The application window for UR-STEM 2026 is closed.
Check out the research projects below to see what students are working on this summer.
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Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Cells need to carefully control a molecule called AdoMet (sometimes called SAM). AdoMet is like a tiny chemical “donor” that cells use to add methyl groups to DNA, proteins, and other molecules. These methyl additions help control gene activity, repair damage, and keep the genome (the DNA) stable.
In yeast, two very similar genes—SAM1 and SAM2—make the enzyme that produces AdoMet. Because these genes are so similar, you might expect them to have the same effects in the cell. But our work shows they do not.
Even though Sam1 and Sam2 proteins look alike and sit in the same part of the cell (the cytoplasm), the cell uses them differently. We tested what happens when each gene is removed:
So, SAM1 and SAM2 affect genome stability in opposite ways, meaning they work through different mechanisms.
We conduct our studies in a yeast model system but this system matters beyond yeasts. Humans have related genes (MAT1A, MAT2A, MAT2B) that also control AdoMet production. In many cancers, AdoMet levels and MAT gene activity are abnormally high or low, depending on the cancer type. AdoMet is also being explored more and more as a treatment supplement, but scientists still don’t fully understand what happens inside cells when AdoMet is out of balance.
Because our yeast mutants create opposite AdoMet conditions (too much vs. too little), they form a powerful model system to learn:
Students joining this project could help answer questions like:
Students will learn techniques in genetics, molecular biology, and data analysis while working on a problem that connects basic biology to human disease.
Required Skills:
Faculty: Dr. Erin Strome, Biological Sciences
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: We use a mouse model to understand how genetic differences affect susceptibility to traffic-related air pollution and similar pollutants that are widespread in our food and environment. We are focused primarily on exposure during pregnancy and breast-feeding, because this is a critical time of early brain development. We use exercise as an intervention to mitigate the adverse effects of these pollutants. We are also looking at changes in brain-derived neurotrophic factor and the gut microbiome, because the microbial community in the gut can affect neurotransmitter levels and chemical signal that either protect the brain or lead to adverse neuro-inflammation.
Required Skills: Students should have a strong interest in biomedical research, neuroscience or environmental science and be able to work well as part of a research team.
Faculty: Dr. Chris Curran, Biological Sciences
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: In the Shifley lab, we use Xenopus frogs to study how cells in the early, vertebrate embryo organize and differentiate into the various organs of the adult body. We study embryonic development because when this process is disrupted, birth defects can occur, and it is important to know how to prevent or treat these syndromes. This project would be looking at the activity of a certain group of genes called FGF and Iroquois genes in embryos using several different molecular genetics techniques. We will manipulate developing embryos and then analyze and photograph their resulting phenotypes. The expected outcomes would be that you gather data on the role of the FGF signaling pathway and Iroquois genes during embryonic development.
Preferred Skills: Value a student who is responsible, hard-working, careful in their work, and committed to spending time learning new techniques in the lab.
Faculty: Dr. Emily Shifley, Biological Sciences
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Controlling mosquitoes is the best way to reduce mosquito-borne disease transmission. The Parker lab investigates factors that affect disease-transmitting mosquitoes with the goal of determining best practices to reduce their populations. This summer we will be continuing work to determine which mosquito species are found in the Northern Kentucky region and what factors affect their distribution. We will conduct ecological field studies examining the role of man-made containers as mosquito larval habitats and how insecticides impact mosquito behavior. We will also explore the lethality of the insecticide, Fipronil, on juvenile and adult mosquitoes. The majority of the work will take place at multiple field sites in the surrounding region and will occur from late May through August. Some work on weekends may be required.
Required Skills:
Preferred Skills:
Faculty: Dr. Allison Parker, Biological Sciences
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Callery (Bradford) pear is a small nonnative woody tree that is invasive in our area. It becomes established in open or disturbed areas that eventually become wooded. If invasive species remain in or invade the forest, they displace native species, which has deleterious ecological effects. Whether an invasive species persists in or invades the forest depends on shade tolerance. Shade-intolerant species need high light levels to survive, while shade-tolerant species can persist in the forest understory when they are shaded by a tree canopy. Callery pear’s shade tolerance is currently under investigation. Work by my lab last summer indicated it is shade-intolerant, but all work was conducted on trees growing in a high-light environment. No work was conducted on shaded leaves, so we don’t know how plastic pear’s response to shade is. Shade tolerance is determined from curves of photosynthesis rates against light levels. Photosynthesis can be calculated from chlorophyll fluorescence and light levels, measured by a chlorophyll fluorometer. Usually, this is done under controlled conditions on the same leaf, but we will be taking measurements in the field on multiple leaves. Stomatal conductance, which is a measure of stomatal opening, is measured with a porometer and is also important because it can limit photosynthetic rates.
The goal of this summer’s research is to develop light-photosynthesis curves for pear growing under shaded conditions and compare them to pear growing in the open. Stomatal conductance will be measured at the same time. In addition to the overall determination of shade tolerance by plants, we will see if there are shifts over the growing season. Work will be done in an undeveloped section of campus.
Required Skills:
Preferred Skills:
Faculty: Dr. Richard Boyce, Biological Sciences
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: The Williamson lab focuses on the interactions between the immune system and the brain. The prenatal environment can have big effects on offspring brain development. Our project is studying the anti-inflammatory effects of parasites (masking themselves from the immune system) and how mom's parasites might affect their offspring at several different developmental time points. We will focus on synaptogenesis – the growth of new connections between neurons in the brain – this summer, including working with preparing tissue and using a confocal microscope.
Required Skills:
Faculty: Dr. Lauren Williamson, Biological Sciences
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that has high misuse potential. Due to its potency (50-100 times more potent than morphine), fentanyl overdose occurs easily. In fact, overdose deaths have increased by approximately 29% since 2020, and fentanyl accounts for roughly 69% of overdose deaths. As such, developing treatment options for those with fentanyl use disorder is critical for preventing overdose deaths. One behavioral intervention that is used to treat substance use disorders is contingency management, in which individuals are given money or food vouchers for providing a drug-free urine sample. While effective, one major limitation is that individuals often resume substance use when contingency management is no longer utilized. Pharmacological treatments for opioid use disorder exist, including methadone or buprenorphine replacement therapy. Evidence suggests that combining pharmacological interventions with contingency management is an effective treatment for opioid use disorder.
The purpose of the present project is to assess the validity of an animal model of contingency management. In the resurgence model, animals are trained to self-administer fentanyl. After animals have learned to stick their nose in an aperture to earn intravenous fentanyl infusions, responding will no longer lead to fentanyl exposure. At this point, animals will be allowed to press a lever to earn a food pellet. Responses on the lever should increase quickly while responses in the aperture will decrease. This is analogous to contingency management as animals are receiving an alternative reinforcer. Eventually, animals will not earn fentanyl or food reinforcement for responding. Resurgence is the phenomenon in which a previously extinguished response returns (i.e., because animals no longer earn food, they return to the fentanyl-paired aperture).
Three different groups of rats will be tested. One group will be tested in the resurgence protocol as described above (contingency management only group). A second group will be tested in the resurgence protocol, but they will also be treated with buprenorphine before each test session (contingency management + pharmacotherapy group). A third group will be used as a control; these rats will continue to self-administer fentanyl as normal and will receive no treatment interventions.
By validating the resurgence model, this will allow for future experiments that aim to determine the neurobiological changes associated with dual contingency management and pharmacotherapy that lead to long-term abstinence.
Required: Comfort handling rats, performing cage changes, performing behavioral testing, and recording data.
Preferred: Comfort observing surgical procedures and assisting with post-surgical care.
Faculty: Dr. Justin Yates, Neuroscience (outside of Biological Sciences department)
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) cares for over 500,000 specimens in its Zoology Collection, consisting of 8 taxa representing both local and global biodiversity from the mid-1800s to present. Our specimens are used in research on taxonomy, species diversification, gene flow, parasite-host interactions, and climate change. The backbone of much of this research is the genetic material stored inside of each specimen and one of the largest hurdles faced by researchers is effective removal of high-quality DNA from specimens.
This research experience will be split into two sections. The first half of the experience will take place in CMC’s Zoology Collection, focusing on the myriad ways in which specimens can be processed and prepared for long-term storage in the collection. Students will explore historic and modern methods of specimen preparation for a variety of taxa and gain hands-on experience skinning, dissecting, and preserving specimens. Students will then take samples from their prepared specimens, as well as historic specimens in the collection. Students will spend the second half of the summer in CMC’s DNA Lab, learning how researchers extract, quantify, and qualify DNA from museum specimens. Students will sequence their DNA extractions and learn how to analyze their results to discover which methods of specimen preparation yield the highest quality of genetic material.
Required Skills: Students should possess a basic understanding of vertebrate anatomy, knowledge of the major organ systems, and be comfortable with handling and dissecting dead animals. Most of the animals entering CMC’s Zoology Collection are collected through salvage (such as picking up window-strike birds or road-kill mammals) and come with all the associated sights and smells of autolysis and very early-stage decomposition.
Students should also have a firm understanding of laboratory safety and knowledge of how to conduct a literature search. Instruction on museum storage techniques, dissection safety, and laboratory aseptic techniques will be provided. All appropriate PPE will be provided.
Personal transportation to and from CMC and related sites is required.
Contacts: Dr. Heather Farrington and Makayla Dean, Cincinnati Museum Center
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Endocrine disrupting compounds can be found in surface waters, where they can harm aquatic life. Sunlight and UV waste treatment can break them down, but the products themselves can be harmful. The Hare group is synthesizing the major products from the exposure of some estrogens to light and studying them using a variety of spectroscopic techniques to determine their properties. This information can be used by others to model their persistence in the environment, and the products themselves may also have pharmaceutical applications.
Required Skills: Completion of General Chemistry I is required.
Preferred Skills: Completion of Organic Chemistry I or II is preferred for the synthesis aspects.
Faculty: Dr. Patrick Hare, Chemistry & Biochemistry
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: 6PPD-quinone was recently identified as a highly toxic (to salmon) byproduct of a common polymer present in tire rubber. However, it may be able to be broken down by UV light. This project will study the breakdown of this molecule and its precursor using high resolution mass spectrometry and other analytical techniques.
Required Skills: Completion of General Chemistry I is required.
Preferred Skills: Some computer aptitude is preferred, but no programming background is required.
Faculty: Dr. Patrick Hare, Chemistry & Biochemistry
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Our lab uses biochemistry techniques to investigate enzymes from bacterial pathogens. The goal is to understand crucial enzymes that could later be a target for antibiotic drugs.
Required Skills:
Faculty: Dr. Catie Shelton, Chemistry & Biochemistry
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) cares for over 500,000 specimens in its Zoology Collection, consisting of 8 taxa representing both local and global biodiversity from the mid-1800s to present. Our specimens are used in research on taxonomy, species diversification, gene flow, parasite-host interactions, and climate change. The backbone of much of this research is the genetic material stored inside of each specimen and one of the largest hurdles faced by researchers is effective removal of high-quality DNA from specimens.
This research experience will be split into two sections. The first half of the experience will take place in CMC’s Zoology Collection, focusing on the myriad ways in which specimens can be processed and prepared for long-term storage in the collection. Students will explore historic and modern methods of specimen preparation for a variety of taxa and gain hands-on experience skinning, dissecting, and preserving specimens. Students will then take samples from their prepared specimens, as well as historic specimens in the collection. Students will spend the second half of the summer in CMC’s DNA Lab, learning how researchers extract, quantify, and qualify DNA from museum specimens. Students will sequence their DNA extractions and learn how to analyze their results to discover which methods of specimen preparation yield the highest quality of genetic material.
Required Skills: Students should possess a basic understanding of vertebrate anatomy, knowledge of the major organ systems, and be comfortable with handling and dissecting dead animals. Most of the animals entering CMC’s Zoology Collection are collected through salvage (such as picking up window-strike birds or road-kill mammals) and come with all the associated sights and smells of autolysis and very early-stage decomposition.
Students should also have a firm understanding of laboratory safety and knowledge of how to conduct a literature search. Instruction on museum storage techniques, dissection safety, and laboratory aseptic techniques will be provided. All appropriate PPE will be provided.
Personal transportation to and from CMC and related sites is required.
Contacts: Dr. Heather Farrington and Makayla Dean, Cincinnati Museum Center
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: The Sheriden Pit at Indian Trail Caverns near Carey, Wyandot County, Ohio is an excavated sinkhole site that has produced the most diverse assemblage of late Pleistocene (“Ice Age”) animals in Ohio. Thousands of bones, teeth, and bone fragments from accumulated sediments in the sinkhole/cave were collected by staff and volunteers of Cincinnati Museum Center in the 1990’s. These include over 75 identified species, some of which are extinct, such as the Flat-headed Peccary (Platygonus compressus), Short-faced Bear (Arctodus simus), Dire Wolf (Aenocyon dirus), Giant Beaver (Castoroides ohioensis), and the Elk-Moose (Cervalces scotti). Many more are of extant, generalist species such as the Raccoon (Procyon lotor), Striped Skunk (Mephitis mephitis), and Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes), while others are extralimital, having migrated north as the regional climate warmed with the close of the Pleistocene Epoch, such as Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) and Pine Marten (Martes americana).
Although the larger (megafaunal) animal bones have been processed and catalogued, many thousands of small bones and teeth in the collection are yet to be identified and placed into the Museum’s database. These small fossils, known colloquially as microvertebrates, range from rodents and insectivores, rabbits and squirrels, to bats, fish, turtles, snakes, and birds. Microvertebrates provide a unique window into the general climate and environmental conditions of a region by virtue of the generally small geographic ranges of the included species.
Student(s) will sort, identify, and organize microvertebrate remains from the sinkhole. Specimens will then be labelled, catalogued, and photographed. Using scientific references and methodologies, the student will investigate the faunal composition and regional paleoecology of Wyandot County, northern Ohio, during the latest (Wisconsinan) Pleistocene or “Ice Age.” Results will be produced in the form of a written report/research poster presentation.
Required Skills:
Contacts: Glenn Storrs and Cameron Schwalbach, Cincinnati Museum Center
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Students will be taught the basics of fossil preparation in the public-facing paleontology lab at Cincinnati Museum Center. Following training, students will assist the fossil preparation team with preparing a field jacket containing sauropod fossils from the Aaron Scott Site in Utah. Following preparation, students will use academic resources to compare the fossils they prepared to fossils collected from the northern Morrison Formation from Montana. This will not only introduce students to paleontological research techniques but also assist the vertebrate paleontology team in completing field jackets in backlog.
Students will learn technical skills related to fossil preparation, as well as fossil curation and research techniques. The research that is conducted on these fossils will be presented in poster format at CINSAM in August 2026. Additionally, students will spend a day outside the paleontology lab at Cincinnati Museum Center, sharing their experience with museum visitors.
Fossil Preparation and Curation Duties:
Skills Required:
Contacts: Katie Hunt and Glenn Storrs, Cincinnati Museum Center
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Online communication platforms are increasingly exploited for scams, social engineering, and coordinated disinformation, where malicious intent is often distributed across multiple conversational turns rather than isolated in a single message. Existing detection systems primarily rely on per-message classification, limiting their ability to capture evolving intent and contextual dependencies within conversations. This project proposes a context-aware, graph-based conversational risk analysis framework that models chat interactions as structured message graphs, where nodes represent sentences or key phrases and edges encode semantic, temporal, and behavioral relationships. By integrating transformer-based language models with graph neural networks, the system will assess both local linguistic cues and global conversational patterns to detect emerging threats such as phishing, financial fraud, and grooming behaviors. The framework will support dynamic risk scoring, early warning signals, and explainable threat indicators aligned with cybersecurity taxonomies such as MITRE ATT&CK. The proposed approach will be evaluated using real and synthetically generated multi-turn chat datasets and deployed as a modular pipeline suitable for messaging platforms and educational cybersecurity laboratories. This work aims to advance practical, explainable, and context-sensitive AI systems for conversational security monitoring and cyber defense training.
Required Skills: Python Programming
Faculty: Dr. Shahid Noor, School of Computing & Analytics
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Traditional academic transcripts provide limited insight into students’ ongoing learning activities, skill development, and co-curricular participation, and they lack mechanisms for secure, real-time verification by employers or external institutions. This project proposes a blockchain-based digital badging framework that issues verifiable micro-credentials representing student progress, performance milestones, participation, and demonstrated competencies across academic and experiential learning activities. Each badge will be cryptographically signed and stored on a decentralized ledger, enabling tamper-resistant verification while allowing students to maintain ownership and portability of their learning records. Smart contracts will automate badge issuance based on validated academic events such as assessment completion, project contributions, competition participation, and laboratory performance. The system will integrate with learning management systems and cybersecurity lab platforms to support fine-grained tracking of technical skills and engagement. Evaluation will examine student motivation, credential usability, employer trust, and system scalability. The proposed framework aims to enhance transparency, trust, and workforce alignment in digital education credentials while supporting secure, privacy-preserving student data management.
Required Skills: Python/Java Programming, Security Fundamental, Hashing
Faculty: Dr. Shahid Noor, School of Computing & Analytics
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: Virtual
Description: As cloud adoption continues to grow, organizations increasingly face challenges related to security, latency, and scalability. Traditional cloud security mechanisms often operate at centralized regions, which can expose applications to distributed attacks and introduce performance bottlenecks for globally distributed users. This research project investigates the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) edge services to enhance both security and performance for cloud-hosted applications. By leveraging edge-based capabilities such as content delivery networks (CDNs), web application firewalls (WAFs), rate limiting, and serverless edge compute, security controls can be enforced closer to end users while reducing latency and improving application responsiveness. This study proposes an edge-first security and performance architecture, evaluates its effectiveness against common threats, and measures performance improvements compared to traditional region-based deployments.
Required Skills: HTML and Python
Faculty: Dr. Wei Hao, School of Computing & Analytics
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: Hybrid
In-person weekly meetings with remote inter-week follow-ups. Students will perform assigned and expected weekly tasks remotely.
Description: Can we combine a "Math AI" and an "Essay AI" into one without expensive retraining? This project explores Model Merging, a hardware-efficient way to aggregate the capabilities of two different Llama-based engines. Students will use the open-source Mergekit tool to mathematically blend model weights. The goal is to move beyond just using AI to becoming "AI Architects," learning how to manipulate large-scale data structures to create a new, hybrid model. By the end of the summer, the student will have built and tested their own "Frankenmodel."
Skills:
Faculty: Dr. Rasib Khan, School of Computing & Analytics
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: Hybrid
Description: Cloud-based AI poses significant data exfiltration risks for sensitive industries. This project challenges students to build a Local-First Privacy Gateway that secures AI interactions on-premise. Students will develop a Python middleware pipeline that intercepts user prompts and applies Named Entity Recognition (NER) to sanitize Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in real-time. By deploying local models via Ollama and exploring Model Quantization (4-bit vs 16-bit), the students will analyze the engineering trade-offs between system performance and data security.
Skills:
Faculty: Dr. Rasib Khan, School of Computing & Analytics
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: Hybrid
Description: During World War II, Japanese naval attachés enciphered communications using a machine codenamed CORAL by the Allies. Little effort was devoted by the Allies to attacking CORAL until September 1943, when British codebreakers forwarded their analysis of the machine to the Americans. Then, based on the British ideas and the American success with the Imperial Japanese Navy’s cipher machine JADE, the two codebreaking organizations began an ultimately successful joint attack on CORAL. This project begins an exploration of the codebreaking techniques used in the Allied attack on CORAL by examining declassified documents from the US Navy’s codebreaking section OP-20-G and the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park. The goal of this exploration is to write a concise, modern explanation of the Allied attack on CORAL.
Required:
Faculty: Dr. Chris Christensen, Mathematics & Statistics
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Are you interested in applications of mathematics and data analytics & statistics in business? Would you like to learn how to analyze text data? If you answered yes to either of these questions, consider joining us this summer as we work with Ascent Data Insights, a Cincinnati-based Data and AI Consulting Firm that provides supply chain optimization, forecasting, agentic workflows, and software development for companies.
Sentiment analysis, also referred to as opinion mining, is a computational technique used to identify, extract, and categorize opinions expressed in textual data. It primarily focuses on determining the polarity of text (positive, negative, or neutral) thereby revealing overall brand perception as well as specific sentiments toward individual product features. By transforming unstructured text into actionable insights, sentiment analysis enables businesses to enhance product development, refine marketing strategies, and improve customer experience.
In this project we work with Ascent to explore sentiment analysis of product reviews using the R programming language. Working with a large dataset, we applying text mining and statistical techniques to uncover meaningful patterns and insights from customer feedback.
Required Skills: Completion of MAT 129
Preferred Skills: Some programming skills, or an interest in learning some programming
Faculty: Dr. Lisa Holden and Dr. Dhanuja Kasturiratna, Mathematics & Statistics
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Approximately 4,000 years ago, the most recent volcanic eruption in Colorado occurred. The site of the eruption is located between the present-day towns of Dotsero and Gypsum; marked by a ~100-meter-deep explosion pit, referred to as Dotsero Crater, that formed during an explosive phase of the eruption in which magma interacted with groundwater. Today, the volcano remains dormant, with lavas and pyroclastic deposits well-preserved along the margins of the volcano. However, this relatively recent eruption is not the only volcanism to occur in the area. Nearly 20 million years earlier, chemically similar lava flows containing similar minerals erupted a few kilometers northeast of the location of the future Dotsero Crater. Additionally, 10 kilometers to the west of Dotsero Crater is another relatively young volcano, Willow Peak, constructed of lava and pyroclasts that is also compositionally and mineralogically similar to volcanic rocks around Dotsero Crater. This raises the question, did the magma bodies that drove these temporally distinct eruptions originate from similar, or different, processes? Furthermore, were the magma bodies stored at similar temperatures and pressures prior to eruption, or did the final pre-eruptive magma storage conditions change over time in relation to the tectonic evolution of the region? We will explore these questions primarily by measuring the chemical compositions of minerals contained within the lavas and pyroclasts erupted from these three different volcanic events.
This 8-week-long project will involve approximately one week of field work in Colorado, several weeks of lab work at ˛Řľ«¸ó, and data acquisition using electron microscopy techniques. Roundtrip airfare to Denver, Colorado is provided for the student researcher. From Denver, we will travel to around the Glenwood Springs area and camp for the week.
Required:
Preferred:
Faculty: Dr. Nicholas Meszaros, Physics, Geology, & Engineering Technology
Experience Type: Summer Mini-Project Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: This mini-project will collect new data and use archived data from the ˛Řľ«¸ó Observatory 14-inch telescope to study stars using our optical spectrograph. In particular, we are interested in characterizing the star's velocity, temperature, and chemical makeup. This work will involve setting up the cameras and spectrograph on the 14-inch telescope, taking astronomical images, and processing those images. We will then analyze those images using the camera software, astronomical software, and Excel. The result will be a series of spectra on these stars that we will use to both measure stellar characteristics and get a sense of how well we can measure those properties on our telescope. I am looking for a student who has an interest in astronomy. No prior experience with astronomical data taking or telescope mounts necessary. This mini-project will require a student for 10 hours/week for 4 weeks, with some of the work occurring at night.
Required Skills:
Preferred:
Faculty: Dr. Nathan DeLee, Physics, Geology, & Engineering Technology
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: The Sheriden Pit at Indian Trail Caverns near Carey, Wyandot County, Ohio is an excavated sinkhole site that has produced the most diverse assemblage of late Pleistocene (“Ice Age”) animals in Ohio. Thousands of bones, teeth, and bone fragments from accumulated sediments in the sinkhole/cave were collected by staff and volunteers of Cincinnati Museum Center in the 1990’s. These include over 75 identified species, some of which are extinct, such as the Flat-headed Peccary (Platygonus compressus), Short-faced Bear (Arctodus simus), Dire Wolf (Aenocyon dirus), Giant Beaver (Castoroides ohioensis), and the Elk-Moose (Cervalces scotti). Many more are of extant, generalist species such as the Raccoon (Procyon lotor), Striped Skunk (Mephitis mephitis), and Red Fox (Vulpes vulpes), while others are extralimital, having migrated north as the regional climate warmed with the close of the Pleistocene Epoch, such as Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) and Pine Marten (Martes americana).
Although the larger (megafaunal) animal bones have been processed and catalogued, many thousands of small bones and teeth in the collection are yet to be identified and placed into the Museum’s database. These small fossils, known colloquially as microvertebrates, range from rodents and insectivores, rabbits and squirrels, to bats, fish, turtles, snakes, and birds. Microvertebrates provide a unique window into the general climate and environmental conditions of a region by virtue of the generally small geographic ranges of the included species.
Student(s) will sort, identify, and organize microvertebrate remains from the sinkhole. Specimens will then be labelled, catalogued, and photographed. Using scientific references and methodologies, the student will investigate the faunal composition and regional paleoecology of Wyandot County, northern Ohio, during the latest (Wisconsinan) Pleistocene or “Ice Age.” Results will be produced in the form of a written report/research poster presentation.
Required Skills:
Contacts: Glenn Storrs and Cameron Schwalbach, Cincinnati Museum Center
Experience Type: Summer Part-time Experience
Project Mode: In-person
Description: Students will be taught the basics of fossil preparation in the public-facing paleontology lab at Cincinnati Museum Center. Following training, students will assist the fossil preparation team with preparing a field jacket containing sauropod fossils from the Aaron Scott Site in Utah. Following preparation, students will use academic resources to compare the fossils they prepared to fossils collected from the northern Morrison Formation from Montana. This will not only introduce students to paleontological research techniques but also assist the vertebrate paleontology team in completing field jackets in backlog.
Students will learn technical skills related to fossil preparation, as well as fossil curation and research techniques. The research that is conducted on these fossils will be presented in poster format at CINSAM in August 2026. Additionally, students will spend a day outside the paleontology lab at Cincinnati Museum Center, sharing their experience with museum visitors.
Fossil Preparation and Curation Duties:
Skills Required:
Contacts: Katie Hunt and Glenn Storrs, Cincinnati Museum Center
