Blazing the trail for research in higher education institutions in the Northwest, projects at the Integrated Research and Innovative Center demonstrate the future in a variety of academic fields.
The IRIC at the University of Idaho is a university building dedicated to research, located in the middle of campus. It opened in January 2017 and hosts projects that are being studied by every college at UI. The various projects include a Black History Research Lab, a research lab studying sentinel organisms by the Idaho Water Resources Research Institute and the Polymorphic Games Studio. While varied in subject, each of these projects contributes to the innovation at UI.
Black History Research Lab
Highlighting and chronicling the accomplishments of Black community members at UI, the BHRL started at the IRIC in Fall 2021. Professor Sydney Freeman Jr., director of the lab, said the project is the first of its kind at UI. While STEM research is prominent, the lab is one of the first projects at the IRIC that is social science based.
“It’s expanding to investigate ways in which the Black population on campus can thrive and flourish while on campus,” Freeman said.
One of the first projects created by the BHRL is the Black history at UI exhibit at the campus’ library. The exhibit opened Feb. 15 and showcased the history of the Black Student Union and Black trailblazers at the university.
Freeman said the BHRL was created to encourage learning about different history at UI.
“I think there was an assumption that there’s only 1% of the campus that’s Black,” Freeman said. “So, there’s not really a history here, but we were able to pull documents all the way back from 1899 up to now, starting with Jenny Eva Hughes being our first Black graduate, so there is a lot of things that that we are learning as we’re going as we’re moving forward. What we’re hoping is that we can expand and grow.”
Freeman hopes to continue to main mission of the lab- investigating Black history at UI.
“We also want to talk about ways in which we can, in current times, ensure that black faculty, staff students and administrators can thrive on campus,” Freeman added.
The BHRL is in partnership with the UI Library. Freeman said the partnership with the library has been helpful in analyzing data.
“We’ve been able to put a mechanism so that when we get information it goes through a lot,” Freeman said. “It goes to the library for processing, and then we bring in our students. I think what we’re particularly proud of is being able to bring student interns and have access to data and information so having that partnership with the library has been key.”
Freeman hopes the lab continues to be a staple on campus with its unique topic area.
“I think that it’s important that we have more humanities and social science-based projects that are not related to STEM in the IRIC,” Freeman said. “I think that’s the next frontier.”
Idaho Water Resources Research Institute
Located on the second floor of the IRIC, the Idaho Water Resources Research Institute is set up for water source professionals and faculty members involved with the Institute can learn about water resource issues. Alan Kolok, director of the institute, said having a shared research space at the IRIC has been valuable.
Work for the IWRRI is seasonal, depending on if the water is frozen or not. Kolok said research is especially active during the summer months. One of the projects the institute studies is water quality.
“We have both analytical capacity for water quality,” Kolok said. “We have analytical equipment there that would allow us to measure things like nutrients, like nitrates, and phosphates. Then we also have the capacity to do work on sentinel organisms.”
Sentinel organisms are mainly fish and wildlife that are used as an indicator for contamination. Kolok said the current sentinel the institute is focusing on is crayfish.
“Right now, we have an ongoing crayfish project where we’re looking at mercury concentration in the tissues,” Kolok said. “We again do so during the summer. We’re bringing in animals from the field and dissecting those animals, taking specific parts and then looking at concentration of mercury in those parts.”
The project received funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to potentially add crayfish to the list of sentinel species.
“They’re (EPA) using different organisms for a number of reasons that aren’t as good as crayfish are,” Kolok said. “We wanted to add crayfish to the list.”
Kolok said another reason for researching crayfish is their charisma and how they interest communities with involvement.
“We’ve had a number of citizens groups that have been involved,” Kolok said. “We’ve had a lot of community participation and that’s another thing relative to IRIC is that we’re really interested in not only it gives us the laboratory, but it gives us a location where we can do work, that is actually either involving directly or certainly impacts community members across Idaho.”
Polymorphic Games Studio
Finding inspiration from enjoyment of video games and their field of study, Terry Soule and Barrie Robison created the Polymorphic Games Studio. Both professors at UI, Soule’s field of computer science and Robison’s focus on evolutionary biology became the basis for the games that incorporate evolution, stationed on the first floor of the IRIC.
During the summer of 2016, prior to the IRIC opening, the duo hired students to work on video games. The first game in the studio, Darwin’s Demons, was released in February 2017.
The studio hires an extensive range of students, not limited to computer science or biology.
“You can’t have a good game unless you have people who can do good graphics, unless you have people who can do good music and sound, and somebody who can write a good story,” Soule said. “We hire a pretty diverse group of students because it’s just a requirement.”
Project Hastur is another game created by the studio. The program utilizes Steam as a platform for the content to be played.
“The main reason we want to release games on Steam is it gets to a big audience,” Soule said. “Also, it makes sure that the bar is high in terms of the quality and students, generally undergrads who work on them when they go apply for a job can say they worked on a commercial game.”
The studio is currently working on a zombie simulation game. “It’s a model of disease spread, but from the point of view of zombies,” Soule said. “So, they set up this model, where you can sort of look at how zombies, which really means how a disease, would spread across the US. You can change different parameters. Like, how likely are you to run into somebody who’s infected? If you do meet some of these infected how likely are you to catch it? What is the incubation time and so forth?”
Soule said one of the main purposes behind the studio is to support research projects with an educational component. Students come in-between classes to fit work into their schedules.
“From my perspective, that’s part of what makes the studio a lot of fun is we get to interact with all sorts of different people doing different research,” Soule said.
Sierra Pesnell can be reached at [email protected]
Erin Fanning
Nice review of the variety of research going on at the U of I!