the research investigates how political rhetoric and government communication shape public perceptions of immigration and its criminalization. Ethical considerations — such as the treatment, rights and conditions of individuals in immigration detention compared to other forms of incarceration — are central to the analysis, alongside the influence of political and corporate relationships. The project aims to deepen public understanding of immigration detention in the Carolinas and the U.S. more broadly and to raise awareness of its broader social and ethical implications.
Professor Eric Kocher’s collaborative summer research project explores creative writing as a way of thinking about environmental questions. The project will support the development of his poetry manuscript “The Naturalist,” which examines the history of naturalism and the limits of observation and certainty in describing the natural world. Students will design their own writing-based research projects grounded in environmental questions of their choosing. The group will meet regularly throughout the summer to write, read and workshop one another’s work while developing research reading lists that inform their projects. Through sustained drafting and revision, participants will explore creative writing as a way of thinking about how people observe, describe and make sense of their environments. The project will culminate in a public reading featuring work by both faculty and student participants.
Dr. Robin Lewis’ collaborative project. (Description coming soon!)
Dr. Clare Mathes’ study series uses a rat model to explore how the foods and fluids consumed during early development affect later-life food and fluid choice or “liking,” as well as body weight status. Her work focuses on two different developmental manipulations: high-fat diet feeding and consumption of artificial sweetener. First, she and her students will assess if chronic consumption of a high-fat diet starting early in life impacts how much other sweet fatty treats are desired and enjoyed. In collaboration with professors at Johns Hopkins University and Georgia State University, they will also evaluate how the rats’ behavior profiles and body weight changes correlate with levels of hormones, like insulin and GLP-1, and tongue proteins that influence taste sensibility. Second, and in collaboration with a professor at the University of Southern California, Mathes and her students will assess how early-life consumption of artificial sweetener influences later-life nicotine intake. This study is particularly relevant since oral nicotine products, like pouches and gummies, are becoming increasingly popular, especially among adolescents. Finally, Mathes and her students will examine taste bud profiles on the tongues of rats that show the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and correlate this anatomy to deficits in taste-based behavior.
Dr. Geoff Mitchell uses anemones as a proxy to decipher the cellular mechanisms of coral bleaching. Coral bleaching is happening at an alarming rate worldwide. It occurs when ocean temperatures increase just a couple of degrees above their normal summer maxima, putting stress on corals and causing them to destroy or expel the algal symbionts living in their guts. Unfortunately, corals rely on these symbionts for the energy they produce from sunlight; without them, corals become sick and usually die. By deciphering the specific cellular events that lead to coral bleaching, Mitchell is hoping to help save coral reefs for future generations.
Dr. Ryan Nangreave’s group is attempting to address the inequalities in access to safe and effective, life-saving medicines in emerging nations. His research group is developing and optimizing a deep learning artificial intelligence model for image segmentation, in conjunction with a novel, low-cost and reproducible chromatographic method that will identify and determine the relative purities of commonly substandard or falsified essential medicines. The goal is to develop a library of thousands of images for hundreds of medicines to accelerate workflows for worldwide quality-control evaluations. We believe this robust library will facilitate the integration of deep learning segmentation and conventional densitometric calculations, providing an accurate, reproducible, user-friendly and cost-effective analysis tool for the markets most affected.
Dr. Ramin Radfar’s collaborative project focuses on isolation and purification of the key gluconeogenesis enzyme glycerol phosphate dehydrogenase and digestive enzymes trypsin and chymotrypsin that are targeted by metformin. Inhibition of digestive enzymes is associated with loss of appetite, and inhibition of glycerol phosphate dehydrogenase decreases glucose synthesis rate by the liver. Purified enzymes will be used to study inhibitory potency of metformin at different concentrations, optimum concentration determination, effect of metal cation in inhibitor binding and affinity. In addition to metformin, we are going to evaluate sequence, structure, and effectiveness of FDA approved glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor activator like Ozempic and its derivatives.
Dr. Katherine Steinmetz’s project focuses on learning information about people and examines how the order of positive and negative, social and non-social information influences your memory for that person. What kind of first impressions help you remember someone the most? And can you overcome those first impressions? Students will collect and analyze eye tracking and behavioral data and will then help to plan and pilot the follow-up study!
Dr. Lilly Trotter’s faculty-student collaborative project continues her work on the expansion of access to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the early 20th century. Last summer, Trotter worked with a student to begin digitizing the official NYSE directories which provide the locations of NYSE member-firms. Once the remaining directories are digitized, this summer the team plans to analyze the trends and patterns of firm expansion leading up to the Great Depression. Originally, these firms were all located in New York City on Wall Street. However, certain financial firms opened branches in other major cities starting in the 1910s, effectively providing a channel to invest directly in the NYSE. Understanding what drove firms to select these locations as opposed to others and their direct impacts could provide valuable insight into the development of financial markets and financial literacy across the U.S.
Michael Webster will mentor a group of three students as they develop new artwork for upcoming solo exhibitions awarded through internal or external fellowships. Each team member will produce a new series of artwork individually, with weekly critical feedback sessions and advice on professional practices. Together, the team will study exhibition design strategies at regional museums, conduct studio visits with established artists and meet with gallery curators to continue the research beyond campus. Using the model of a community of practice, this research group will support each other through individual creative work, culminating in four solo exhibitions scheduled for the 2026-27 academic year.
Dr. Tom Wright’s faculty-student collaborative research project will explore how frequently clusters of prime numbers appear among the whole numbers. A common question in number theory is that of how often pairs of primes are a prescribed distance apart (for example, how often do we see pairs of primes that are two apart like 3 and 5?) or triples of primes are prescribed distances apart (for example, how often do we see triples of primes that are all six apart like 7, 13, and 19?), or quadruples, quintuples, etc. are all prescribed distances from one another. In general, these "prescribed difference clusters" still have many open questions around them, and for many of those questions, mathematicians have not even yet made predictions for how many such clusters there should be. Building on a summer project from last year, this year’s project will combine computer models with theoretical ones to make predictions for certain types of prime clusters, and then those predictions will be tested against actual data.
Dr. Zhe Yang is studying optimal decision making in a contest model where two or more investors spend irreversible resources to increase their chances to win a prize whose value is stochastic. For example, suppose sport trading card collectors are trying to get a one-of-one basketball player card (the prize) from opening card packs. The collector who gets the card might hold it for a period of time. There is a risk associated with the future value of the card, which makes the value of the prize stochastic. Yang has been studying how the stochastic nature of the prize will affect investors’ optimal decisions and would like to work with a student to use computer simulation to test his theoretical results. This collaboration will be a great opportunity for a student to know how to conduct rigorous research in economics and better understand investment behavior in contests and auctions in practice.
Dr. Yongfang Zhang’s collaborative project explores how AI-generated feedback can be purposefully integrated into second language learners’ writing processes so that it aligns with individual student needs and promotes productive learning through an elaborated writing process. As more second language learners turn to AI for assistance during writing, the complexity of second language writing often results in AI-generated feedback that is abundant, unfocused, not aligned with learners’ i+1 developmental level and occasionally misleading, thereby reducing its pedagogical value. This challenge is further intensified when students do not specify the type of feedback they need or fail to distinguish the guidance they provide to AI for second language writing from the prompts they would use for writing in their first language. This project investigates the challenges AI faces when providing feedback on second language writing and identifies effective ways to guide AI through purposeful prompt design to generate individualized feedback with a clear focus for learners with different needs. It also explores strategies to deepen learners’ metacognitive awareness and engagement with AI-generated feedback to foster active language learning, while identifying the guiding roles of language faculty in this process. In addition, the project includes a literature review comparing AI-assisted writing in first and second language contexts.