• Celebration of Scholars 2020

  • Atmospheric Gas Loss in Hot Jupiters Under Variable Stellar Irradiation
  • Automated Repair of Buffer Overflow
  • Biogeochemical Cycling of Nutrient Elements in Stormwater Retention Ponds
  • Bioinformatic Investigation of Nuclear Transport
  • Buried Alive: Ecology of the Infaunal Sponge Oceanapia
  • Caloric Load Preferentially Influences Epithelial Differentiation in the Murine Uterus to Drive Endometrial Hyperplasia
  • A Compilation of Systems That Are Both Novae and Dwarf Novae
  • Computer Modeling of Nucleophilic Substitution and Beta Elimination Reactions
  • Cubed Sphere: Simulating Tilted Black Hole Accretion Disk and Their Effects on Astrophysical Jets
  • Data Visualization: From Covid-19 to Back on the Bricks
  • Designing a Mobile Flood Warning Application for the Charleston, SC Region
  • Developing a Mobile Application for Flood Warning in the Charleston, SC Region
  • Discovering Authorship of Flawed Code Snippets
  • Dynamic Network Activation of Hypothalamic Neurons in REM Sleep
  • Effect of Storage Temperature and Time on Urine Electrolyte Assessment
  • Effects of Changeover-Requirement Location on Between-Sequence Variation in Pigeons
  • The Effects of Estradiol Treatment on Synaptic Reorganization and Plasticity Around Motoneurons After Traumatic Peripheral Nerve Injury in Mice.
  • Effects of Steroid Hormones on Voluntary Physical Activity Levels
  • Encountering Overdose: An Analysis of College Students' Overdose Experiences
  • Evolution of Pelvis Musculoskeletal Anatomy in Lizards
  • Examining the Back To Bricks Reopening Plan on Various Demographics Within Charleston
  • Expanding LGBTQ+ Responsiveness at CofC Student Health Services
  • Expression-building in Squid 3
  • Growing Up Salty: The Effects of Transient Salinity on Tadpole Growth, Behavior, and Development
  • HailPoint, Broadcasting, and Social Media
  • A Hubble Space Telescope Direct Imaging Investigation of Extrasolar Planets
  • Inter-comparison of Rainfall Measurements from 1- and 2-Dimensional Video Disdrometers
  • Investigating Nanocolloids Using Shadowgraphy
  • Investigating the Effect of Episodic Stellar Activity on Planetary Evolution
  • Investigating Truncated Disk Simulations for Signs of Quasi Periodic Oscillations
  • Lower Extremity Jump-Landing Biomechanics After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction with Quadriceps Tendon Versus Patellar Tendon Autografts
  • Mapping Water in the Outer Asteroid Belt - Origins of Life
  • Mars Map Maker: User Empowerment in Meta Data and Data Submission
  • MARS: Middleware for Assisting the Registration of Samples
  • Patterns Observed on Mussel Bed Formation
  • Preliminary Analysis of Bulk Rain Variables Acquired from Laser Precipitation Monitors Mounted at Different Heights on a Vertical Tower
  • Progress Toward Anti-microbial Polymers: Adventures in Small Molecule Synthesis and Polymer Synthesis
  • Properly Resolving the Effective Measurement Area in a High-Fidelity Rain Measurement Device
  • A Religious History of the College of Charleston
  • Simulations of Light Transmission Through a Virtual Cloud
  • Strongly Magnetized Disks & Thermal Stability
  • Subdividing Rain Drop Arrivals into Steady Intervals
  • Synthesis and Spectral Characterization of 6-membered Silanes
  • Teaching Data Science Skills with a Focus on Visualization
  • Thermochemistry of Novel Polymers
  • A Tomographic Scan of the Accretion Disk Around a Supermassive Black Hole
  • Topsoil: An Open-Source Visualization Engine for Geochronological Data
  • Tropical Cyclone Climatology for Columbia and Greenville SC
  • Two-scale Factor Universality of O2: Experiments Under Density Gradients
  • Uncertainty of Heterogeneous Freezing Rate of Water on Muscovite Mica
  • The Use and Abuse of Philosophy in History: James Warley Miles and the Dangers of Racist Dehistoricization
  • Using Sentinel-2 MSI Data to Monitor the Physical Environment of Coral Reefs in the U.S. Virgin Islands
  • Virtual Assistant for Pair Programming (VAPP)
  • Women with HIV's Perception of Coercion During Contraceptive and Infant Feeding Counseling

Student: Mylene Gonzales

Major: Marine Biology

Mentor: Dr. Chris Freeman

Department: Biology

Buried Alive: Ecology of the Infaunal Sponge Oceanapia

Most sponges (Porifera) live attached to exposed surfaces on coral reefs or within crevices, but almost all of the biomass of sponges in the genus Oceanapia is under the sediment, with only tube-like fistules extending out of the sediment and into the surrounding environment. Preliminary experiments using fluorescein dye to visualize water flow showed that water enters the sponge through these fistules, travels through hollow tubes to the main body (ball) of the sponge, and is released after traveling through long excurrent tubes. Initial observations of Oceanapia spp. in Bocas del Toro, Panama also suggested the presence of cyanobacterial symbionts in the exposed fistules; to better understand the ecology of Oceanapia, we measured the abundance of cyanobacterial symbionts within different parts of this sponge (fistule, ball, and excurrent canal) by measuring the chlorophyll a concentration in each of these regions. We discovered that chlorophyll a values were high in the fistule, but about 9x and 29x lower in the excurrent canals and underground ball, respectively. These data support the presence of cyanobacterial symbionts in the exposed fistules and an absence of these symbionts in other regions of Oceanapia. Furthermore, to determine the role of these symbionts in carbon and nitrogen metabolism, we incubated Oceanapia sponges in seawater spiked with inorganic compounds enriched in 13C and 15N (NaH13CO3 and Na15NO3) and measured the 13C and 15N values of tissue from different regions of the sponge. These data suggest that Oceanapia engages in a unique and currently unexplored interaction with photosynthetic symbionts.