Keysville Graduates Share Advice
Special thanks to GSSV Alumni Trevon Scott, Ebony Aruaz, Katie Stang, Lucy Doswell, Ben Currin, and Ethan Currin, who gave back by speaking with the Keysville students about their GSSV experience.
Samantha Schutt's Experience
While attending Longwood’s Summer Scholar program, I worked with Dr. Julian Dymacek, a computer science professor at Longwood University, alongside Dionna Charity and John Eddy, both seniors at Longwood. We generated a program called MAFR to identify nocturnal flight calls and track avian migratory patterns to establish the demand for conservation policies that can be put into place to protect avian wildlife. MAFR is an inexpensive tool that uses non-negative matrix factorization to generate patterns from the spectrograms of nocturnal flight calls. My daily work consisted of completing data entry and analysis on the spectrograms. I am grateful for the research experience I have gained from the Summer Scholars program.
Victoria Daniel's Experience
I was paired with Dr. Sujan Henkanaththegedara on a biology project evaluating the diversity and distribution of freshwater crayfish in the middle Appomattox River Basin. My team found two crayfish species: the White River crayfish and the Piedmont crayfish, from 12 surveyed streams in Prince Edward and Amelia Counties. Although we only found two crayfish species, they were both first-time records for Amelia County, and the Piedmont crayfish represents a species new to science. During the program, I was also able to participate in science labs daily with different Longwood Professors and learn about the other research projects at the University. At the end of the seven weeks, we wrote a research paper on our findings and presented our posters at a research symposium at Longwood University. It was a wonderful learning experience, and I am grateful for the opportunity to participate.
Dissection Fun
As part of the introductory study on the taxonomy and phylogeny of living things, senior Biology students are getting an up close and personal view of select representative species from various phylums of animals ( pigs, sharks, starfish, frogs, etc). Dissections over the next few weeks during these comparative anatomy labs will help develop an appreciation for the unity and diversity of life.
Re-brand GSSV
During the month of September, students are challenged to use their artistic talents to create a new GSSV logo. The first week of October, all students will be able to vote on the new logo and we will use that on our letterhead, apparel, and other items that will be branded.
The file must be emailed to Mrs. Swain and be a .jpg file. We are super excited to see what our students create.
