DNA Storage, Black Maternal Health, Safe Water Storage Among Research on Display at Summer Research Expo

“Big companies have really large warehouses just full of computers to store data from the cloud,” Levine said. “And DNA, it can make [storage] much smaller, much more efficient.”

Fellows from The Marcon Institute, established in 2021, presented at the expo for the second time.

“The Marcon Mountain Hawks lead with radical love, and the Summer Research Expo offers each cohort their first opportunity to present their projects to the community,” Holona Ochs, director of Lehigh’s Marcon Institute and associate professor of political science, said. “The expo is the perfect time to engage with the community, share ideas and get feedback on their progress. This year the Marcon Institute is focused on challenging the mainstreaming of white supremacy through public facing and peer-reviewed scholarship, healing workshops, researching and implementing solutions to health and educational inequities and building antiracist solidarity to confront the rising hatred threatening democracy.”

Marcon Institute scholars who displayed projects included Aminata Coulibaly ’25, who presented her initial work on “Black Women Deserve To Grow Old.” Addressing health gaps by focusing on Black women’s maternal health is a topic she said she has been working on since high school, but didn’t get as far as she hoped due to interruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Marcon Institute provided her an opportunity to continue her work.

Her goal is to compose a paper with her research findings to help raise awareness about the topic.

“This is a topic that people tend to just brush under the rug,” Coulibaly said. “They don’t really pay attention to it, or when they hear about it, they tend to get scared, because it’s a really heavy topic. No one likes to talk about how Black women are suffering in America.”