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‘RESEARCH IN THE CAPITOL’ HIGHLIGHTS CRITICAL ROLE OF UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
 

Iowa’s political leaders perennially confront two challenges: first, how to turn technology developed at the state’s leading research universities into opportunities for economic development; and, secondly, how to plug the “brain drain” of highly educated younger people leaving Iowa.

These issues are, in fact, intimately related, a connection driven home February 28 when 30 of the most accomplished undergraduates from the Regent universities’ honors programs presented their research to lawmakers and the public in the rotunda of the Iowa state capitol building in Des Moines. The students ran the gamut of fields from philosophy and genetics to marketing and mental health.

The significance of undergraduate research to Iowa was underscored by the presence at the event of Regents President Michael Gartner, along with Iowa State Vice Provost for Research Dr. John Brighton and his counterparts from the University of Northern Iowa and the University of Iowa. The undergraduates aren’t just bright students presenting their classroom projects, Brighton stresses, but gifted young innovators who typically fill key roles in the research programs of their mentors.

“These students are doing up-to-date, fundamental research, and it’s exciting to watch,” Brighton says. “It’s like being a pioneer—you’re discovering new things no one has ever seen before.”

The research model fostered at Iowa State, Brighton adds, reflects a continuum that includes identifying, cultivating, and integrating talented undergraduates into the upper-level programs of the university’s top research faculty. Many of these students will continue their work at the graduate level and beyond in programs that ultimately result in marketable technologies.

Critical links in that continuum include Drew Cookman, Jason Haegele, and Nathan Willis, three Iowa State Honors Program students from the College of Engineering who presented their work at the event. Indeed, besides their significance in their own departments’ research, the research projects of Cookman and Haegele are critically linked to each other—and to the prospects of one of Iowa’s leading industries.

Cookman, a senior who hails from Mason City, is a member of the research team of Professor Charles Glatz of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Together, they’re developing more efficient and economical processes for recovering high-value proteins from corn.

“Protein separation is an important step in a lot of processes, such as pharmaceuticals,” Cookman says. “But it’s very expensive to separate proteins from corn, so we break down the three final steps—the protein extraction, solid-liquid clarification, and purification—into a single step. My research involves finding the optimal factors for doing this.”

Still, Cookman acknowledges, a key challenge lies not so much in the process as in the product itself: the corn varieties used in their work are transgenic, and, as with many genetically modified organisms (GMOs), their isolation from other food and feed crops is critical to the ability of Iowa producers to export their products to markets where the introduction of GMOs are strictly controlled.

Enter Jason Haegele, a double major in the Departments of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering and Agronomy. Under the direction of agronomy’s Dr. Peter Peterson, the senior from Davenport is studying the flow of pollen from Iowa cornfields. Absent the ability to control drift between fields, he says, rigorous monitoring of pollen flow is essential.

“With the introduction of genetically modified varieties, there’s been a lot of concern about their pollen drifting to traditional hybrids,” says Haegele. “So there’s great interest in determining how far pollen travels in order to avoid cross-pollination between corn used for something special like pharmaceuticals and corn grown for food or animal feed.”

Though not tied to a specific economic sector, the project of Nathan Willis (pictured, explaining his work to Regents President Michael Gartner), a junior major in aerospace engineering from Omaha, is no less important to Iowans in general—and, given two pedestrian traffic fatalities on campus this past year, to the Iowa State community in particular.

Along with mentor Derrick Parkhurst, an assistant professor of psychology and associate director of Iowa State’s Virtual Reality Applications Center, Willis has developed a system to monitor and analyze driver behavior at intersections using off-the-shelf digital video cameras patched into computers running open-source software. Funded by the Iowa Department of Transportation, the project has been deployed at four intersections around campus.

“We wanted to make a system that was easy and cheap to use so it could be used across Iowa,” Willis says. “We thought this might be one way to help make the campus a little safer.”

According to officials from the participating schools’ honors programs, the Regent institutions hope to make “Research in the Capitol” a regular event each year during sessions of the Iowa General Assembly, keeping the critical connections between teaching, research, and economic development before the state’s lawmakers.

“The message for political leaders and the public is the importance of getting young people interested in research,” says John Brighton. “These people will be the scientists of the future.”