Thank you again for your gift to the ISRCA Impact project last year.  Your donation helped us create more opportunities for student research and support more student produced works on campus.  We could not thank you enough!

We wanted to let you know that we are opening an Impact project again this year to provide financial resources for our new group of ISRCA scholars.  By making a gift today, you will be supporting their research stipends, travel, and the cost of materials for their work. 

To learn more about our student scholars and to make a gift, visit impact.nku.edu/ISRCA2.

Thank you again,

Dr. Shauna Reilly, Director

Thank you for your support on this campaign, your donations will make a difference in several students’ lives.  This summer ISRCA was able to fund four students for $1000 each, in part because of your donations.  Two of these students are highlighted below.

Neha Srivatsa is a senior with a double major in Psychology and Media Informatics. She will investigate the role of praise (ability and effort) and how it impacts students and their fear of failure.  She will conduct an experiment to determine if praise can overcome students’ feeling of inadequacy or helplessness that often leads to students dropping out of school. In a controlled experiment, these two types of praise will be given to subjects to determine if these can help them to overcome the challenges of the experiment.  Neha just finished her Honors in Psychology two semester capstone where she conducted phase 1 of this research.  Her plan is to use the result of this experiment (combined with some of her earlier research from her capstone with Dr. Kalif Vaughn) to prepare a manuscript for the international journal of Teaching and Teacher Education.

Dakota Langhals is a junior with double majors in economics and math. He will spend 100 hours looking at the impact of anti-discrimination legislation and its impact on housing outcomes and interest rates this summer.  In this research, Dakota will investigate racial discrimination policies, anti-predatory laws and mortgage prices.  Dakota’s plan is to create a manuscript from this summer research that will be publishable with his faculty mentor.  Dakota’s long-term plan is to build research for two goals – his economics senior seminar project and his applications for graduate school.  In the short term, this manuscript will also be presented at the Kentucky Economics Association conference in October.

These are both ambitious projects for the summer and we are excited to be able to provide funding for these students. Your donations made these projects and funding possible.  We cannot say thank you enough for your donations to the Institute for Student Research and Creative Activity to support our students at Northern Kentucky University.

We're 15% to goal!  We are so thankful for the support from our faculty, students, alumni, and friends.  Your donations will impact the education of students like Jennifer Korth. 

Jennifer Korth participated in undergraduate research throughout her career at NKU. She graduated in 2016 with a political science major and honors minor.  Her research encompassed three areas: gender stereotypes in the media, the perceptions of women in the military, and public opinion of different torture methods.  These projects were supported by NKU through research funding and travel stipends, which allowed her to conduct surveys and interviews, and present the results at political science conferences.

At the Southwest Political Science Conference in March 2016, Jennifer (who received travel funding from NKU to attend) was recruited and later admitted into the prestigious Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Jennifer also received a competitive assistantship for her studies.  Her success in this program is due, in part, to the experiences and skills she gained during her undergraduate research. Below is a brief video from Jennifer talking about the benefits undergraduate research and the impact it had on her career.

We have had an excellent start to our campaign, thank you to our donors!  But we still need your support – please share this message with others who might be interested in supporting student research and creative activity at NKU and direct them to this link: impact.nku.edu/ISRCA

We are 14% of the way to our goal!  Thank you for your support! We wanted to share an experience of one of our students to show the impact that your donations will have on our students' lives.

Cassie Volker grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio taking frequent trips to the nearby zoo, which fostered her love of animals. Cassie came to NKU to major in biology.  Initially a pre-pharmacy student she soon realized that was not a fit for her future. Eventually, Cassie discovered that her real passion was understanding animal behavior. So, she switched to the ecology/evolution/organismal biology concentration.

Cassie wasn’t sure what kind of job she wanted after college, even though she was interested in majoring in biology. Some of her friends suggested she get involved in research to see if there was a way to spark her interest in a future career.  She saw a job posting for an animal behavior position with one of her professors, Dr. Lindsey Walters. Cassie went to work for her, observing wild birds in the field, their nest boxes, and fell in love with the work. Cassie worked with Dr. Walters for three years before graduating.

After graduating from NKU, Cassie moved to South Florida to work on the Wild Dolphin Project. WDP is the world’s longest running underwater study of dolphins in the world. Since 1985, the team spends months out at sea every summer, living on boat, and studying two species of dolphins that live on the shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas, Atlantic spotted dolphins and Atlantic bottlenose dolphins. Researchers have made many discoveries over the year regarding aspects of social structure, paternity, habitat use, behavior, communication and movement patterns.

Cassie’s successful career in this field was motivated and made possible by her work with Dr. Walters at NKU.  Thank you for joining us in making more opportunities like Cassie’s possible!