This year, students in the Leonetti/O’Connell Honors Research program were able to attend conferences to hear from researchers studying the same topics and present their own projects. Rachel ’26 and Victoria ’25 are two students who chose to attend conferences.
A participant of Honors Research in Science, Rachel completes her project externally through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) PRIMES-USA program. The program currently houses 47 students, all of whom will receive mentorship from both graduate students and MIT’s faculty. Alongside her two teammates, Rachel focuses her research on group theory and the automorphisms within five billion groups. During the weekend of Oct. 12, Rachel attended the annual PRIMES-USA conference where she presented her research and watched other students’ respective presentations. To prepare, Rachel met with mentors who provided her with feedback on her verbal presentation and slides.
“There was a sense of pride to be able to share what we have worked on for so long with everyone,” Rachel said. “The social aspects of the conference were great too. I got to meet a community of other very passionate and dedicated people.”
Prior to the conference, Rachel and her group mates attended the Summer Workshop for Intrepid Mathematicians and the Math Research Outreach Conference. Rachel feels that these two conferences were unique as they taught her how to properly present math, speak to an audience and curate a detailed slideshow. She will later attend the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January 2025, which will have over 3,000 presenters and 6,000 viewers, where she will give a poster presentation, blackboard lecture and slide presentation.
Like Rachel, Victoria will attend a conference in which she hopes to gain new insight surrounding her topic. She currently works in the Motion and Sports Analysis Lab at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles where patients, either athletes who have sports injuries or people with neuromuscular disorders, have their emotions analyzed. This examination serves as data to aid doctors in making recovery decisions. Victoria helps to obtain data on athletes with sports injuries by using a marker system. She has recently been testing if the markerless system, which uses synched cameras, can be used in solidarity without the aid of the traditional marker system. Victoria will attend the annual conference hosted by the Pediatric Research in Sports Medicine (PRiSM) in Columbus, Ohio where she will be doing a poster presentation in which attendees can inquire about her project. Her research mentor had previous experience with PRiSM and suggested that she submit her abstract from her literature review so that she could attend the conference.
“I definitely anticipate it being a really great learning experience for me,” Victoria said. “Both from the presenting standpoint but then also the learning from others and seeing what a conference actually looks like.”
