Learning physics in any context, including undergraduate research experiences, requires learning its concepts and the relational structure between those new concepts with what students already know. We use concept maps, a knowledge elicitation method, for assessing mentees' and mentors' knowledge structures during Research Experience for Undergraduates programs. The study looked at maps from seven mentor-mentee pairs to understand how mentors and mentees use specific knowledge and strategies during the development of their concept maps. A qualitative analysis of the maps showed mentors and mentees differed in their ways of organizing and displaying their knowledge in terms of structure, scale, language, and use of conceptual and procedural knowledge. For instance, mentees used more procedural knowledge. It is perhaps due to their perception of finishing their Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) projects and the fact that they may have only limited and superficial knowledge of specific topics. However, mentors maps were smaller but more significant in using more comprehensive conceptual knowledge and connecting their maps to the broader scientific context.

In the Summer of 2020, as COVID-19 limited in-person research opportunities and created additional barriers for many students, institutions either canceled or remotely hosted their Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs. The present longitudinal qualitative phenomenographic study was designed to explore some of the tools, communities, norms, and division of labor that make up the remote research program and some of the possible limitations, challenges, and outcomes of this remote experience. Within the context of the undergraduate research program, the paper makes a comparison between outcomes of the remote and in-person research experience. Overall, 94 interviews were conducted with paired participants; mentees (N=10) and mentors (N=8) from six different REU programs. By drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory as a framework, our study has explained the remote format has not opened a gap between mentees' research and academic objectives from the REU program and what they got at the end. All mentees reported that this experience was highly beneficial. Comparisons between the outcomes of the remote REU and the published outcomes of in-person UREs revealed many similar benefits of undergraduate research. Our study suggests that remote research programs could be considered as a means to expand access to research experiences for some students even after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.

Physics is a degree that supports many career paths, and students often develop preferences for particular methods, such as theoretical, computational or experimental. However, it is not well understood how those preferences develop and affect students' later career decisions. We used Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) as the basis for interpreting students' decision-making processes. SCCT provides a framework for connecting learning experiences, self-efficacy, and outcome expectations with students' interests, goals, and decisions. Semi-structured interviews with 8 physics students were conducted. This analysis focuses primarily on a single student to provide space to explore all three method specializations (theory, computation, and experiment) in more depth. We find that the availability of resources and learning opportunities had a significant impact on students' career choices. Theoretical and computational experiences were readily available through classwork, undergraduate research, and could be worked on at home and in peer study groups. Students lacked the ability to work on experimental physics outside of infrequent classroom opportunities and could not build peer networks that supported their experimental skill growth, which was linked to lower interest and self-efficacy in regards to experimental physics.

In this project, we sought to uncover the cognitive processes and skills that are involved in completing a theoretical physics project. Theoretical physics is often portrayed as a field requiring individual genius and can seem inaccessible to undergraduate students, as well as the public. We drew upon the foundations of Cognitive Task Analysis and completed semi-structured interviews with eleven theoretical physics faculty members from several different research institutions who specialized in subfields including quantum optics, biophysics, computational astrophysics, and string theory. We analyzed the processes and skills of these physicists, focusing on an analysis of idea origin, which is typically the first cognitive process within a project, and how it was connected to collaboration and motivation. We used concept maps to organize these codes and portray the factors that influence the creation of project ideas. We found that motivation and collaboration are fundamental determinants of project ideas and their origins, which contradicts the "lone genius" stereotype. These findings on cognitive processes and skills can help us understand how to better prepare students to do theoretical physics research. Finally, the information gathered during this project may be useful for improving the public understanding of theoretical physics, dispelling the belief that the field requires "genius," and making it accessible to more students.

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) often leads to heart failure and an early death, with upwards of 70% of DCM considered idiopathic. The responsible mechanisms, including for congenital DCM, often are not known. The sequential process of extracellularly facing enzymatic protein glycosylation is altered in human DCM and in individuals with DCM risk factors. However, it is not known whether such altered glycosylation is pathogenic or subsequent to DCM onset, nor are mechanisms understood. The importance of glycosylation is further highlighted by the observation that a significant percentage of patients with congenital disorders of glycosylation present with cardiac deficits including DCM of unknown etiology. Previously we showed that changes in sialic acid levels (typically, the terminal glycan residue) attached to specific voltage‐gated ion channel isoforms (VGIC) impact cardiac electrical signaling through electrostatic mechanisms, with these same changes in protein sialylation also causing stress‐induced HF, further suggesting a link between altered glycosylation and aberrant heart function. However, without availability and use of appropriate models, evidence that links, mechanistically, altered glycosylation to heart disease remains largely circumstantial. Thus, here, we created a cardiomyocyte‐specific knockout strain of a single glycosyltransferase gene (GTKO) whose expression was shown to be altered in human end‐stage idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy. The GTKO mice present with altered myocyte VGIC gating, action potential waveforms, Ca 2+ handling, Ca 2+ spark activity and contractility, that together contribute to DCM deteriorating into HF with 100% dying early. The data demonstrate that reductions in N‐glycosylation achieved through cardiomyocyte‐specific deletion of a single glycosyltransferase impacts whole‐heart and myocyte functions, drawing a direct link between changes in myocyte N‐glycosylation and heart disease. Thus, this specific GTKO strain provides the first model to investigate the relationship between glycosylation and cardiac disease, showing that clinically relevant changes in cardiomyocyte complex N‐glycosylation are sufficient to cause dilated cardiomyopathy that deteriorates into heart failure and early death. Support or Funding Information This work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation [IOS‐1146882, IOS‐1660926 and CMMI‐1266331; E.S.B.]; an American Heart Association, Greater Southeast Affiliate Grant‐In‐Aid [14GRNT20450148; E.S.B.] and Postdoctoral Fellowship [15POST25710010; A.R.E.]; and a grant from the National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute [1R01HL102171‐03; E.S.B.]. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .