April 3, 2019

This paid piece is sponsored by Augustana University.

More than 70 students representing Augustana’s academic areas of study will present original research at the 2019 Arthur Olsen Student Symposium on Saturday, April 6.

Attendees can expect to see a range of research topics covering diverse topics such as artificial intelligence, religion, disease research and agriculture. View the full list of presentations.

This year’s committee chair, biology professor Dr. Carrie Olson-Manning, credits Augustana for providing research opportunities to every student.

“It is experiential learning,” she said. “The students are not just wrestling with ideas — they are actually creating new knowledge.”

Former Washington Post editor Kaeti Hinck, a 2007 Augustana graduate, will be the keynote speaker.

Hinck is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Her presentation, “Ghosts in the machine: How technology is shaping our behaviors, what we believe and how we live,” will discuss how neuroscience and psychology can inform the news ecosystem and reshape approaches to product design, visual journalism and trust.

Before her fellowship, Hinck led a team of visual journalists, developers and data reporters at The Washington Post. She was involved with some of the newspaper’s most ambitious projects, including investigations about unsolved murders, segregation in America, drug industry corruption and police shootings. Hinck previously worked as the design director at the Institute for Nonprofit News and has explored the power of visual communication, technology and design in newsrooms for more than a decade.

The Arthur Olsen Student Research Symposium is a gathering that fosters and celebrates student research at the university. The structure of the symposium follows that of a traditional academic conference, and Augustana students from all disciplines are invited and encouraged to present their original research in this forum.

In 2015, the family of Dr. Arthur Olsen made an endowed gift to support the Augustana Symposium and student research. In honor of that gift and in tribute to Olsen’s many contributions to the campus community and student research, the Augustana Symposium was renamed the Arthur Olsen Student Research Symposium.

Registration for this year’s symposium begins at 9:30 a.m., with the keynote beginning at 10 a.m. in the Hamre Recital Hall, Fryxell Humanities Center. This event is free and open to the public. For a schedule of events, click here.