Students in the Pietas Honors program partner with faculty to more deeply explore a topic of interest in one of their classes to create a paper, project, or artwork. See some examples of this work in this collection.

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Submissions from 2020

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Remembering Eden: A Study of Garden Imagery in Judeo-Christian Worship Spaces, Luc Berard
Vases of flowers, a mural of wildlife, and poetic references to a garden, these artistic elements are all commonplace in Judeo-Christian worship spaces; but why? While all of these are certainly aesthetically pleasing, there is likely much ...

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Developing a Portable, Smartphone-Based Schlieren Imaging System, Grace Riermann and Keith R. Stein
Schlieren imaging is a technique for visualizing fluid flows that are characterized by spatial variations in density or refractive index. Because schlieren imaging is commonly performed with expensive equipment in a lab setting, we sought c...

Submissions from 2015

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The Paneled Lives of Extraordinary Women: Comic Books, Superheroines, and American Women in the 1940s, Kelly Van Wyk
When scholars examine a society in search of the principles that it holds most dear, popular culture promises an attractive and engaging medium where one can search for answers. Intellectual disciplines such as art history, film studies, an...

Submissions from 2014

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The Pivot: American Involvement in Asia, Marisa Tillman
Part I: On November 17th, 2011, President Obama addressed the Australian parliament and presented a plan to shift American attention towards the Asia-Pacific region (Beitelman 2012, 1086). This is a policy known as the Pivot, which represen...

Submissions from 2013

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Separable Subsurface Scattering: An OpenGL Implementation, Michael Tetzlaff
The light reflection of many materials, including skin, milk, and marble, are not dominated by direct reflection, but rather by the subsurface scattering of light [1]. Most real-time computer graphics techniques, most notably Phong lighting...

Submissions from 2011

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Sequencing of Amine Nucleoside Polymers: Understanding the Fidelity of DNA-Directed Reductive Amination, Sarah M. Anderson
DNA replication is a form of template-directed polymerization that occurs with the aid of numerous enzymes. By developing a DNA replication mimic that can undergo template-directed polymerization without enzymes, the scope of template-direc...

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The Un-Human Femme Bisclavret: Monstrous Misuses of the Disunion between Secular and Religious Culture in Marie de France’s 'Bisclavret', Santidad Bennett
While much of the recent scholarship on Bisclavret has focused on its unusual treatment of the werewolf motif, the more telling character of the story is actually the wife whose abuse of language subverts the major cultural constructs of wh...

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Constructing a Vector for Over Expressing Nitrobenzene Dioxygenase in E. coli, Paul Davis
Due to extensive use of nitroaromatic compounds in the production of dyes, pesticides, explosives, and their harmful effects on the environment, studying the enzyme mechanisms of bacteria capable of utilizing these compounds as nutrient sou...

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La Concencia Mestiza Materialized: A Study of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing, Megan Frutiger
In her creative nonfiction memoir Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, Judith Ortiz Cofer demonstrates one way of dealing with questions of bicultural identity. This creative work, Ortiz Cofer says, arose out o...

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Game Theory and Von Neumann’s Minimax Theorem, Megan Hall
We encounter many situations of conflict on a day‐to‐day basis. When trying to find a solution, we consider all the possible consequences of our choices. Sometimes, the outcome of a situation depends on the decisions of others. This is wher...

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Increased Power and Detuning of Diode Lasers for Magneto-optical Trap of Lithium, Jami Johnson
Precision experiments such as laser cooling and trapping using diode laser systems are increasingly prevalent in the fields of modern atomic, molecular and optical physics. Multiple laser diodes of precise frequencies and significant output...

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Phase Sensitive Detection: Frequency Locking of a Laser Diode for Lithium Cooling and Trapping, Brandon Peplinski
The frequency of a laser-diode can be locked by providing a negative feedback voltage to the piezo-electric transducer in the laser cavity. By phase-modulating the light and placing side bands on the carrier frequency, the fluorescence of t...