Each spring, Northwestern hosts an event to showcase student research projects in the Rowenhorst Student Center, organized by the Director of the Dewitt Library, Greta Grond. This year’s Celebration of Research was held on Thursday, April 3 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
From medieval fashion to virtual nursing, the Celebration of Research showcases a poster fair of projects from a multitude of disciplines and includes musical performances throughout the two-hour time slot. This year’s performances included a clarinet solo from Meredith Sundberg with piano accompaniment by Janelle Phinney and a clarinet and trumpet duo from Sundberg and Angel Skippings.
The research posters spread throughout the RSC mall featured presenters from the humanities, social sciences, natural and applied sciences and even from the NW graduate program.
Marissa Leraas, a senior theatre major, presented the research she did as the costume designer for NW’s production of “Hamlet” in the spring of 2024.
“In our first design meeting, Dr. Bob said he wanted both Medieval and Renaissance costumes and also for them to be Nordic,” Leraas said. “So, then I had to play with the idea of do we try to combine Medieval and Renaissance? Do we separate them? When thinking about combining them, one idea that I had is not necessarily that one costume needs to be both Medieval and Renaissance, but what if we played with a mix of both?”
Leraas brought with her one of her more Renaissance style costumes for the character Polonius, that contrasted the Medieval costume for Hamlet showcase on Leraas’s posterboard.
Another humanities presentation was on settler aesthetics in 20th century Hawaiian postcards. “I studied the settler aesthetics theory, which is a theory in modern history right now that talks about the effect of settler colonialism and imperialism on a country’s aesthetics, which is the production and standards of art,” history major Elena Lee said.
“So, postcards are a really interesting field of study because they are low art, they are not high art. You do not have to pay money to see it. It is a really public form of art.” Lee looked at how colonialism influenced what kind of postcards were made and what the significance of those artistic choices were.
One of the presentations on applied science was from a group of nursing majors including Brieannah Brands, Gabrielle Johnson, Madison Naig, Kennedy Van Beek and Lydia Zink, who researched the implementation of virtual nursing. “We researched how the addition of virtual nursing compared to just standard bedside nursing care impacts workflow, patient safety, patient provider satisfaction, and what the financial outcomes of virtual nursing are,” Johnson said.
“It improved nursing workflow and decreased the amount of time it took for nurses at the bedside to do discharge education, because they could set up the education with the virtual nurse and then the virtual nurse themselves could do the education. It was about 30 minutes of time saved.”
These are just a few of the 26 student presentations this year. This event is an excellent opportunity for students to showcase their passion and hard work both in and out of the classroom and for those not presenting to support the work of research and academic study at NW.
