The event, which will be held in the state Capitol’s rotunda, celebrates the research of Minnesota’s private college students. Thirty-seven students from 15 private colleges and universities will display and present 28 posters describing their research in various disciplines.

Sam Jensen and Julie Rech, both seniors, will represent St. Thomas at Scholars at the Capitol. Faculty advisers also are invited to participate.

The Minnesota Private College Council is the primary sponsor of the event. Each college selects and sends its own students to the event. Students will present to visitors in the rotunda from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Research Summaries

Assessing Estrogenic and Androgenic Activity of UV Filter Photoproducts

By Sam Jensen
Faculty advisers: Dr. Dalma Martinovic-Weigelt, Biology; Dr. Kristine Wammer, Chemistry

Previous research suggests that some UV filters commonly used as active ingredients in sunscreens may exhibit estrogenic or androgenic activity and produce photoproducts that are also potential endocrine disruptors. Here, UV filters were exposed to simulated sunlight to generate photoproduct mixtures and characterized by HPLC and LC-MS. Mixtures were screened for endocrine activity using two transcriptional assays. The endocrine activities of the samples were interpolated by a least-squares means procedure from a nonlinear sigmoidal dose response curve fit to the relative luminescence units of the estradiol/testosterone standards. Octyl methoxycinnamate (octinoxate) and a mixture of its photoproducts exhibited androgenic activity in vitro; one active photoproduct (4-methoxybenzaldehyde) has been identified. Octyl dimethyl para-aminobenzoic acid (padimate O) had no androgenic activity in vitro, whereas a mixture of its photoproducts was found to have activity. Utilizing flash chromatography, present work is focused on isolating and identifying the active photoproduct(s).

Great River Greening: Managing Environmental Data and Evaluating Restored Landscapes

By Julie Rech
Faculty adviser: Dr. Paul Lorah, Geography

As the significance of Earth’s natural landscapes gains increasing acknowledgment, many people are beginning to actively work toward making remedial environmental changes. With these efforts comes the question of how to measure a conservation project’s success. Great River Greening is a nonprofit organization promoting and leading volunteer and community-based restorative projects in Minnesota. It has been asking this question and is interested in understanding its projects’ successes. In partnership with this organization, field research was undertaken by studying its existing sites; further work was done in its office and at the University of St. Thomas GIS Lab, where the organization’s data was managed. Evaluations were collected, datasets were formatted and geodatabases were built. This project also had a marketing aspect, which yielded informational maps and graphics for the organization’s use. Ultimately, this project’s value will lie in its potential future use for evaluations of project sites and maps and for marketing.

Abstracts of all 28 of the research presentations can be viewed in the Scholars at the Capitol abstract booklet.

The Minnesota Private College Council (MPCC) represents 17 liberal arts colleges and universities with 60,000 students. These institutions award about 30 percent of the baccalaureate degrees in the state. The organization’s mission is to advocate for high-quality private higher education.

Editor’s note: The research of Sam Jensen and Julie Rech was conducted with assistance from the Grants and Research Office’s Young Scholars Grant Program, Community Based Research Grant Program and Student Travel Grant Program.

In her project, “Mental Maps: Gaining Insight Into the Diverse Somali Perceptions of Residential Desirability in the Twin Cities,” Dirie, who was born in Somalia, studied how Somalis perceive the Twin Cities’ landscape in terms of residential desirability.

Fartun Dirie

Dirie presented her research at the 2012 GIS/LIS Consortium annual conference, held Oct. 3 to 5, in St. Cloud, Minn., where she was awarded the undergraduate scholarship and first-place presentation award with cash prizes totaling $1,000.

To start, Dirie had to do some research to locate the areas with the highest concentration of Somalis, first identifying sections with the highest density of African Americans then narrowing that field to solely Somali residents. Eventually, she found the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in south Minneapolis, and University Avenue between Rice and Hamline streets in St. Paul to have the highest density of Somalis.

Her data collection method was grass roots in style. Dirie randomly approached patrons – 68 in all, who varied in age from 18 to 70, of which about 40 percent were women − of various mosques, Somali community centers and Somali-owned businesses, all located in her pre-identified areas of high density, and asked each of them to color in a simple template mental map of the Twin Cities that she created: Red to mark geographical areas they would like to live if they had complete freedom to choose, blue to mark the areas they did not find desirable, and gray to mark the areas in which they spend most of their time.

Research findings

What Dirie discovered was heartening.

“What I found very interesting was that many of my survey participants did not list a place where they wouldn’t want to live on their mental maps. This shows that, generally speaking, Somalis view the Twin Cities in a positive light,” she said.

Participants also marked 103 areas where they would consider moving, which is significantly higher than the 78 areas participants noted they would not move to. This is further evidence that Somalis find more areas desirable than undesirable in the Twin Cities.

Her findings reinforce Minnesota’s (particularly the Twin Cities’) reputation as the “de facto Somali capital of the United States,” she said. While doing background research, Dirie found that  in 1994 there were virtually no Somali-owned businesses in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Today there are more than 550.

Somalia’s history provides insight into these figures. An east African country, Somalia has been mired in war and political instability for more than two decades. After civil war broke out in 1988, resulting in the 1991 overthrow of the dictatorship government, many Somalis fled to neighboring African countries and elsewhere, including the United States. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, 100,000 Somalis now live in the United States, and at 32,000, Minnesota has the highest Somali population in the country.

“Like many Somalis, my family and I moved to the United States to flee the war in Somalia,” Dirie recalled. Her family moved to the United States in 1994 when she was 2, settling first in Pennsylvania before heading west to Minnesota during the state’s Somali boom.

“My parents moved to Minnesota specifically because they wanted to live among a thriving Somali community,” she said.

A mental map created by Dirie illustrates how the 68 Twin Cities’ Somalis she surveyed perceive their environment. The deepest red tones, seen here surrounding Minneapolis, show the residential areas they collectively found the most desirable.

City vs. Suburbia

Her results also showed that while most Twin Cities’ Somalis spend the majority of their time near downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis, regardless of where they live, they have diverse views on the areas they consider residentially desirable. While some Somalis indicated they preferred urban areas to suburban, there also were many Somalis who preferred the opposite.

Dirie acknowledged that she would have liked to have incorporated additional socio-demographic factors − such as number of years living in the United States, level of English fluency and mode of transportation − into her study, but due to time constraints she chose to focus on just two: income and education level.

These factors illuminated a striking difference among Somalis with regard to who finds the suburbs residentially desireable.

Dirie found that the higher one’s income, the more likely he or she was to mark the suburbs red (for desirable). Fifty-five percent of her subjects with incomes greater than $35,000 indicated they find the suburbs desirable, compared with 42 percent of those having incomes between $20,000 and $30,000, and 25 percent of those who make below $20,000. The same could be said for education: Forty-eight percent of college-educated participants indicated they find the suburbs desirable, compared to 33 percent of those with high school educations and 11 percent of those with little to no schooling.

Dirie said one explanation may be that “as Somalis climb higher on the socio-economic ladder, they acquire more resources and capital, which may make it easier for them to assimilate.”

Regarding the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul, income and education did not factor significantly into desirability.

Even among those subjects with the highest incomes and educations of those surveyed, Dirie found “a considerable number who preferred to spend most of their time downtown even if they don’t live there.”

Migration decisions

In addition to filling out mental maps, Dirie asked participants to answer a few demographic and open-ended questions to help her understand the factors that inform their decisions in choosing where to live. The majority indicated that good schools and educational opportunities attracted them to an area. Others factors cited were safe neighborhoods, proximity to family, ethnic network and job opportunities.

Mapping her own future

Lorah, Dirie’s adviser on the project, called her “thoughtful and enthusiastic.” He added, “New students have the ability to gain insight into culture by modeling data in a GIS environment. She gets the theory, she has strong technical skills, and she uses both in creative ways. I’m looking forward to finding out what her next project is going to be.”

And so does Dirie.

“Research at St. Thomas was a great experience! While finishing up my research, I realized my work is never really over. I found myself left with even more curiosity and many more ideas and topics I hope to research in the future.”

With two years of undergraduate work still to go, she already has begun to map her own future.

“My plan is to attend graduate school for either geography or public health and obtain a Ph.D. I’m interested in studying migration as well as GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology and its applicability within fields like public health,” she said.

“After completing my doctorate, I hope to work in international development. I’m still very interested in studying mental maps. I think it would be really interesting to see how people’s perception of their environments influences areas such as urban planning, community development or even health care accessibility. ”

Dr. Jeffrrey Pilcher

The talk, “Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food,” is free and open to the public.

The burritos and taco shells that many think of as Mexican actually were created in the United States, while Americanized foods have been carried around the world in tin cans and served in tourist restaurants.

Using the “chili queens” of San Antonio and the inventors of the taco shell as examples, Pilcher will show how Mexican Americans helped to make Mexican food global. He also will discuss the struggle between globalization and national sovereignty that is represented by the clash of fast food and Mexican regional cuisines.

Pilcher teaches and writes on the history of foods throughout the world, but especially on Mexican food.

His lecture is co-sponsored by the St. Thomas departments of History, Modern and Classical Languages, Geography, International Studies, American Culture and Difference, Women’s Studies and Justice and Peace Studies.

In the summer of 2007, Larry Cerf came to the lab to ask for assistance. His great-grandfather had owned a large amount of agricultural and industrial land surrounding Berlin. In the early 1930s, the Nazis confiscated the land for government use. The family fled to Switzerland and eventually settled in the United States.

In the early 1990s, Cerf started to search for proof of his family’s land ownership in Germany. What he found were hundreds of deeds and historic maps with connections to his relatives. The problem: He knew only the general area where the parcels of land were located. Fortunately, the St. Thomas Geography Department has many competent student researchers who seek out real-world problems such as this to improve their skills.

The Applied GIScience lab is a state-of-the-art mapping laboratory in John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts. It specializes in spatial research for a variety of disciplines. It can be used for almost anything ranging from business to conservation, or, in this case, courts of law.

To find where the Cerf family’s land was located, we needed to study the deeds in concert with historic maps. That provided a basic framework, but it still did not solve the problem of locating the land in modern time. In the GIS lab, we took satellite images from Google Earth of the area surrounding Berlin and associated them with real coordinates in the GIS software. With that we could take the historic deeds and reference them to the land as it stands today.

While it sounds easy, the project proved to be quite difficult. Some deeds dated as far back as 1863; the landscape of the towns has changed dramatically over time, making it difficult to find landmarks that still exist today. After many hours of work with the deeds, we finally were able to produce maps with accurate depictions of where the parcels currently are located. With these maps in hand, we calculated the areas of the parcels, allowing Cerf to connect them to parcels for which he had proof of confiscation.

Over the course of a year, Cerf sent us more historic maps and deeds and we associated them with actual areas using satellite images. We created multiple maps with area calculations and overlays of the deeds on satellite imagery. A big break came in fall 2008, when the German Supreme Court accepted his case [which has been delayed]. Because our maps could prove to be effective pieces of evidence for the case, he decided it would be beneficial for us to go to Germany ourselves and research the case in greater detail.

In late October, Cerf paid for us (Moen and Hoffman) to travel to Berlin for a week, where we searched for maps that could be useful. We went to archives outside of Berlin to search records for anything of relevance. Two historians working on his case met us there to help orient us and get us into the archives.

We filled our hotel room with big plots of maps of key areas that the historians found in their research. We pieced the maps together to get the whole picture. Eventually we came up with multiple maps that we thought could be useful in the GIS lab.

We spent most of our time in Berlin in an archive outside the city. There we had access to all the maps, building plans and deeds from the late 19th century to present. We pored over hundreds of documents trying to find relevant data that would be useful to map in GIS. We were able to find some very useful deeds that could be relevant but we could not be sure until we were back in the GIS lab. At the end of the week we had a few dozen documents and maps that we had copied or scanned to bring back to St. Paul.

We had spent many hours working with satellite images and felt as if we knew the land like the back of our hands. To actually walk on lands that we had spent so much time studying on paper was a very satisfying experience that brought a whole new understanding to our work.

When we returned, it was back to the lab to input the data into GIS. With a greater understanding of the case from our trip, we created a comprehensive map with multiple deeds over one satellite image. Using this base map, we created files that show how the land ownership has changed over the years, highlighting gaps that were unknown to us before. We hope these maps will be useful in court and that the land which has been disputed for more than 60 years will be returned to its rightful owners.

Read more from CAS Spotlight

I teach geography and became convinced a few years ago that the best way to teach students was to have them solve real problems, just the way professionals do. Rather than plod through Chapter 1 in the first week and Chapter 2 in the second, we get a real client with a real problem. The clients come to class, explain their needs and then we work on the problem for a month or so. The client returns, students present what they’ve done, and clients tell them if it solves their problem.

For example, last year one class had The Bibelot Shops as a client. Bibelot wanted the class to evaluate a new store site in Woodbury, and to construct demographic profiles of the customers at its four existing stores. We do about 50 real projects a year, such as mapping voting patterns in suburbs, making maps and a family tree to help explain to a judge that two Burmese Karen Christians would be endangered if deported and calculating housing units and median income in Merriam Park.

Thinking about the conference, I called my friend, Dr. Sue Chaplin, a professor of biology at St. Thomas. She is a fabulous teacher, never afraid of innovations.

Chaplin is especially interested in how to make science interesting and accessible to nonmajors and introductory students. She belongs to Project Kaleidoscope, which is dedicated to science education reform. One good technique is teaching content in the context of real-world problems. Two years ago she taught a human biology course, led by problems instead of chapter topics: (“Want fries with that cheeseburger?), work and fitness (“Can you climb Mt. Everest?), immunity (“Is HIV an epidemic?”), and reproductive health (“Whose baby is this?”). Each unit had a central case (the problem or issue), around which lectures, discussions and homework were focused.

Principles and content are still taught and are still of central importance, but they are presented in the context of their use, rather than just memorized.

Chaplin found a highly significant increase in students’ positive response to the statement “Biology is an interesting subject to me,” with five times as many students responding in the “strongly agree” category at the end of the semester.

At that conference on inquiry-based learning, Chaplin and I asked how professors know their students are thinking instead of just applying plug-and-play procedures. We modeled inquiry learning.

Following a brief introduction to levels of higher-order thinking (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation), we gave 45 fellow teachers a reading about famine in the Horn of Africa from The Economist. They first identified what they would want their students to learn, then assigned levels of higher-order thinking to each objective. For example, if a teacher wanted students to identify where famine occurred, simple memorization would be sufficient. If the teacher wanted students to identify the causes of famine in the region, only reading comprehension would be required.

However, if a teacher wanted students to explain why food production has declined in the area, students would have to investigate political conditions, weather, the role of poorly developed infrastructure and much more. This would require research skills, analysis, synthesis of multiple sources and expression of their conclusions, which would emphasize successively higher orders of thinking.

During the presentation, Chaplin demonstrated how to develop assignments that would assess specific thinking skills. For example, most high school students taking college biology for the first time can recite (from memory) the basic characteristics that define “life.” Chaplin asks students to work together to debate whether computers are alive, based on the characteristics of life they mutually agree upon. They read original articles, each proposing an alternative hypothesis for the origin of life on earth. After students discuss each of the hypotheses  they write a consensus essay to answer the question, “Could life originate on earth today?”

Working on new, relevant problems keeps a course fresh and energizes the instructor as well as the students. Students appreciate the experience of learning as it really is – messy and imperfect, but something they can do and hopefully will do throughout their lives.

Dr. Robert Werner has a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and came to St. Thomas in 1991. Dr. Sue Chaplin, a Ph.D. from Cornell University, began teaching here in 1990.