CHS Students Gain Research Experience During Summer in the Big Apple
Published September 6, 2023 By Darlene Muguiro UTEP College of Health Sciences
CHS students Jizelle Duarte and Sophia Chew spent a memorable summer in New York City. The two undergraduates, both in their senior year in the Bachelor of Science in Rehabilitation Sciences program, took their first trip outside of El Paso as part of a short-term research internship experience at the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at New York University (NYU). Both were selected through a competitive process initiated by the UTEP Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences faculty that aimed to recruit minority students who had little to no research experience but who exhibited a keen interest in the area. In total, 12 students from universities across the United States were included in the program.
The trip to New York City was the first for Duarte and Chew. Both say they were impressed by the size and glamour of the city, but the trip also occurred during the time that smoke from the Canadian wildfires was drifting across the northern part of the United States, making the airplane landing and initial moments in the “Big Apple” especially memorable.
“I initially had no idea what was going on, because I started my flight at 7 in the morning, and I ended up getting into New York at 4 in the afternoon; the wildfires had started around noon,” said Duarte. “But when I was getting ready to land, and people started opening their windows, I couldn’t see anything but an orange glow all over the city. Once we got to the hotel, I noticed that people were wearing face masks, and you could even smell the fire.”
In their first few days at NYU, Chew and Duarte attended mini lectures where faculty spoke about the focus of their research, and were allowed to choose where they spent the rest of the internship. Chew was ultimately assigned to Dr. Adam Buchwald’s laboratory, where she worked with other lab members on a project focused on cognitive control and inhibition among people with aphasia. Chew says the opportunity to participate fully in the experiment – including participant recruitment and coding of data – was extremely valuable.
“The thing that struck me most about Dr. Buchwald’s lab was how he focused on the analysis of his work. Since I had never done research before, I really wanted to be part of the analysis and understand what I was analyzing in order to make connections to the field of CSD,” she said. “His lab aimed to ensure that its members were able to simplify complex concepts to people who don't know anything about things like aphasia or inhibition. In the end, I felt that I was able to do that, when it came to presenting our research in the symposium.”
Duarte was assigned to the laboratory of Dr. Eric Jackson, who focuses on stuttering research. Duarte was part of a project that analyzed how communication stress can impact speech production among stutterers, specifically whether perceived peer pressure impacts the act of stuttering. The lab used a special infrared cap to map brain activity among the participants.
“We learned that for stutterers, there's more brain activation in the right hemisphere, in comparison to the left hemisphere for non-stutterers,” Duarte said. “So, essentially, in private speech, stutterers can be in the grocery store talking to themselves and not stutter, versus when they’re with someone, they’ll begin to stutter.”
Following their graduation, Duarte and Chew both plan to apply to the Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology Program. From there, their plans deviate – Chew plans to focus on her clinical role as a future SLP, while Duarte foresees opportunities to incorporate research into her profession.
“I hope to be in a hospital setting where I can also do clinical research,” Duarte said. “This experience inspired me, and I liked it even more than I expected to.”
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