Category: Faculty

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Engaged Learning Faculty Funding Undergraduate Research

The Publishing JoURney

Every year, SMU Libraries and the Office of Engaged Learning publish the SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research (JoUR). The JoUR is a peer and faculty-reviewed journal that showcases SMU students’ exceptional research accomplishments.

Roles

The JoUR publishing process is not simple and requires an all-hands-on-deck approach. To successfully put it together, team members are each assigned a unique role. As of 2021, the team is composed of seven editors in total. Jessie Henderson, the senior editor, onboards team members and ensures the editors comprehend the publishing process. Hannah Webb, the editor-in-chief, oversees the entire production of digital and print volumes, and the general paper and peer-revision process. The editors are tasked with the responsibility of working with student authors, faculty mentors, and the reviewers, as well as editing written work and suggesting improvements. They collaborate with SMU administration to produce an annual volume of successful undergraduate research.

Faculty also plays an important role in the JoUR publishing process. Dr. Adam Neal serves as the Assistant Director for Research Programs in the Office of Engaged Learning. Dr. Neal’s responsibilities in the publishing process include managing the editors and helping the team identify eligible peer and faculty reviewers that match the field of the paper topic. Director of SMU’s Office of Engaged Learning, Jennifer Ebinger, encourages entrepreneurship and equips the team with the tools appropriate to find funding. Dr. David Son serves as both a faculty advisor and chemistry professor at SMU. His experience in academia and the publication process enables him to help the team maintain the quality of the journal.

Road to Publication

To ensure a smooth publication process, the JoUR team uses the app, Trello, to manage tasks and establish an efficient workflow. With a defined publication system, the team can maintain a rhythm and rely on the journal being released around a similar time every year.

Students can submit their papers via email or the SMU scholar website. Once the JoUR’s editorial board receives the papers, they place them through a ‘pre-review’ process in which the editors check the quality of the papers to ensure they are in appropriate format and condition for peer and faculty review. Some authors may be asked to make corrections before they can proceed in the process.

The papers are then assigned anonymous peer and faculty reviewers. Reviewers must be in the same field as that of the paper. If the team is unable to find a reviewer in a specific field, they either seek members with similar interests or branch out to other institutions. Reviewers receive about a month and a half to evaluate organization, readability, originality, presentation, and grammar. Throughout this preliminary certification, faculty evaluates whether the results of the research make sense given the analyses.

Once reviewers deem the paper worthy of publication, it is then put through the first stage of edits; authors will implement any necessary changes and corrections to their papers before entering copy-edits.

During copy-edits, JoUR editors search for readability and any remaining grammatical errors. Once the authors implement the copy-edits, the JoUR editors format and prepare the papers for publication. Finally, a vendor will then print the papers and bind them together.

According to Dr. Adam Neal, Volume 7, Issue 1 will be ready in January and Issue II in April. Editor-in-chief, Hannah Webb, states that both issues will be printed by late April or early May. SMU Libraries posts a digital version of the journal every year. All papers can be found here. Readers can also view how many times a paper has been downloaded. Samiah Woods’ paper on ketamine’s role in spirituality served to be a huge success with nearly 900 downloads since January 2021. All papers come with a unique DOI link which can, and certainly should be, included in a resume.

Challenges

JoUR’s biggest challenge is funding. As a small, student-led organization, they have learned to be financially self-sufficient. Because they are not an officially chartered student organization, they are not eligible for funding by SMU’s Student Senate.

High-quality journals cost thousands of dollars, but the team confidently believes it to be a worthy investment for students, faculty, and the institution as SMU continues its efforts to become a nationally competitive research university.

For the past few years, the Journal of Undergraduate Research has been supported by SMU Libraries, the Office of Engaged Learning, Student Senate, and the Giving Day donors. Using a temporary charter, the JoUR editorial board is grateful to have been provided funding from Student Senate, but it isn’t enough. Insufficient funding is a continuous battle for the team every year. They hope to find a more permanent solution to ensure sufficient funding every year. The JoUR editorial team will continue pursuing funding through as many ventures as possible.

Evolution

 The JoUR continues to grow every year. As submissions, reviews, and funding demands increase, the editorial team will need to develop new strategies to keep up. Having gone from five editors in 2020 to seven in 2021, their number of editors is on the rise, which should help with managing the JoUR’s growth. The team wishes to continue expanding and spreading awareness so that they receive more paper submissions, and more helping hands.

Submit your work and let your talents be shared!

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Engaged Learning Faculty Faculty Research

Interview With Dr. Jennifer L. Dworak (SMU Lyle School of Engineering)

Dr. Dworak

Dr. Jennifer L. Dworak is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at SMU. Her research in hardware security, manufacturing test, and digital circuit/system reliability is funded by the National Science Foundation and Semiconductor Research Corporation.

As an undergraduate student at Texas A&M, Dr. Dworak began composing research and enjoyed it so much that she decided to get her Master’s degree. She aspired to become a professor someday, so she stayed and also received her PhD. After completing her studies, she interviewed at different companies and universities, but ultimately accepted the job offer from Brown University. She taught there for a few years and enjoyed the experience, but missed Texas and her family. After two years of working at Brown, a friend informed her of an SMU job opening in the Computer Science and Engineering Department. She was interested in hardware security so the department seemed like a good fit. She applied and was hired for that position starting July 2010.

What inspired your current research?

Dr. Dworak once believed she’d become an astronomer, but she learned in high school that there were such few job openings in the field of astronomy, that one would have to wait for someone to die in order to get an interview.

Because her father was an engineer, she saw that as a direct route to helping people, so she decided to give it a chance. Initially, she was not sure what kind of engineering to pursue, but she was curious about computers. She took a digital logic class, which allowed her to make anything from her imagination out of ANDs, Ors, and inversions. During her undergraduate research, she worked with her professor on logic minimization and how to detect abnormalities during the manufacturing process. For example, if someone needs a pacemaker, the manufacturers need to make sure it works. Because she enjoyed the experience so much, she decided to commit to the field.

What research are you working on now?

When one tests a chip, they should not only test it immediately after it has been manufactured, but several times over. Dr. Dworak’s current essential question is, “How do I efficiently run tests that detect defects faster and more effectively—especially in the field?” Before, people spent a lot of time setting up a test by shifting logic values (either a 1 or a 0) into a logic circuit one at a time (similar to shifting marbles of two different colors into a tube). Once all the logic values for the test have been shifted in, the response of the circuit to those values is captured.  The response captured could then be compared to the expected response of a good circuit to see if the circuit passed or failed the test. The amount of time it took to set up the test was much longer than actually executing it. Therefore, Dr. Dworak’s research group decided to capture the circuit’s responses at the same time the logic values were shifted in (i.e. while putting marbles in). They were better able to detect several defects as they set up each test pattern. Thus,  fewer test patterns were needed to detect all of the modeled defects.

 What resources have you needed to further your work? Have those resources been accessible?

Some of Dr. Dworak’s work involves emulating circuits in an FPGA.  One of the companies they are working with is loaning supplies (such as an FPGA board).

Additionally, for the test project using simulation, there are several computers (named Genuse) at SMU that students use to work with Mentor Tessent software, which runs on Linux. Students could use any computer, log into the Genuse machine, and run it from there.

What is a challenge you had to overcome?

Debugging code has always been a struggle because finding the issue is not easy. One approach that makes it easier to find the source of the problem is to look for “impossible” outcomes.  For example, think about data referring to birthdays.  If one part of the data says that a person’s birthday is March 25, and another part of it says that the same individual’s birthday is May 13, clearly something went wrong.  In a digital circuit, every wire should be equal to either a logic 1 (high voltage) or a logic 0 (low voltage).  If the data states that it is at both a logic 1 and a logic 0, then there is an obvious error.  Debugging often entails finding the error that causes the contradiction.

 What is the long-term goal?

Long-term, Dr. Dworak hopes to create ways to detect as many defects as possible, in as little time as possible, using the least amount of power. She also wants to see  whether “stall” cycles that occur when a processor is not doing useful work can be re-purposed to perform tests. Similarly, Dr. Dworak and her team are still looking at how to use shift cycles that set up tests to detect even more defects.

 What is one piece of advice you would give someone who is interested in conducting research?

Always check your research/experiment because it is very easy to make a small mistake that will be very difficult to recover from. If you are interested in research, never think you are too young or do not know enough to partake. Think about classes you have taken and surf different websites to see what type of research each professor is conducting. It is okay to experiment to see if a project is for you. Go after knowledge and experience, do not be intimidated by research, and try out different topics!

Thank you, Dr. Dworak!

 

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Engaged Learning Faculty Research

Interview with Dr. Andrew Davies (Dedman School of Law)

 

by Aya Bellaoui ’24

Dr. Davies is the Director of Research at the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center in the Dedman School of Law. It was ultimately the creation of this Center that drew Dr. Davies to SMU. The university does not have a criminal justice department like other universities, but a gift from the Deason Foundation helped to establish the Center in 2016 to conduct innovative research and educational programs to address need for reforms in US criminal justice system. Davies’ background is in social science, not law, but his research prior to arriving at SMU was in regard to legal representation for accused people who cannot afford a lawyer.

Prior to working in Albany, Dr. Davies was a Research Associate at the New York State Defenders Association. He has received degrees from Oxford University (BA Modern history, 2002; MSc Criminology, 2004) and the University at Albany School of Criminal Justice (MA, 2006, PhD 2012). He has also received large national grants on access to counsel and quality legal representation from the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and the National Science Foundation.

The Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center had hired its Director, Pamela R. Metzger, who then hired Dr. Davies as Director of Research at the center. Professor Metzger states that “Dr. Davies is among the nation’s top criminal justice researchers. He is a pioneer in the growing field of multi-site, data-driven, and evidence-based indigent defense research. He brings with him the substantial experience of nearly a decade of work in the field.”

What previous research have you done and what have you found?

Much of Dr. Davies’ research is centered around indigent defense service. It is mostly regarding whether people have access to defense representation, and if the quality of that service is good or bad. To initiate the process of providing representation for supposed criminals, Dr. Davies wrote the article, “Gideon in the Desert,” which examined the difficulties facing defendants in rural Texas accessing indigent defense services. Access to counsel for criminal defendants is an ongoing challenge in rural localities, notwithstanding the mandates of Sixth Amendment jurisprudence. He and his co-author analyzed Texas as a 254-county study (every county in Texas organizes its own defense). They evaluated every county and identified the patterns. One finding revealed that in rural counties, significantly fewer defendants were using indigent defense resources; about 39% of those prosecuted for a misdemeanor in Texas urban counties received these resources, but only about 25% in rural counties would.

In addition to these statistics, they obtained data from various policy documents and 46 interviews with rural county officials. The biggest finding was that indigent defense resources are delivered in two ways: The assigned counsel system (a judge meets the defendant in court and picks the lawyer for them), and the more modern version which goes through the public defender’s office where all the lawyers perform criminal defense work for the poor. The latter is more professional and formal. In rural counties, it is significantly less likely for a defendant to get representation, but if a rural county has a public defenders office, indigent defendants were significantly more likely to be represented. That closed the gap with the urban counties. Rates of representation in rural counties could match that of urban counties if they incorporate public defenders offices.

What are your goals?

Dr. Davies and his research team will be reviewing the data and analyzing it to further flesh out and test their findings. Long term, they wish to prove the value of indigent defense representation in the state of Texas. The main concern is that there are financially unstable defendants being put through the judicial system without appropriate representation and are prosecuted unfairly. This can lead to serious, but avoidable, consequences. There may be people that plead guilty even though they are innocent simply because they are not represented. When you are charged for something and don’t have anyone to help you find evidence, you may give in to the deal/charge presented to you by law enforcement personnel. The number of people who agree to these deals, just so they can return home, is shockingly high. The alternative is an undetermined period spent in jail. This results in a criminal record which prevents one from being able to work at certain places and disqualifies you from various benefits.

Dr. Davies is hoping to make clear recommendations to Texas to support the creation of indigent defense resources across the state, particularly in rural areas where people are not receiving proper representation. As a large-scale approach, his team must figure out the financial angle—because if prisons hold fewer people, they have to make budget cuts which lead to worse living conditions in the prison, and even limit the necessities. Overall, the pitch is to improve defense services and guarantee more equitable justice.

What resources have you needed to further your work? Have those resources been accessible?

The team received a grant from the Texas Bar Foundation, which lasted one year and funded the collection of the data. They have only worked to collect all the data, but they have not yet analyzed it. That is this coming year’s objective.

Have you faced any challenges? What are you doing to overcome them?

Knowing how to approach this research was a challenge at first. They found it difficult to conceptualize what they’re looking at and how they were going to do it. Developing the pieces for that was also a demanding task. For example, they needed to know who they were going to interview, and what type of questions they needed to ask. The interviews ended up being a total of 400,000 words, which is difficult to get through. They struggled to summarize everything since interviews are unstructured. To boil it down, they used a software program called NVivo, which acts as color-varied highlighters on steroids. They were able to create a list of texts to highlight, which the software would then categorize. They successfully developed one single list and had all researchers categorize the text once again. They then used statistics to compare whether each research member is categorizing the data the same way.

Having a consistent system where multiple people are working on the data can be beneficial as the entire group could better come to an agreement and be on the same page. The struggle is getting a team with a massive load of unstructured information to come to a consensus interpretation of what the information means. Fortunately, Thematic Analysis assisted the team in consolidating the information. It is easy to conduct research so long as every team member performs it the same way.

Thank you, Dr. Davies!