About 150 undergraduates clustered into the Memorial Union to present their individual research from zebra fish to nutrition to asteroid deflection as part of the symposium on undergraduate research and creative expression.

April 15 was the eighth annual symposium designed to celebrate the research of undergraduate students. Dana Schumacher, the symposium coordinator, said one of the main points of the symposium is to allow students to practice presenting the research they will do later in their careers.

“There are two reasons to do this and one of them is to give students a presentation experience. This is part of the research cycle: You collect your evidence, you decide what it is and then you make it public and share it,” Schumacher said. “Scientifically, there is a value in doing that as part of the student’s development.”

Schumacher said another main point to the conference was “showcase students across the university.”

Students who have completed or are in the process of researching must apply to present at the event. Once they are accepted, they immediately begin to work on presentations. Schumacher said faculty members usually have undergraduate researchers in mind that they recommend apply to the program.

Sullivan Stewart, sophomore in industrial engineering, was one of the students picked by his professor to present his research.

Stewart’s research centered on finding a repeatable process to create “tissue engineered scaffolds” that would allow cartilage to grow outside of the body.

“It’s not quite there yet, it’s on its way,” Stewart said. “It’s going to be able to take someone’s cartilage cells and and grow more in the scaffold so they can grow more and heal defects in their cartilage.”

Stewart’s idea is to create the scaffolding through polycaprolactone, a biodegradable material, that he would mix with salt to create a solid mixture. The mixture would be placed into water so the salt would dissolve and leave a small structure with many holes that the cartilage cells could use to grow on.

“Cartilage right now doesn’t really regenerate like skin does because it doesn’t have blood vessels,” Stewart. “It would be able to grow the cartilage outside of the body for a couple of weeks and be able to implant it in the body, and then the scaffold would just dissolve.”

Kyla Rand, freshman in biology, said she began her research on painted turtles as part of a project for freshman honors mentor program. Her group researched the temperature at which baby painted turtles’ mortality rate increased during the winter.

“Basically, [the eggs] are laid in their nest just a couple of inches under the soil. They hatch in August, and they stay in their nests all the way through until April,” Rand said. “They have to somehow survive the frigid Iowa temperatures.”

Rand said the group studied 16 nests of turtles along the Illinois-Mississippi River shore. She said only three of the nests survived because of predators.

Rand said the group is now trying figure out whether the other turtles would have survived the temperatures if not for the predators. Rand said turtles can survive with up to two-thirds of their bodies being frozen.

“This year they were able to withstand about -1 1/2 degrees Celsius. They’ve been known to withstand about -8, so it was a little on the warmer side,” Rand said. “Turtles have these mechanisms and ways they can survive the winter, and there’s evidence in a lot of reptiles. But this is just a specific species that we were able to study them in. They’re one of the few species that can do both methods: freeze avoidance and freeze tolerance.”

Schumacher said she intends to come back to next year’s presentation with new research.