The Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase is an annual event for student team members to share their research highlights with the community. This year, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, teams have drawn on virtual means to communicate which challenges they tackled, how they approached their work and what they learned. Students collaborated online to produce websites, videos, digital presentations, podcasts, lightning talks, profiles and posters.

We salute the 2019-2020 project teams, and we invite you to explore some of their highlights in our special section, the Fortin Foundation Virtual Showcase. Here are just a few examples of what teams worked on this year:

• How course structure impacts the learning experience in STEM and can help increase retention rates for underrepresented students
• A novel and student-led approach to help patients address their unmet social needs, in deep partnership with Durham’s Lincoln Community Health Center
• Tools to explore the effects of stressors on freshwater ecosystems, including an interactive website, a podcast series and a simulation model
• An investigation of North Carolina’s mortgage market in the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis
• Prototypes of a “smart toilet” to enable early disease detection and serve as a screening tool for health monitoring
• Creative, data-driven ways to memorialize the enslaved Africans who died during the Middle Passage
• Protocols to strengthen the systems needed to support neurosurgical patient outcomes at a hospital in Uganda, in close collaboration with local staff

Bass Connections Poster Competition

In our annual competition for the best research poster, the Environmental Epidemiology in Latin America project team emerged as the winner and will receive a team prize.

Studying Malaria Transmission Patterns in the Amazon

Poster by Lissette Araya, Jonathan Avendano, Alex Bajana, Annika Gunderson, Olivia Hunt, Rani Kumar, Amelia Martin, Robert Rolfe Jr, Maria Velasco and Mackenzie Zepeda

Runners-up

The Art and Craft of Saxophone Mouthpiece Design (poster by Giavanna Jadick, Maxwell Bartlett, Matthew Busch and Joshua Socolar, from the project team of the same name)

Measuring and Addressing Social-Emotional Well-being in Early Childhood (poster by Nathaniel Neptune, Rasheca Logendran, Ellie Winslow, Emma Garman, Ainsley Buck, Sophie Hurewitz, Reed Kenny, Rushina Cholera, Michelle Franklin, Beth Gifford, KK Lam and Gillian Schmidler, from the project team NC Early Childhood Action Plan)

Spreading HoPE: Helping Patients and Families Access Information about Hospice through a Web-based App (poster by Mihir Patel, Debra Davis, Fred Friedman, Jon Nicolla, Vicki Quintana, Michala Ritz, Margaret Salinger and Arif Kamal, from the project team REGAIN: Roadmap for Evaluating Goals in Advanced Illness Navigation)

Learn More

• Explore the Fortin Foundation Virtual Showcase.
• Meet the winners of the 2020 Bass Connections Student Research Awards.
• Check out this year’s winners of the Bass Connections Award for Outstanding Mentorship.