Senior thesis presentations

The Aquatic Research Lab presented two senior thesis talks today:

Jehmia Williams- “Determining Spatial and Temporal Water Quality Changes in the Halifax River Lagoon”.

Jehmia’s research required managing a 10,000 row data set, learning about Python coding to remove unwanted data, and running/interpreting Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Jehmia did excellent in follow up questions today on data normalization and mitigating nutrient pollution to the central HRL.

Alyssa Stubbs (coauthor Ja’Kaila Jefferson)- “Benthic and Pelagic Copepod Feeding Preferences of Dwarf Seahorses, Hippocampus zosterae” 

Alyssa and Ja’Kaila have been maintaining live algal and copepod cultures in the lab to support this research, a very challenging task! Alyssa hand picked individual live copepods under the microscope for her feeding trials, with a single trial taking four hours to complete. Her data analysis required coding the maximum likelihood equation in excel, running iterations to determine her proportion values, and running a chi-squared analysis to compare the feeding preferences between prey types. Alyssa confidently answered follow up questions on her statistical analysis and methodology.

It was a proud day to see a years worth of literature reviews, experimental design and research culminating in two outstanding senior presentations! These quantitative studies highlight the strong data science talents of a Bethune-Cookman students from the College of Science, Engineering and Mathematics, preparing our students for competitive 21st century careers!