by Greg St. Martin

Senior and marine biology major Lauren Josephs, S’15, spent her co-​​op last year in the coastal land­scape man­age­ment field, meeting with water­front home­owners to dis­cuss issues related to pro­tecting and restoring coastal ecosystems.

Josephs, who has par­tic­i­pated in Northeastern’s Three Seas Pro­gram, landed her co-​​op with post­doc­toral researcher Steven Scyphers, who works at the university’s Marine Sci­ence Center in Nahant, Mass­a­chu­setts. Josephs col­lab­o­rated with Scyphers on research that involved sur­veying home­owners in Rhode Island and Alabama to better under­stand how their values and beliefs relate to their treat­ment of their shorelines.

“What we’re trying to do is get a cohe­sive pic­ture of how these two systems—humans and their environment—interact with each other,” Josephs explained. “Under­standing this dynamic is impor­tant to envi­ron­mental man­age­ment and policy, and it’s crit­ical to bring water­front res­i­dents into the restora­tion process.”

Josephs was among some two dozen stu­dents who dis­cussed their co-​​op expe­ri­ences from the July to December 2014 cycle at the annual Col­lege of Sci­ence Co-​​op Expo held in the Curry Stu­dent Center Indoor Quad on Feb. 27. The stu­dents worked at a range of co-​​op employers, from phar­ma­ceu­tical com­pa­nies and research insti­tutes to lab­o­ra­to­ries at North­eastern, in the Boston area, and across the globe.

Rebecca Arcidiacono’s co-​​op meshed her aca­d­emic pur­suits and per­sonal inter­ests. She trav­eled abroad to work with the Music, Mind, and Brain research group at Gold­smiths, Uni­ver­sity of London, where she con­tributed to a study exam­ining the rela­tion­ship between emo­tions, music, and the com­mer­cial effec­tive­ness of TV adver­tise­ments. The research focused on mea­suring how elec­tro­dermal activity, or activity in the sweat glands, can be used to quan­tify emo­tional arousal.

Arcidi­a­cono, S’16, is a fourth-​​year psy­chology major and is pur­suing minors in both behav­ioral neu­ro­science and busi­ness. Her co-​​op involved ana­lyzing data for the project.

“This co-​​op really spoke to me because I’ve always had a pas­sion for music, par­tic­u­larly the psy­chology of music,” she explained. “It was a really good com­bi­na­tion of my aca­d­emic and per­sonal inter­ests, and it worked out incred­ibly well.”

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Third-​​year chem­istry major Davis Sawyer, S’17, worked on co-​​op in Houston at Blade Energy Part­ners, an inde­pen­dent con­sulting com­pany that focuses on projects in the energy industry and has exper­tise in drilling across the oil and gas and geot­hermal indus­tries. Sawyer was tasked with building a data­base of mate­rials used in a variety of drilling projects. But he took on other roles too, including per­forming sta­tis­tical analysis as part of a quality con­trol project to deter­mine whether a new steel alloy was sus­tain­able for use in building deep oil wells, which must with­stand varying tem­per­a­tures, pres­sures, and other conditions.

Sawyer said the co-​​op piqued his interest in the oil and gas industry. “I love the pace and the inten­sity, and the way people focused on solving prob­lems and making progress,” said Sawyer, who noted that the expe­ri­en­tial learning oppor­tu­nity showed him the value of using Big Data ana­lytics to bring a tech­nology to market.

Fourth-​​year chem­istry major Hope Ianiri, S’16, worked from July to December 2014 at the Woods Hole Oceano­graphic Insti­tute in Mass­a­chu­setts, where she spent six months ana­lyzing sed­i­ment sam­ples for new and existing bio­markers of cli­mate change. Bio­markers, she explained, are mea­sur­able sub­stances released by organ­isms in response to their sur­round­ings, and the con­cen­tra­tion of these bio­markers is pre­served in sed­i­ment cores and can be used to deter­mine past cli­mate con­di­tions. Knowing how vari­ables like sea sur­face tem­per­a­ture or pH have changed over time can help researchers create models that can pre­dict future changes.

The expe­ri­ence solid­i­fied her aca­d­emic goal to pursue a doc­torate in envi­ron­mental or marine chem­istry. “I real­ized I loved being in a lab and having the inde­pen­dence that comes with doing your own research,” she said. “I want to do research for a living.”

Originally published in news@Northeastern on March 20, 2015.