Research Days events set to begin April 28

Binghamton University will celebrate Research Days from April 28-May 2 with a weeklong slate of events, including presentations, panels and workshops highlighting the breadth of contributions made by students and faculty.

Binghamton will kick off the week on April 28 by hosting the 12th-annual SUNY Undergraduate Research Conference (SURC), which will bring together students and faculty from more than 35 SUNY campuses. In addition to student presentations and performances, there will be a graduate school and career fair as well as professional development opportunities.

Departments and divisions at Binghamton have also organized events to showcase research all week long.

Stephen Ortiz, a historian who serves as director of the External Scholarships and Undergraduate Research Center, sits on the steering committee that organizes Research Days each year. He said he’s particularly excited to have the SUNY-wide conference come to Binghamton.

“Every year, Research Days gives us so many opportunities to learn something new about the work our students and colleagues are doing,” he said. “This year, we’ll also be able to see what’s happening across the state in undergraduate scholarship, and showcase our university and its culture of support and enthusiasm for undergraduate research. It’s going to be an exciting and busy week.”

Watson College’s inaugural Graduate Research Outcomes Workshop (GROWS) and the Center for Civic Engagement’s annual Community-Engaged Learning and Research Showcase will both take place April 29. The Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies program will also highlight diverse, interdisciplinary scholarly work from its majors and minors on April 30.

Earlier that day, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships and the Materials Research Society will host a symposium at the Innovative Technologies Complex. The program features a keynote speech by John Rogers, an MIT-trained professor of engineering at Northwestern University with more than 70 active patents. Binghamton’s resident Nobel laureate, M. Stanley Whittingham, will be among those honored during a ceremony recognizing faculty inventors.

Afterward, winners of the Art of Science contest will be announced and there will be an opening reception for a new exhibit of work in the atrium of the Center of Excellence. Participants share compelling images visible either with the naked eye or advanced imaging technology such as microscopes and telescopes.

On May 1, graduate students are challenged to briefly summarize their research to a general audience using only a single slide through the Three Minute Thesis competition. From 1-5 p.m., DataViz will take the stage in Bartle Library’s newly opened Digital Scholarship Center to present projects about data visualization using tools like Power BI, R, Python and more.

To end the week, three student poster sessions with more than 200 projects will occupy the Mandela Room and UU-Old Union Hall from 9-10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. and 2-3:30 p.m. A session dedicated to digital presentations will also run simultaneously from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. in UU-111. Featuring original undergraduate and graduate research conducted with the support of Binghamton faculty mentors, each session will explore a variety of disciplines including work produced by participants in the Source Project and First-Year Research Immersion Program.