Below you will find a list of Kansas State University faculty members who volunteered to mentor a KS-LSAMP student lab during Summer 2021. We appreciate their willingness to participate in our program! THANK YOU!
Dr. Heather Bailey
Department of Psychological Sciences
Dr. Bailey’s research focuses on memory systems and how they change with age and related to individual differences and age-related differences in working memory. The first line involves evaluating the efficacy of different strategies that people use to help improve their memory. The second line of work involves how individuals effectively segment, or chunk, incoming information and how they update their working memory representations accordingly. Finally, the third line of work involves how older adults use their existing knowledge to help them remember information about everyday activities.
You can read more about Dr. Bailey here https://www.k-state.edu/psych/research/baileyheather.html
Dr. Matthew Kirk
Department of Geology
Dr. Kirk’s research focuses on subsurface biogeochemistry related to energy and water quality questions. Current studies in his laboratory include efforts to better understand how variation in carbon dioxide levels affect microbial activity in the subsurface, controls on arsenic mobility in freshwater aquifers and factors that influence biogenic natural gas formation in unconventional natural gas reservoirs.
You can learn more about Dr. Kirk and his research lab here:
http://www.k-state.edu/geology/faculty-staff/Kirk.html
http://matthewkirk.weebly.com/index.html
Dr. Peter Sues
Department of Chemistry
Dr. Sues’s research focuses on inorganic and organometallic chemistry to develop inexpensive and sustainable catalysts for various chemical transformations. His research interests include developing olefin metathesis catalysts that exhibit the best characteristics of both of these systems; high activity and selectivity, as well as functional group tolerance, while also utilizing sustainable earth-abundant metals. Also, Dr. Sues focuses on the investigation of the catalytic activation of small molecules, which is crucial for the future of sustainable energy.
Dr. Jocelyn McDonald
Division of Biology
The McDonald lab studies the underlying mechanisms–the genes and proteins–that control migration of a small group of cells in Drosophila called the “border cells”. Border cells migrate during development of the ovary and are an excellent and simpler model to understand how cells move during human embryonic development and in tumor invasion.
You can read more about Dr. McDonald’s lab here: http://www.k-state.edu/biology/people/tenure/mcdonald/
Dr. Sonny Lee
Division of Biology
Dr. Lee’s research uses a combination of genomics enabled technologies (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics) to inventory microbial genes, functions and expressions. Combining with chemical and processes data, we create a profile of microbial functions that contribute to critical host-microbes-environment interaction. Dr. Lee works with various model systems ranging from plants and soil, to organisms in the ocean and streams, to human gut.
Dr. Behzad Ghanbarian
Department of Geology
Dr. Ghanbarian’s research area covers a wide range of topics in geology, hydrogeology, environmental sciences and engineering, and petrology. His main research focuses on applying fundamental theories from physics and math as well as multi-scale numerical techniques to model fluid flow and solute transport in heterogeneous porous rocks, fracture networks, soils and sediments. Dr. Ghanbarian also pursues unconventional methods to characterize physical and geomechanical properties of porous media using a combination of experiments, theories and numerical simulations.
Dr. Willian Hsu
Computer Science
The Knowledge Discovery in Databases lab group has a research emphasis in the areas of applied artificial intelligence (AI) and knowledge-based software engineering (KBSE) for decision support systems. The group looks for ways to systematically decompose analytical learning problems based upon information theoretic and probabilistic criteria, so that the most appropriate machine learning methods may be applied to the resulting transformed problems. More specifically, the group is interested in machine learning, data mining and knowledge discovery from large spatial and temporal databases, human-computer intelligent interaction (HCII) and high-performance computation in learning and optimization.
You can learn more about Dr. Hsu and the Knowledge Discovery in Databases lab here: http://people.cis.ksu.edu/~bhsu/
http://www.kddresearch.org/7