Community Flood Risk Assessment from Rising/Surging Seas Project
Kevin Kupietz, Elizabeth City State University
Globally 634 million people, 10% of the world's population, live in coastal areas less than 10 meters above sea level. According to 2010 census data, 123 million people, 39% of the United States population, live in coastal counties with an estimated increase to this number by 8% in the 2020 census. As natural disasters have been seen to increase in frequency and severity in the past five years coupled with expected sea rises from climate change it is important that anyone involved with the safety and resiliency planning of their organization/community have an understanding of how to scientifically assess risk from flooding in order to mitigate and recover from the effects. This project allows students the ability to develop skills to utilize computer modeling systems and to apply the data to real world communities in examining risk to structures as well as different groups in the community.

Design2Data
Ashley Vater, University of California-Davis
The D2D program is centered around an undergraduate-friendly protocol workflow that follows the design-build-test-learn engineering framework. This protocol has served as the scaffold for a successful undergraduate training program and has been further developed into courses that range from a 10-week freshman seminar to a year-long, upper-division molecular biology course. The overarching research goal of this CURE probes the current predictive limitations of protein-modeling software by functionally characterizing single amino acid mutants in a robust model system. The most interesting outcomes of this project are dependent on large datasets, and, as such, the project is optimal for multi-institutional collaborations.

Random gene mutagenesis for gene identification linked to prodigiosin production in Serratia marcescens
Verena Carvalho, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
This lab course is designed to provide course-based undergraduate research experiences. You will learn how to prepare, execute, and interpret your own experiments. While all of you will conduct the same techniques in the course, each of you will create their own sets of mutant strains and study different features of your bacterium. We will study Serratia marcescens, an opportunistic, nosocomial pathogen, and is particularly linked to catheter-associated bacteremia, urinary tract infections, and wound infections. It is responsible for 1.4% of hospital-acquired infection cases in the United States. These bacteria are commonly found in the respiratory and urinary tracts of hospitalized adults, and in the gastrointestinal systems of children. Many strains of S. marcescens have a bright red colony color (a tripyrrole pigment called prodigiosin), while pigment production is often temperature-dependent. Prodigiosin is a secondary metabolite, and its expression is thought to be related to phosphate limitation. It was also identified as a natural bioactive substance with high potential for antibiotic and anti-cancer applications. It currently receives renewed attention for its wide range of potential applications, including activities as antimalarial, antifungal, immunosuppressant, and antibiotic agents. It is also prominently known for its capacity to trigger apoptosis of malignant cancer cells, and high activity against stationary phase Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease, has been demonstrated. Given its diverse effects, the exact mechanisms are currently not elucidated, and may be highly complex, including phosphatase inhibition, copper mediated cleavage of double stranded DNA, or disrupting the pH gradient through transmembrane transport of H+ and Cl- ions. Clearly, prodigiosin is a highly promising drug candidate, and is currently in preclinical phase study for pancreatic cancer treatment. In this course, we will use the transposon Tn5 to generate random mutations in the chromosome of Serratia marcescens. The transposon will be provided by a plasmid hosted in a donor E. coli strain, and transferred into your test bacterium via conjugation. We will then first select for successfully transposed mutants by testing for antibiotic resistance, and screen for your mutants that are altered in their pigment production. To identify the gene where the mutation has happened, we will remove the chromosomal DNA from the mutant strains, perform restriction enzyme digest, and generate self-circulating DNA. These plasmids are transformed into an E. coli strain that can replicate the fragment of genomic DNA that contains the transposon, and we can sequence the insertion site with the transposon DNA as anchor. In summary, in this course you will gain hands-on experience with modern genetic and biotechnological techniques, you will gain insights into bioinformatics and into working with public databases, which are all essential skills in modern microbiological research.

Water in Gen Chem
Ruthanne Paradise, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

PHYS 102 Modern Physics with CURE/PBL
Pei-Chun Ho, California State University-Fresno
A component of course-based research experience (CURE)/ Project-Based Learning is implemented in this course. Students (two per group) will have to choose and design a project based on Modern Physics to perform research-style activities. Students will work on a project over a semester to engage in solving a real-world problem or answering a complex question. As a result, students can develop deep content knowledge as well as critical thinking, creativity, and communication skills in the context of doing an authentic, meaningful project. Examples of proposed projects can be thermal radiation related, such as solar cell, dye-sensitized-solar cell, heat-load analysis, and thermal-imaging analysis. In the end of semester, each group need to make a poster to showcase the results. The outcome of CURE is to prepare students for academic, personal, and career success and readies them for the challenge of our environment on Earth and global competition.

BIOL 189T Fungal Biology
Alija Mujic, California State University-Fresno
The diversity, community structure, and functional diversity of fungi in the high Sierra is understudied and is largely unknown from the Sierra Nevada foothills. Through use of direct field sampling I will engage BIOL189T students in sampling efforts to elucidate the fungal biology of these understudied habitats. Students will sample fungal sporocarps (mushrooms) from existing field plots established by the National Environmental Observation Network (NEON) and use morphological identification techniques and DNA barcoding methods to identify the fungal diversity in these habitats. Future iterations of the course will likely focus upon selected fungal taxa identified in previous iterations of the course to investigate the phenology and ecological interactions of the fungal community in these habitats in NEON plots.

Science Education Research for Pre-Service Elementary School Teachers
Dermot Donnelly, California State University-Fresno
This CURE focuses on supporting pre-service elementary school teachers to investigate predictors of peers' intentions to teach science in their future practice.

Designing Authentic Undergraduate Experiences in Research (DAUER)
Joseph Ross, California State University-Fresno
In this research experience, students will learn about how inheritance of diverse genetic material from their parents can impact the health (fecundity) of offspring. Students will design experiments to mate pairs of populations from a diverse global collection of microscopic worms and measure and compare the fecundities of their hybrid offspring.

Applied Linear Statistical Models
Mario Banuelos, California State University-Fresno
In this CURE, students will use descriptive and inferential statistics through linear models on new data sets, either directly affecting the local or research community.

Using R to Build Powerful Predictive Models for Kaggle Competitions
Earvin Balderama, California State University-Fresno