ORISE Featurecast

We celebrate mentorship in this episode of the ORISE Featurecast in a conversation with Lindsey Perkin, Ph.D, research molecular biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service. Perkins’s unit focuses on insect pests of cotton and other row crops. She says mentors can make or break a student's experience in a lab or other opportunity. It’s important to guide people in the right way, to give them that good experience. If they have a bad experience, that might complet

James Dewar, Ph.D., assistant professor of biochemistry at Vanderbilt University, uses Large Language Models (LLMs, a type of generative artificial intelligence) in his research. In a recent article published at nature.com, Dewar writes that to get more from AI researchers should treat every prompt like an experiment. In this episode of the ORISE Featurecast, Dewar talks in more depth about his article and gives a preview of his upcoming ORISE Symposium Seminar on the use of LLMs for science and

Hampton Kennedy was between jobs when he came across an opportunity for the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Research Participation Program Fellowship. The fellowship blended history – Hampton is a history teacher – and ecology in that it focused on the history of signal crayfish in Montana. In this episode of the ORISE Featurecast, Hampton talks about the process of investigating the history of signal crayfish. Few studies had been done prior to this project, but determini

Beth Ellinport is an ORISE research program participant at the US Army Corps of Engineer's Engineer Research and Development Center Environmental Laboratory, where her research helps drive data-driven decision-making under uncertainty. We think of the Army Corps of Engineers in relation to dredging waterways and building levies, locks and dams but there is much to consider for those projects and others, including impacts on downstream communities, employees and search-and-rescue crews. Ellinport

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is something most people interact with every day, even if they don’t realize it. Maps apps, the predictive text you see when you’re writing an email or document, or the ad you get served on social media because you searched the web for something. While useful in our daily lives, AI is also beneficial in the classroom. As this episode is posted, students and educators from around the country are about to compete in the finals of the Presidential AI Challenge in Washin

Maggie Mangas is a former ORISE Research Program Participant whose fellowship was with the Health Research Services Administration (HRSA) Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program. Mangas was excited about the opportunity to develop her quantitative research skills. Her background includes conducting qualitative research. Mangas was drawn to the ORISE fellowship because she saw an opportunity to be in a government setting, along with this data training component. She sa