In just a few short years since its founding in 2018, the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience has grown into a mainstay of the campus’ burgeoning research culture. The program pairs faculty mentors and undergraduate students for an 8-12 week summer session in which the student researchers get to do hands-on research, attend professional development sessions and get paid a $3,200 stipend. SURE continued its steady growth this year, providing opportunities for 49 students (up from 32 in 2023), who worked in areas ranging from artificial intelligence and renewable energy to reproductive rights and healthcare. So what are students taking away from this year’s experience? Recently, we talked with two SURE researchers from the College of Engineering and Computer Science and College of Education, Health and Human Services about what they learned this summer. Next week, we’ll have student stories from the College of Business and College of Arts, Sciences and Letters.
Rayan Khalil and Assistant Professor Van Hai Bui
Project: Assessment of solar energy generation towards net-zero energy buildings
Software engineering senior Rayan Khalil says she was drawn to the SURE program mostly because the idea of doing research “just sounded like a really fulfilling experience.” It didn’t disappoint. This summer, Khalil and her faculty mentor, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Van Hai Bui, ticked through a big list of projects focusing on solar energy generation for net-zero buildings. Specifically, Khalil built detailed models that predict how much solar-based electricity a building might expect to produce, given geographically specific variables like wind speed, temperature, day length, cloud cover and the amount of sunlight a site receives in a typical year. Based on those prediction models, she then created an optimization model for net-zero buildings to determine the lowest-cost solar and battery storage installations, while minimizing the amount of purchased power buildings would have to draw from the grid. She even built a user-friendly interface that enables building operators to quickly plug in site-specific variables and get accurate prediction and optimization scenarios.
Khalil says the summer felt like a super- accelerated learning experience: “In some ways, I feel like I learned as much as I did in two years in two months,” she says. She chalks that up to a couple of factors. First, she’s always had a “passion for sustainability,” and getting to apply her coding skills to something she was really interested in made the whole thing feel “a lot more fulfilling.” Second, unlike in a lot of her courses, there wasn’t a test waiting for her at the end. “Research isn’t one of those things where the answer is already predetermined, so one of the things I loved is that if I tried something and it didn’t work out, I felt like I could learn from that and try something else without worrying that I was going to be graded harshly if I didn’t do it a certain way,” she says. Indeed, Bui won’t be grading Khalil. But he says she accomplished a phenomenal amount of work over the summer, and the prediction models she worked on could be useful in upcoming projects he has planned with DTE. The two are also planning to present their findings at an upcoming conference, for which Khalil is writing the paper. “To maybe have a publication with my name on it — that’s just insane,” she says. It might not be the last either. Heading into her senior year, she says the goal was to finally be done with school and score a full-time job. Now, based on her SURE experience, she’s thinking seriously about grad school.
Sarah Chaban and Associate Professor Lisa Martin
Project: Reproductive freedom on the ballot: How gender and demands for self-determination are driving electoral politics in the post-Roe era
Professor of Health and Human Services Lisa Martin’s first piece of advice for her SURE research partner Sarah Chaban: Set up a new email account. That’s because over the course of the summer, Chaban would be tracking trends in how people are talking about reproductive rights during the election season, a conversation which, needless to say, inspires an intensity that you don't necessarily want flooding your personal email accounts. For her project, Chaban kept tabs on numerous sources, including social media accounts, advertisements, podcasts, state ballot referendums, newsletters and news articles, with a particular focus on language trends. A few of her takeaways thus far? At the highest level, she says voices on the left and right are speaking very different languages, with the latter emphasizing fetal personhood and the former framing things in terms of rights and healthcare. Moreover, especially in the realm of laws and ballot initiatives, there tends to be more uniformity on the right, which Martin and Chaban say reflects a strategy of replicating approaches which have worked well in other states. On the other side, ballot language tends to vary widely both in breadth and emphasis, with states emphasizing (one or multiple) rights and/or healthcare, depending on what organizers think will speak to their constituencies. Overall, Chaban says one of her biggest findings is that the conversation around reproductive rights now has multiple volatile fault lines. Within the post-Roe legal framework, access to contraception and fertility treatments, like IVF, are now being debated sometimes as intensely as abortion.
Chaban says one of the biggest lessons she’s drawing from her research experience is how important critical thinking skills are — especially when responding to unexpected challenges. For example, during her project, President Joe Biden, a candidate who rarely uses the word abortion, withdrew from the presidential race, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who uses very different language when speaking about reproductive rights, became the Democratic nominee. “I thought, how am I supposed to put together my poster now that the world has just changed?” Chaban says, smiling. “But this just showed me that when you’re tracking something in real time, you can’t get stuck in your ways of thinking about things. Whatever changes might come, you have to pivot. No knowledge is lost.” Her experience this summer also changed the way she’s thinking about her future. Chaban was originally planning on pursuing a master’s in public health after graduation. But after seeing how many influential voices in the reproductive rights space have legal backgrounds, she’s thinking about law school. And if she can’t choose between the two, she has her eye on the dual degree in Law and Public Health (JD+MPH) at the University of Michigan.
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Want to read more about what students are taking away from SURE 2024? Next week, we’ll feature students from the College of Business and College of Arts, Sciences and Letters. Story by Lou Blouin.
