Pictured above: Remote Research examples. Photo courtesy of Jaya Nagarajan-Swenson '22
By Casey Roepke ‘21
News Editor
When the March 2020 decision to close Mount Holyoke’s campus and move classes online went public, STEM student researchers faced a unique set of challenges. Labs were difficult to adapt to an online format, faculty could no longer teach using hands-on pedagogy and the fall module system made for intense schedules with little time between classes to absorb material. In the midst of a difficult time, however, some STEM majors have been able to maintain their outside-the-classroom learning experiences by conducting remote research with Mount Holyoke professors and science labs.
Isabel McIntyre ’22, an astronomy and biology double major, and Lindsey Hands ’22, a physics major, have had the opportunity to work on a project together for Visiting Astronomy Lecturer Jason Young despite living in different states. McIntyre began researching low surface brightness galaxies in the fall of 2019, and Hands joined her on the project, researching hot dust and star formation rates in LSBs in the spring of 2020 for a brief on-campus stint before being sent home in March.
“Luckily, going remote at the end of the spring and over the summer didn’t disrupt our research process too much, because it’s not as if we are working with our subjects in the lab,” Hands said. “They are actually about 100 megaparsecs [approximately 2 sextillion miles] away.”
McIntyre felt that her switch into remote research was fairly smooth. “The transition to remote research worked out remarkably well for me,” she said. “On campus, we conduct our research on Linux computers. Remotely, I am able to connect to these computers through the MacBook terminal. … Our goals remained the same, but remote work added a few extra steps to our process.”
Because of the nature of astronomy research — scientists do not exactly have the capacity to observe galaxies in a lab — the bulk of Hands and McIntyre’s research has been on a computer. But using technology at home has created problems of its own.
“The manual labor that I do is fiddling with images taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and processing them with Python code,” Hands said. “A lot of the summer was spent troubleshooting how to get the data from the school computers onto my personal computer and then how to properly process it, which involves a lot of sending files back and forth from school to home. It’s easy to make a mess of files when you are constantly copying them and moving them around, [which is] a problem exacerbated by working remotely.”
Another obstacle to successful and productive remote astrophysics research is collaborating with teammates. “Something that is definitely frustrating about being remote is not being able to show images to the other team members as conveniently,” Hands said. “The screenshare capability on Zoom is a huge help, but it’s still not quite as simple as literally having the person in the room with you, especially when we are looking at very subtle variations in images.”
Hands also found that time zones proved challenging to navigate on her team. “Rarely is my team member in California chugging out region files at 8 a.m. their time [PST], while I am in prime grind-time at 11 a.m. [EST],” Hands said. “It’s a little silly, but research requires focus and discussion, which is hard to actually get when only one participant is working and the other is taking a break from work or working on something else or about to go to bed.”
Researchers from other departments also felt the challenges of switching to remote research.
Katherine Dailey ’22 conducted biochemistry research in the first fall module and found that transitioning into remote research actually caused her to change the focus of her project.
“Prior to remote work, I was working on looking at the interaction between a specific protein in bacteria and RNA,” Dailey said. “When we went remote, my work shifted to looking at how our lab could use image analysis to quantify the blue [or] white levels of this bacteria. Within the experiments that our lab runs, the blue [or] white level can tell us about the level of interaction between RNA and protein or protein and protein in the experiments of our lab.”
Students in the Berry Lab — where Dailey researches under the mentorship of Assistant Professor of Biochemistry Katie Berry — normally rely on hands-on experiments, like growing bacteria, to reach scientific conclusions. “Transitioning from on campus to remote meant that our entire lab had to shift our goals, because we were no longer able to be growing bacteria in the lab,” Dailey said. “Our goals became less focused on discovering particular interactions and more focused on thinking about how our lab might run better in the future and how we could use technology to help us.”
Oliver Stockert ’21, another biochemistry researcher in the Berry Lab, is no longer able to continue his research project: studying a specific protein, ProQ, and its interactions with RNA binding partners in the physical lab. “The type of research I usually do is simply incompatible with remote learning,” Stockert said. “The transition to remote research was definitely challenging. Since all the projects I was working on involved me going into the lab and running experiments, I had to put everything on hold and look in a different direction.”
Over the summer, Stockert was able to shift his research goals and work remotely on a computational research project. Now, he is spending time writing his senior thesis. Still, he misses the in-person aspect of scientific research. “I miss being in the lab so much,” he said. “Even though research looks completely different right now, I’m so glad that I have been able to continue my work and take it in a new direction. More than anything, I am so grateful that my professor has been so supportive and has put so much effort into making remote research possible for our lab.”
Although Stockert’s own lab work could not be carried out remotely, some students continued with projects requiring hands-on lab research. According to Stockert, the Berry Lab has maintained a full-time lab technician, who has the ability to run experiments in the lab to help research progress during the COVID-19 interruption.
Sophie Maxfield ’21 also had to change research focuses when transitioning to remote learning.
Maxfield is conducting research for a biology thesis in Professor of Biological Sciences Craig Woodard’s lab. While most of Woodard’s research students examine hormones in fruit flies, Maxfield is studying a group of Ambystoma laterale-jeffersonianum salamanders, which consist of unisexuals — females without actual species and only one set of chromosomes — and bisexuals, males and females that have two sets of chromosomes.
“When sexual reproduction occurs between these two populations, their hybrid offspring can have between one and five sets of chromosomes, and these can all go on to be completely normal, healthy salamanders,” Maxfield explained. “The specific phenomenon that I’m studying has to do with the death of these hybrid embryos. Weirdly, a lot of these embryos die before the first cleavage [split] event. After the first cleavage event, however, all embryos have a much higher chance of survival and all survive at an equal rate regardless of how many sets of chromosomes they have.”
Similar to some other students, the campus closure forced Maxfield to adapt. “I had to shift the focus of my research entirely,” Maxfield said. Instead of conducting hands-on research in a lab, Maxfield is writing a literature review. “I’m … essentially compiling all of the past research that’s been done on the genetics of these salamanders in order to create a basis for researchers in the future to use when they study this,” Maxfield explained.
Despite the change, Maxfield is enjoying the process of writing a biology thesis, even remotely. “I would have preferred doing lab work, both because I enjoy that more and because I was hoping that my research would give me more experience working in the lab, but ultimately I’m getting a lot of practice reading scientific literature and engaging with a much wider breadth of research than I would have been if I was working in the lab,” Maxfield said. “In my thesis, I’ll be discussing how embryo development of Ambystoma complex salamanders might be affected by their genetic abnormalities, how their complicated genomes organize themselves, how they regulate gene products and how any environmental factors of the vernal pools and surrounding environment … might also influence their development.”
For Dailey, remote research required her to develop new skills like adaptability and resilience. “Being physically on my own, working on a new project on my own, taught me so much and forced me to learn to troubleshoot on my own more than I think a lab environment ever could have,” she said.
Dailey joins a growing number of STEM undergraduates with limited access to research in ideal conditions. “My work hasn’t been super focused on biochemistry all the time, which is disappointing because that is what I want to be working on,” Dailey said. “Instead, I am working more on developing Excel spreadsheets and using software — important components of scientific research, especially in this age, but not the same as growing bacteria.”
Dailey’s concerns extend beyond the world of undergraduate biochemistry. “I also worry a lot about the skills that I am missing out on learning,” she added. “If I continue research in this or a related field, I worry that I will be lacking in skills that most undergrads with research experience develop.”
Though frustrating, Dailey still found remote research rewarding.
“I am really so very grateful for the opportunity to be able to do remote research. I feel so lucky to be able to get any sort of research experience in this time and to continue to learn more about a field that I really enjoy,” Dailey said.
McIntyre was also grateful for the ability to continue research during the pandemic. “While I miss our lab on campus, I am glad that I have been able to continue research, as it is something I find fulfilling and am very interested in,” she said.
“Remote research has genuinely been going much better than I’d anticipated,” Maxfield said. “In general, I'm extremely passionate about genetics and about research in general, so I’m still happy that I have the opportunity to do remote research even if it is different than I’d anticipated.”
As of Dec. 3, the College has tentatively released a decision to faculty researchers which would allow residential students to conduct research in person. Many students are cautiously optimistic about their ability to return to campus research.
“I would prefer to be working in my little windowless lab with more powerful computers, more monitors and more in-person communication and teamwork,” Hands said. “Modern-day approximations of lab work — and I mean literally being in a lab together — are just approximations.”