On Friday, April 4, the inside of the Science Center held a series of ten vibrantly colored acrylic paintings and a milling crowd. Students presented their various research projects at the tenth annual Student Research Symposium; the paintings were done by Katherine Brelje for her project “The Gandhi Transformation Series.”

 
Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs Glenn Sharfman addressed the audience before announcing the scholarship winners. “The idea behind a symposium is to have a structure that mirrors a professional conference,” Sharfman said. “I didn’t write papers like these until I was an advanced graduate student.”

   
“Some of the work I heard today, and that I read, was clearly graduate level,” Sharfman continued. “I’m so happy that we can provide the opportunity for undergraduates to gain some experience working on projects that go deeper than your average class.”

  
The 35 presenters were divided into ten sessions in different rooms of the Science Center. After discussing their projects (some of which were done individually, some collaborative) two students were presented with the Jo Young Switzer Award for Excellence, which honored the best written works.

  
The winner in the non-science category was peace studies student Sarah Hall, whose research question “Can former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld legally be tried by Germany under universal jurisdiction?” inquired about the legal issues surrounding alleged war crimes committed against 11 Iraqi citizens held at Abu Ghraib and one Saudi Arabian held at Guantanamo Bay.

  
Hall explained the intricacies of international law regarding the possible prosecution of Rumsfeld during her presentation. She elaborated on the treatment of prisoners taken by the United States during the current Iraq war, describing the use of “extraordinary rendition,” in which prisoners are “whisk[ed] from one foreign country to another… Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Iraq, Egypt…quite a lot of places.” Hall showed a map of these prisons, which were kept secret during their use.  According to the United Nations definition of “torture” as “any act of intentional severe mental or physical pain or suffering in order to obtain from the prisoner or a third party information or a confession” is considered to be a violation of international law.

  
Hall concluded: “unless the US fails to prosecute, Germany has no right to exercise universal jurisdiction. Legally, it’s possible, but only if the US says explicitly: ‘We are not going to prosecute Rumsfeld.’”

  
Georgi Chunev, winner in the science category, utilized data from the Wyoming Infrared Observatory (WIRO) and the Spitzer Space Telescope to try to indirectly observe protoplanetary disks around stars in our galaxy. His project, entitled “Optical Spectroscopy of GLIMPSE stars with 8 Micron Infrared Excess,” focuses on identifying stars that are candidates for future planetary systems.

  
Out of the 15 million stars covered in the northern GLIMPSE catalog (the stars involved in Chunev’s project) only 449 had the characteristics of a “warm debris-disk system”, which is not too surprising, considering that “such systems represent a very rapid transitional phase in stellar evolution.” “We observed 23 of the 449 stars,” Chunev said.  “A possible continuation of our project would be to observe the remaining 426 stars with WIRO, get additional satellite data for each of them, and more precisely derive the proportion of stars in our galaxy that are at this short, but vibrant evolutionary stage.”

  
Out of 15 million stars covered in the northern GLIMPSE catalog (the stars involved in Chunev’s project) only 449 had the “warm debris-disk system” that indicated a “very rapid transitional phase in their evolution.” “We observed 23 of the 449 stars,” Chunev said.  “A possible continuation of our project would be to observe the remaining 426 stars, get data for each of them, and more precisely derive the proportion of stars in our galaxy that are possibly hosting Earth-like planets.”

  
Chunev concluded: “Of course, there is much more work to be done before any broad conclusions can be made. After all, what we did was provide one small piece of an enormous puzzle.”

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