With capstone research, LC students take deep dive into questions of health, hazing, virtual economy and much more

When Julia Trudeau was starting her senior research project, she knew she wanted to look at sexual assault.

The Lewis and Clark High School senior found there was a lot of research on how victims are perceived following an assault. But she couldn’t find anything talking about sexual assault as part of hazing rituals.

Trudeau spent a year researching how people’s perceptions of a sexual assault change when the assault is described as part of an athletic hazing ritual.

Her work was based on a survey of LC students, faculty and staff, including athletic coaches. The survey described a scenario where older students sodomized a younger peer with objects.

She found people were significantly less likely to say a sexual assault was “sexually motivated” if they were told it was part of a hazing ritual, though they agreed on other questions about the scenario.

“People tend to minimize hazing,” she said.

But existing research on sexual assault and on hazing shows the motivations are often the same: a desire to humiliate and control the victim.

“The point is not that they’re trying to get off or trying to do this gay act,” she said. “They want this power, they wanted to make [others] below them.”

Her work, part of a capstone research class with teacher Eric Woodard, drew praise from Ed Byrnes, the Eastern Washington University professor who helped Trudeau with statistical analysis of the results.

“The way she introduced the topic, she introduced it better than some of the articles I get for the journal I work for,” Byrnes said, adding that he’d like to work with Trudeau to get it published.

“I wish other researchers I worked with were this organized,” Byrnes said. “She sent me everything I needed.”

Woodard said Trudeau was far from the only student with an impressive research topic this year. Other students in his class examined topics ranging from the experiences of homeless students in Spokane schools to cancer therapies.

One, Isabel Greeley, surveyed classmates about their experiences with sex education and presented her results to a district committee considering a new curriculum in April.

“This was by far the best set of research projects I’ve ever seen,” Woodard said.

Gabe Roller, another senior in the class, researched virtual economies in video games where players interact online in real time, like World of Warcraft. He’s a gamer and said he’s interested in research that treats it like a serious part of culture.

“I love the genre and I feel it deserves study,” he said.

Roller found existing research about the factors that motivate people to play games, but little about the reasons they participate in virtual economies. Other work had documented interesting case studies in virtual economies, such as a financial crisis in the game Second Life when a single player ran off with a significant number of deposits.

“You’ve got a small working society in there,” he said.

Based on a survey of players for three games, Roller concluded that accumulating wealth is the greatest motivating factor among five he looked at, and self-worth the least. Players were also motivated by a desire to help teammates or others in their party, to optimize their play through better equipment, and to enhance their character by paying for upgrades like new spells.

Roller said one of the things he learned is that he doesn’t like doing academic research. He hopes to be a teacher, and said the capstone work gave him more of an appreciation of how research is conducted.

Greta Grim hopes to go into biochemistry and study at a research university after community college. She’s been interested in cancer immunotherapy for a long time, and frequently gets so excited talking about it that she interrupts herself.

Immunotherapy is a form of cancer treatment that trains the body’s existing immune system to recognize and kill cancer cells. It’s best used to treat cancers that are system-wide, like leukemia, rather than ones that can be better targeted by removing a tumor.

“The basis of it is it’s effective because it moves around,” she said.

Grim said it’s promising because it’s a step toward cancer therapies that are individually tailored, but it can have side effects that are difficult to manage.

Her project explored existing research on the effectiveness of chimeric antigen T-cell receptor immunotherapy to treat acute lymphoblastic lymphoma.

She did what’s called a meta-analysis, where researchers examine existing clinical trials that meet certain criteria and review how effective a specific medication or intervention is based on a larger pool of existing data.

Biology teacher Eric Strate helped with her project, which fulfilled requirements for both Woodard’s class and a district-wide biomedical science program she’s part of.

Grim found only three studies evaluating the therapy that met her criteria, and concluded it’s effective at putting patients into remission initially, though the cancer often comes back.

She presented her results at the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair in March, where she won first place.

“People talk about kids today and they’re really worried about the future. They should come into my classroom,” Woodard said.