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Mari and Dimitri interview student researchers at the 16th annual Graduate Academic Conference (GAC), hosted by the Council of Graduate Students (COGS). The second episode of this four-part series features interviews with Roselane Kithan-Lundquist,  and Ifeanyichukwu Eke from MSU's Microbiology department , and Simon Sanchez from the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at thescifileswdbm@gmail.com.  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Mari and Dimitri interview student researchers at the 16th annual Graduate Academic Conference (GAC), hosted by the Council of Graduate Students (COGS). The first episode of this four-part series features interviews with Sam Norcia and Char Dengler from the College of Nursing, and Bismarck Amaniampong from the Department of Chemistry.
If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at thescifileswdbm@gmail.com.  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week's episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Veona Cutinho. Veona works in the Cellular Reprogramming Laboratory at MSU led by Dr. Jose Cibelli. She works with zebrafish embryos and manipulates them so they can be ideal donors for cloning. These tiny embryos are perfect for studying cloning because their development is quick, easy to see, and happens outside the body! While cloning was once a big deal, it's kind of old-fashioned now because it's tough to get it just right. Veona and team at the Cellular Reprogramming Lab  are trying to figure out what the problem is. She's focusing on a troublemaker called H3K9me3, a protein that makes cloning less efficient. By understanding and dealing with this protein, Veona hopes to make cloning much smoother and better. It's like upgrading an old invention to work faster and smarter!
If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at thescifileswdbm@gmail.com.  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Yunting Gu is a PhD candidate in linguistics from Michigan State University. Her research in speech production suggests a basis for several universals regarding the sound pattern of languages.
Despite the differences in languages, some sound patterns are common to most languages of the world. For example, cross-linguistically, syllables starting with pl are more frequently observed than syllables starting with pt, which is more frequent than syllables starting with lp. Also, syllables that have a consonant followed by a vowel (such as so) are more common across different languages than syllables which is a vowel followed by a consonant (such as an). The question is — where do the observed linguistic universals come from? There are two possible answers. First, it may merely be a coincidence that languages share some patterns. Second, linguistic universals may come from some shared property of human beings.
If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at thescifileswdbm@gmail.com.  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week's episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Kiyotaka Suga, a PhD candidate in Second Language Studies.
One of the engaging questions for second language (L2) teachers is how to introduce grammar instruction to help adult L2 learners develop their well-balanced communicative abilities. Most L2 teachers may believe intuitively that engaging in output (speaking and writing) practice in L2 classrooms is crucial for adult L2 learners to develop their productive skills. Despite such common beliefs about output practice, the roles of output in L2 grammar acquisition have not been fully explained with empirical evidence. Previous studies that investigated the roles of output practice for L2 grammar learning have reported mixed results, which were limited due to their primary reliance on indirect measures of grammar learning processes (e.g., note-taking, underlining, and retrospective interviews). Since these indirect measures may not have fully captured learners’ learning processes (i.e., how output practice in L2 classrooms can allow learners to pay more attention to the target grammatical feature that they are learning), it is valuable to employ a more sensitive online objective measure (i.e., eye-tracking) to further examine the roles of output in L2 grammar acquisition. 
In his dissertation study, Kiyo is using eye-tracking to examine how engaging in L2 output practice can push adult L2 learners to pay more attention to grammar features that they are learning and then eventually facilitate their grammar learning. The findings of this study will clarify the roles of output practice in L2 classroom instruction with empirical evidence. Pedagogically, the findings will allow L2 teachers to incorporate empirically-based output practice into their daily teaching practices.
If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at thescifileswdbm@gmail.com.  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

Bryan Stanley is a PhD student in the Physics Department. He does Physics Education Research (PER), where he primarily studies informal physics programs. Informal physics programs create physics learning spaces outside of the traditional classroom settings. Examples of these types of programs include, but are not limited to, summer camps, planetarium shows, public lectures, student groups, science festivals, and open houses. The events that these programs host are sometimes called public engagement or outreach. These types of programs can impact and support youth and adult audiences and university student volunteers in building their science identity, sense of belonging, and sense of community. Bryan studies the structures of informal physics program to better understand the fundamental aspects of these spaces and to help support informal physics practitioners. He also studies how these programs impact their university student volunteers, finding that volunteering can influence students' career paths.
If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at thescifileswdbm@gmail.com.  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!