Undergraduate Research Conference Proceedings

Salicornia pacifica, or pickleweed, is a halophyte native to California wetlands. As a halophyte, it is adapted to saline conditions and the adverse impacts that come with living in these environments, including osmotic and oxidative stress. My goal is to determine how salinity affects the chlorophyll content of pickleweed in order to project the potential impacts of climate change on pickleweed growth. The approach I used was to grow pickleweed under greenhouse conditions in control, low, and high salinity irrigation treatments and to measure chlorophyll content after ten months. The control group was found to have 31% more chlorophyll per gram of fresh weight than the low group, and 39% more than the high group. The results suggest that pickleweed will have reduced chlorophyll content in the future due to increasing salinity of wetland soils as a result of climate change, implying lower productivity and ecosystem function of these wetlands.

This media awareness campaign explores the growing politicization of the United States Supreme Court and its impact on the public. Through the utilization of various mediums, these accumulated pieces seek to achieve an overarching goal: to educate the general public on the Court’s power and how this power has been taken advantage of. Recent Supreme Court decisions reveal an apparent shift toward conservative beliefs. Investigation of recent appointments and their ideological impact on legal precedent highlights the necessity for judicial neutrality in a democratic nation.

Coastal sage scrub (CSS) ecosystems are home to hundreds of bird and insect species. Their range has been significantly reduced, so restoration is crucial. Unfortunately, CSS plants in North Campus Open Space struggle at the Audubon Overlook, yet they thrive on South Parcel. California sagebrush (Artemisia californica) is a foundation species in CSS ecosystems, and these plants grow best in sandy, well-draining soils. Previous researchers hypothesized that high soil compaction stunts CSS plant growth, but more research is needed on how soil bulk density and texture may affect California sagebrush. Our first hypothesis was that California sagebrush responds negatively to high soil bulk density in clay soils but not in sandy soils. Our second hypothesis was that California sagebrush are larger and CSS plants are more abundant on South Parcel due to sandier soils. We measured the dimensions of California sagebrush closest to soil bulk density locations at the Audubon Overlook and South Parcel, and we counted CSS plants in a 3 meter radius of each location. We also analyzed soil texture for 6 Audubon Overlook locations and 10 South Parcel locations. We didn’t find a significant difference in California sagebrush volume within the Audubon Overlook based on soil bulk density. However, the mean soil bulk density was higher at the Audubon Overlook, and the median California sagebrush volume, median number of living California sagebrush in a 3 meter radius, and median number of living CSS plants in a 3 meter radius were all higher for South Parcel; these differences were statistically significant. Also, the sand content was higher for the South Parcel locations. This suggests that soil bulk density relative to soil texture might affect the growth and abundance of CSS plants. This research and future research may inform coastal sage scrub restoration.

The tardigrade, a microscopic animal known for its resilience, can survive extreme environments by entering an inactive state called cryptobiosis. Cryptobiosis is associated with gross morphological changes, including major changes to the anatomy of the nervous system. By measuring motor function in recovery from cryptobiosis induced by lack of oxygen, osmotic stress, and freezing, this project aims to assess the stability of the tardigrade nervous system. These data show tardigrades restore normal motor function rapidly following cryptobiosis, suggesting that if the nervous system is disrupted by morphological changes, it may be capable of rebuilding itself rapidly. Future calcium imaging experiments will further assess neuronal activity in cryptobiosis and recovery. Ultimately, this work aims to provide valuable insights into neuroresilience, with downstream applications for advancing the fundamental understanding of how to create and translate a resilient nervous system.

In the U.S. higher education setting, universities are bound by law to offer support services to disabled students. However, the level of support required by law often does not fully meet the needs of many students. Additionally, thorough documentation is required for students to access these services which causes many to fall through the cracks. This project aims to investigate the gap between the needs of neurodivergent students at UCSB and the support offered by the University, with the goal of providing actionable steps to more effectively support these students.

From an early age, children evaluate others’ actions to determine who is helpful, oftenusing cues like effort, cost, and intention to inform dispositional inferences. While prior research has typically relied on direct comparisons of high- and low-cost helping behaviors, real-world judgments often occur in the absence of such contrasts. This study investigates whether children infer greater helpfulness from a single act of high-cost helping, even without explicit comparison. Using a between-subjects design, we presented 3- to 12-year-old children (N = 106)with a vignette in which an agent helps another character retrieve a toy, either by incurring a high cost (climbing to the top shelf) or a low cost (grabbing it from a lower shelf). Children evaluated the helper’s dispositional helpfulness and predicted their likelihood of helping in new situations, including costlier or cross-domain contexts. Because nearly all children judged the helper as maximally helpful, there were no significant differences in explicit assessments of helpfulness based on cost condition. Children predicted the agent to help in all future scenarios, regardless of the cost that the agent initially incurred. However, responses to counterfactual inference questions revealed differences between older and younger children, suggesting that social reasoning about counterfactual scenarios or perceived competence of others may become more sophisticated with age.

Attention is a critical component of human cognition that enables the prioritization of relevant information, awareness of task demands, and enhanced cognitive processing. Attention can be shaped by selection history, where past experiences with stimuli influence future attentional allocation, independent of current goals. When features of these stimuli have been previously associated with reward, a phenomenon known as value-driven attention capture emerges, in which these features continue to bias attention even when no longer task-relevant. Recent research suggests that value-driven attentional biases may be strengthened under conditions that promote neuroplasticity, such as exogenous brain stimulation or heightened physiological arousal. In the present study, we investigated whether acute aerobic exercise modulates value-driven attention capture. Participants completed a visual search task designed to associate color with reward during a learning phase. The experimental group completed this task interleaved with acute bouts of treadmill high-intensity interval training (HIIT), while the control group completed the task at rest. In a subsequent testing phase performed at rest by both groups, reward contingencies were removed. While both groups successfully learned reward associations, participants in the exercise group demonstrated enhanced value-driven capture effects compared to more selection-driven effects in the control group, suggesting exercise-induced modulation of attentional control. The findings support our hypothesis that states of physiological arousal can facilitate neuroplasticity in attention systems. This work highlights the potential of acute exercise as a cognitive modulator and opens avenues for future research regarding the effects of physiological states on attentional learning.

In the US court system, interpreters are provided for anybody who does not speak English sufficiently proficiently to ease language difficulty and equalize opportunity under the law. Despite that precaution, jurors still hear the original language being translated, which could create extrajudicial biases in court cases. Thus far, there has been limited literature on whether language creates a juror bias and whether one language creates more bias than another. These studies have also been limited in scope and conflicted in findings, with some finding evidence of bias while others not. In order to fill this gap, I designed a pilot study to model for a larger scale study if biases were found. This included recording testimony for a fake court case with dubbed voices to maintain accuracy. I then created a survey asking for ratings of guilt, understanding, credibility, and reasoning which I sent out to a representative sample of the US residents. My findings show that while defendant language does not significantly impact the outcome of a clearly undisputed trial, it may influence the outcome in a highly contested one.

Damage to bee wings commonly occurs during ecologically-essential foraging and flight activities of bees. Interactions and collisions with native environmental conditions such as wind and vegetation leave wings exposed to potential wear and tear. Morphological traits influence bee flight performance, as bees with larger body sizes demonstrate increased flight distance capacity and foraging range. We analyze the degree of wing wear as an indicator of these activities, predicting that larger bees will accumulate more wing damage from extended exposure to environmental wear. We imaged wings across bee species native to Santa Barbara County. By manually creating masks to isolate the wing, we trained a computer vision model with ground-truth data to identify pixels in wing images and separate them from the background. This image segmentation model allows for shape analysis and comparison of degree of wear in the wing’s margin across various species through this large-scale collection of qualitative data. We also created a manual wing wear scoring index to compare accuracy with this model. Genera such as Bombus and Xylocopa that tend to have larger body sizes are predicted to be assigned, on average, higher scores of wing wear compared with smaller species being assigned lower scores to indicate experiencing less wear. By comparing wear patterns, these correlations could offer insight on species resilience in their native habitats, suggesting that species with larger body sizes may be more vulnerable to environmental stresses that require more demanding flight and foraging efforts. This model could then have potential research applications as bioindicators of the local foraging ecology and environmental stress/fragmentation.

This poster was presented at the UCSB Undergraduate Research Symposium 2025, and at the UCSB URCA Poster Colloqium 2025.

An inquiry-based, five-day educational module on CRISPR/Cas9 was developed for high school students. The module utilized engaging wet-lab activities, in which students learned about the mechanisms of CRISPR/Cas9, DNA/RNA, and real-life applications through interactive, hands-on activities. Guided by five or more undergraduate students, students enhanced their skills by learning to generate and test their own hypotheses, collect data, and present results. Our goals included increasing students' understanding and retention of gene editing concepts and their real-world relevance, and to increase overall interest in science.

This module has been run in three Santa Barbara high schools, totaling 89 students. Before and after the module, students were surveyed on conceptual understanding, revealing an average increase of 30% (additive increase, p < 0.001). We are currently enhancing the module to increase student engagement and ensure its continued success.