RC Research

Repost: MCSP Blog

Earlier this month, Dr. Roland Minton and three Roanoke students competed in an online sports analytics championship! Read further to learn all about it:

The Roanoke College team of James Rowe, Selam Mekonnen, and Cyrus Pace earned second place at the National Collegiate Sports Analytics Championship in Dallas, Texas, on February 1-2! Syracuse University won the team championship and Jacob Kauffman of Rice University won the individual national championship. The event was organized by Baylor University and hosted by the Dallas Mavericks.

None of the above paragraph is inaccurate, but it could be misleading. If you follow the weather, you may remember that Dallas was shut down February 1-2 by a winter storm. Reluctantly, the RC group canceled our flight and stayed home. With travel to Dallas shut down, the organizers shifted to a remote event. Although the Roanoke team finished second, the competition was entirely individual work analyzing a massive basketball data set. Team standings were compiled by average scores of schools with three or more competitors.

All four of Roanoke’s original team members can claim “Sweet Sixteen” status. In the qualifying round held in November, James Rowe placed 14th and Lilly Blair 16th. Lilly was unable to be in the finals because of commitments with her women’s lacrosse team. In the finals “in Dallas” contestants were seeded into seven groups, with the top two in each group advancing to round two. Selam and Cyrus gave excellent presentations to advance to the second round, while James was a close third in a highly competitive group. These are great results!

Each competitor was given five hours to take a large spreadsheet of play-by-play basketball data, isolate a team or player or type of play, distill the data into a small number of insights, and highlight those insights in a five-minute PowerPoint presentation. Cyrus, for example, pulled all plays involving Jaxson Hayes and identified strengths (e.g., pick and rolls, plays designed for him after time outs) and weaknesses (e.g., shooting from the left side of the court). After giving their presentations, they answered questions from a panel of judges drawn from professional sports teams around the country. The judges rated presentations in a variety of categories such as use of statistics, graphics, clarity of results, and responses to questions.

The biggest casualty from the winter storm was the loss of unstructured networking time with the judges, who would have been in recruiting mode. All three RC competitors have an interest in pursuing careers in sports. James and Cyrus have interned with the Roanoke RailYard Dawgs hockey team, and Selam has worked with Stat Crew. Despite being limited to zoom discussions, useful connections were made and the team gained valuable experience in the sports analytics field. However, it’s too bad that our Tex-Mex dinner wasn’t in Texas!

Congratulations to James, Selam, and Cyrus for their outstanding performance and representation of Roanoke College!

This past weekend, we had an amazing turnout at the Family Weekend Research Showcase! There were so many wonderful topics that people presented. Congratulations to the first-place winner, Lydia Turner-Little, who presented on the topic of LGBTQ+ Experiences of Religion. For second place, we had a tie between David Adams (Intermittent Fasting Combats Diet-Induced Obesity in Zebrafish) and Alexander Palmer (Neural Dynamics Encode Valence in the Mouse Auditory Cortex).

Kavya Iyer is a recent alum of Roanoke College, having graduated this past spring. This summer, she had the opportunity to work in a research lab as part of the Diversity Summer Internship Program at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Kavya worked specifically in the Population, Family, and Reproductive Health Department where she studied some of the metrics or tools, used to assess the quality of care amongst patients receiving contraceptive family planning counseling services globally. This department aimed to compile all these resources by undertaking a systematic review to understand whether some of the common themes from these metrics aligned with the standardized quality of care frameworks used in the field.

Kavya's research was presented at both the Leadership Alliance National Conference in Connecticut in late July and in front of other professionals at the School of Public Health in Baltimore. There, she was able to meet students, faculty, and researchers from all backgrounds that conducted amazing research in the sciences and social sciences from a wide variety of incredible schools across the country. Kavya wishes to ease others' worries about presenting at conferences, as it is intimidating at first but to remember that everyone else in attendance is there to cheer you on. Remember, you are the expert on your study and that's what matters!

Q: What did you love about Research at Roanoke College?

A: The rigor of the classes and ample opportunities to conduct research really increased my abilities to navigate the complex field of research as a graduate student. The professors at Roanoke are there to make sure you learn, succeed, and have fun, and I can't thank them enough for it! I'm looking forward to continuing my passion of advocating and learning about pediatric health and development into my graduate school years.

Shane Saunders spent the month of June with Dr. Collins, alongside other colleagues, conducting research on the Smooth Coneflower populations at Denhill Preserve. This research is a continuation of a research project Dr. Collins has been working on for almost a decade. Located south of Roanoke College, Denhill Preserve is home to a major population of Smooth Coneflowers. The Smooth Coneflower is an endangered variety of the Coneflower species. The decline of this variety has been due to forest fires and commercial developments threatening their habitats. With this research, Shane and his colleagues aim to seek the core issues that cause the decline of the Smooth Coneflower and promote the preservation of this beautiful and essential species. This preservation process includes counting, marking, and measuring every individual Smooth Coneflower within small plots.

Shane hopes to attend a conference by the end of the year in order to bring awareness to this important species to help it recover in its natural habitats.