Alizay Rizvi is a senior Biological Sciences major, and a URA Scholar.

Title of your research project: Characterizing the gene regulatory networks controlling planarian fission. 

Describe your project: Planarians are worms that can reproduce asexually by undergoing fission, a poorly-understood process that results into two separate pieces each regenerating a complete new worm. The overall goal of my project is to characterize the genes that control planarian fission behavior. The specific aims include the design of a protocol to obtain planarian worms that are about to fission and experimentally analyze their gene expression patterns with in situ hybridization assays. These results will allow me to characterize the genes controlling planarian fission and validate a mechanistic model of this size-dependent behavior.

Who is your mentor(s) for your project? My mentor for this project is Dr. Daniel Lobo.

How did you become interested in this project?

I was reading about the research being conducted in Dr.Lobos lab on the biological sciences building, and the work really stood out to me. I was fascinated by the phenomenon being studied and was interested in getting involved,

taking part in the research, and getting a deeper understanding of planarian regeneration. 

What has been the hardest part about your research/what was the most unexpected thing about being a researcher? My research has just begun, therefore, I have not hit any roadblocks yet. However, the hardest part about research in general is not getting the results you expected which forces you to come up with alternative explanations. 

What has been the most rewarding part? The most rewarding part has been the knowledge I have gained as a result of the literature review I have conducted as well as through wet lab experiments. 

How will you disseminate your research? I plan on disseminating my research through an URCAD presentation, professional conferences and potentially a journal paper. 

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research? My advice to anyone looking to get involved in research would be to look for something that interests you, & you would like to learn more about. There’s something out there for everyone, you just have to explore your options! 

What are your career goals? My long term career goal is to work as a pediatric neurologist. I plan on attending medical school & further specializing in order to achieve my career goals. 

Global Health Considering Environmental Factors BS

Honors College Class of 2021.  

Her article, "Evaluating and Improving upon Ecuador’s Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Policies in an Era of Increased Urgency", can be found here:

(Published in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

Author Spotlight! Aiman Raza from UMBC

Aiman Raza, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
August 14, 2020

The Omland Lab at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Aiman Raza is on the far left. Also pictured on far right, URA Scholar Jonathan Sikora.

As many academic institutions look towards an unprecedented fall semester, educators across the world are searching for agile ways to engage their students both virtually and in-person, and to help them build practical skills and experiences.

Birds of the World is working with several educators and institutions to help students produce revisions of species accounts. Revising an account can be a fantastic way to get students to apply practical skills like literature searches and scientific writing to something tangible; and to get them thinking, and publishing, like an ornithologist.

Aiman Raza is an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and has been working with ;Dr. Kevin Omland on the critically endangered Bahama Orioles (Icterus northropi). Recently, Aiman led a team of authors on revisions to the Bahama Oriole species account in Birds of the World, and in this blog post, she discusses her work and how she became involved in this project.

My name is Aiman Raza and I will be a junior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I am majoring in biological sciences with a minor in environmental science. I have been an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Kevin Omland’s lab for about a year now studying the critically endangered Bahama Oriole.

Aiman Raza is a biological sciences major at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Kevin Omland’s lab.

When I was a freshman, I attended the biology department open house and heard about some of the research undergraduates were involved in. The work that stood out to me the most was the Bahama Oriole Project which Dr. Omland runs along with Shelley Cant from the Bahamas National Trust. I was a little apprehensive about approaching a professor as a freshman, so I was excited to see that Dr. Omland was teaching the Ecology and Evolution course I was enrolled in for the spring. I made an effort to introduce myself to Dr. Omland and express my interest in his research. I became an undergraduate research assistant in the fall of 2019 and have worked on a couple of projects since then.

I have researched hurricane history in the Bahamas to see if past storms possibly had an impact on extirpating the Bahama Oriole population on Abaco island. I worked on writing the Wikipedia entry for the Hispaniolan Oriole and Bahama Oriole. I have recently finished revising the Bahama Oriole species account on Birds of the World. I applied to the Bahama Oriole Project for the summer of 2020, but that was unfortunately canceled. I am hoping to go next summer, and I am curious to study the song of this critically endangered oriole to analyze age-specific bird song to discover whether there is a difference in song rates between age classes. Currently, I am assisting Ph.D. student Michelle Moyer with her analysis of song rate differences in the local Orchard Oriole.

Being part of a research lab on campus has helped me grow both personally and academically. I am excited by the work we do and hope to do a research project involving fieldwork of my own. As a minority woman, I want to encourage diversity and inclusion in the sciences, especially ecology and wildlife conservation. I am currently the president of UMBC Greenpeace, an environmental activism organization focused on policy change. I am passionate about birds and wildlife and am pleased with having many opportunities to explore my interests at UMBC.

Katie Poteet is a Global Studies and Political Science major with an Arabic minor, who will graduate in May 2021. She is a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar, a member of the Honors College, and a URA Scholar.

Title of your research project:Building a Nation: How National Service Requirements Affect Patriotic Sentiment

Describe your project: This project will investigate whether countries with mandatory military or civil service requirements for young adults also have higher levels of patriotism throughout the country. The results will help understand whether these policies are effective in increasing patriotism throughout a country.

Who is your mentor(s) for your project?
My mentor for this project is Dr. Carolyn Forestiere, Chair of the Political Science Department. I chose to research this topic under the supervision of Dr. Forestiere because she has extensive knowledge of Western Europe, which is the region I will be studying, and because I enjoyed working with her as a research assistant as she rewrote her book on research methods in political science over the spring semester. Dr. Forestiere is so encouraging and enthusiastic about research!

How did you become interested in this project?
I first thought of this research project during the fall of 2019 while taking POLI 301: Research Methods in Political Science with Dr. Forestiere. The topic was outside the scope of the class because our research projects had to focus on the United States, so I saved the idea until there was an opportunity to pursue it further. I chose to focus on Western European countries (in addition to a select number of Central and Eastern European countries) after talking with Dr. Forestiere because there are a number of countries in the region that have some type of mandatory service policies or have recently done away with them.

What has been the hardest part about your research? What was the most unexpected thing about being a researcher?
I expect to encounter many confounding variables that may be hard to identify. Many factors can influence citizens’ levels of patriotism that have nothing to do with mandatory service such as a widespread shared identity or a well-liked leader of the country. It will be difficult to determine whether high levels of patriotism are caused in part because most of the population has engaged in mandatory service, but I plan to do this by comparing many different countries with varying degrees of national service requirements and analyzing the differences in overall levels of patriotism in those countries.

What has been the most rewarding part?
The most rewarding part will be contributing to the larger conversation around national service requirements in the public policy sphere. There has not been a lot of research on this topic because researchers have traditionally focused on how one country’s patriotism changes when the country implements or removes a mandatory service requirement, which does not happen very frequently. I am excited to see if my approach will yield new results and help policymakers foster patriotism and high spirits in their countries, or whether such requirements should be phased out of the conversation.

How will you disseminate your research?
I plan to present my research at URCAD and submit my final paper to undergraduate research journals like the Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Public and International Affairs. This project will serve as my honors thesis for the political science department.

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research?
Sign up for a research methods class in your major or a related one! Even if it is not required to graduate, it can strengthen important analysis and writing skills that will be helpful for your future. It will also walk you through the research process step-by-step so you can understand the basics before starting your own research.

What are your career goals?
I want to be a researcher at an international affairs or public policy think tank and conduct research on transitional justice. I am currently interning at the Brookings Institution researching the intersection of climate change and girls’ education and I really enjoy the process of investigating an issue, writing up the findings, and sharing it with an audience. I plan to get my Ph.D. in human rights one day and work at an organization like Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or even the United States Institute of Peace.

Photo: Katie at the United States Institute of Peace (one of her dream jobs).