Student-faculty collaborations at Southwestern University are about to reach new heights. The Southwestern Undergraduate Research with Faculty (SURF) program is set to usher in a new wave of research and creative work beginning this May. A combination of the previous Summer Collaborative Opportunities and Experiences (SCOPE) and Faculty-Student Projects (FSP) programs, SURF allows students the opportunity to partner with faculty from across disciplines to engage in scholarly and creative inquiry.

SURF is designed to attract and support faculty and students from all academic areas and backgrounds, combining the flexibility and diversity of projects previously found in the FSP program with the more equitable student matching procedure and cohort elements from SCOPE. Guiding principles of the SURF program include constant, ongoing mentored interaction between faculty and students as well as real collaboration and shared ownership of the project. The program also endeavors to bring the whole SU research community together for shared experiences, both professional and social.

“SCOPE and FSP were two of our strongest, most successful programs at Southwestern and they have a wonderful history,” Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History Jessica S. Hower said. “SURF merges them into a single program that is even more vibrant, more inclusive, and more distinctive – manifesting everything that Southwestern, as a small liberal arts college made up of brilliant interdisciplinary teacher-scholars, incredibly talented students, and a publicly-engaged campus community can and does do. This summer’s slate of projects proves that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and we could not be more excited to see them set sail.”

Applications are now open for students interested in embarking upon a SURF project. Participants will receive a stipend of up to $3,000, as well as housing for most on-campus projects. Weekly events allow SURF students to become members of a tight-knit research community while fostering personal and professional development. To apply, students can visit southwestern.edu/undergraduate-research/surf. The deadline is February 7, 2025.

“Students should apply to SURF to expand their academic horizons,” Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean said. “Participation in SURF will provide students with a new or enhanced set of skills that will travel with them anywhere they go after leaving Southwestern. They will be challenged, but the experience of meeting and overcoming these challenges is what makes the experience so meaningful. I talk to my students applying for jobs and graduate schools about the need to distinguish themselves from all of the other applicants – an undergraduate research experience does just that.”

McLean is leading a SURF project this summer titled “Exploring Hand Force Variability in Front Crawl Swimming Across Different Speeds: A Biomechanical Analysis,” in which his team aims to investigate the relationship between hand force and swimming speed.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones and Assistant Professor of Geographic Information Sciences Stephanie Insalaco will be teaming up with two students for a cross-disciplinary SURF project rooted in both the humanities and social sciences. Their research, “Visualizing at-home childbirths in postrevolutionary Mexico City: The midwives from the Escuela Libre de Obstetricia y Enfermería (ELOE), 1920s and 30s” blends history with environmental science as the two teams aim to make birthing practices visible via GIS.

Hernández Berrones and his student researcher will travel to Mexico City to engage in archival research that will ultimately contribute to an interactive digital map that will display the distribution and activities of midwives who graduated from the Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing in the early 20th century.

“The semester is a busy time for students and faculty,” Hernández Berrones said. “The summer brings spaces for them to focus and explore. Every student has talents that they have yet to discover and they do so by daring to try new things. While history courses give students opportunities to engage in short-term, low-scale research projects, students are usually too busy to explore their interests and dig deeper in these projects. The structure and space provided by SURF allow students with developing talents to work closely with a faculty member on a project of their interest. I chose to participate in a SURF project because I would like to offer students the opportunity to develop their talents and skills in a digital historical project that will introduce them to the world of Mexican midwifery in the early twentieth century while engaging with GIS and innovative mapping technologies.”

Hernández Berrones and Insalaco’s project was one of 10 SURF projects funded by a grant that Southwestern received through the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative. Southwestern, one of just 10 liberal arts colleges in the nation to be selected to participate in the initiative, received $1,287,000 to support teaching, research, and community partnerships under the theme of “Deepening the Heart of Texas: Public-Engaged Humanities for Social Justice.” Already, only a year in, the grant is proving remarkably inspirational and successful, especially in generating new faculty-student projects. Led by an expansive team of faculty and staff, including Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Theatre Sergio Costola, Director of Public Engagement Manda Wittebort, and Hower, the Mellon award has opened up new possibilities across all areas of the university and stretched from the Southwestern campus into the local community and beyond.

“I am very grateful to have Mellon funding for this research, as it allows me the chance to highlight the publicly engaged humanities in my project,” Insalaco said. “This additional funding has let both Dr. Hernández Berrones and I explore different avenues of this research beyond the initial project scope and has helped to fund the creation of an interactive map of this project. After this map is up and running, which should be accomplished during SURF, we are hoping to display the map and its archives publicly to reach the broader community in Mexico City and to allow them to contribute their familial history to the map as well. The additional funding is also useful as it gives us the chance to bring community partners into the project, overall making this project much more diverse and expansive.”

McLean, Hernández Berrones, and Insalaco are just three of 22 total faculty members from across 12 disciplines hosting mentored research this summer. A year ago, the SCOPE program garnered four projects while FSP added another 11.

“Now that we’ve seen the projects that will be running this summer, I am excited at the breadth of coverage evident across the university,” Chair of the Awards & Honors Committee and Associate Professor of Psychology Carin Perilloux said. “We have projects that vary in content, frameworks, analysis, and form. I love thinking about the Paideia possibilities that might emerge from students talking to one another about their projects and thinking about connections and questions that might link them in new and interesting ways.”

Under the expanded SURF format, nearly 50 students will have an opportunity to conduct research and creative works ranging from sharing information about Southwestern’s collection of German science fiction novellas with Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth and decoding ethnic bias in artificial intelligence with Assistant Professor of Business Raji Kunapuli to examining the rise and fall of Black social, political, and economic empowerment in post-Civil War Texas with Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin and studying the effects of vaporized nicotine exposure in female rats with Professor of Psychology Fay Guarraci.

Overall, SURF projects are available in biology, communication studies, economics and business, environmental studies, German, history, kinesiology, mathematics and computer science, physics, political science, psychology, and sociology and anthropology.

“The diversity and variety, depth and breadth of this summer’s projects is truly remarkable,” Hower said. “We have more from the humanities and humanistic social sciences than ever before, and more that look outwards from our own University into different places and communities, local and global, than ever before. They are working in reciprocal, transformational partnerships to realize both the implications and applications of academic and creative work inside and outside of SU.”

Students who participate in SURF have two opportunities to present their work, first at the High-Impact Experiences Celebration in the fall, then again at the Research and Creative Works Symposium in the spring. SURF students and faculty are encouraged to also present their work at academic conferences, with support from Southwestern’s Undergraduate Travel Award (UTA).

“I work to take my research students to conferences to present their research, often at national conferences,” McLean said. “With support from the University, my students have been able to travel to these conferences and see an entirely new side of our field. We also work to publish our results. While this often takes longer to achieve, my goal is to make the students co-authors on a research journal paper. Most importantly, we have fun working on our projects. The students get to know me on a different level than they see in the classroom.”

More information about the SURF program can be found at southwestern.edu/undergraduate-research/surf.