INK, NC State’s undergraduate research journal, is making a comeback of sorts with a new team of student editors.

When the journal began publishing in 2004, it was the first undergraduate research journal in North Carolina. After going strong for several years, it went out of print in 2012 after the previous year’s editors graduated and there were low numbers of content submissions. But this past February, the former directors were contacted by a student interested in reviving the journal. 

That student, David Nacouzi, a senior studying physics and applied math, saw a need for undergrads to have a place to share their hard work with the broader NC State and Triangle community. Under Nacouzi and the rest of the student editorial board, INK will publish both STEM research and humanities content.  

The Technician sat down with Nacouzi to talk about how he came to be at the helm of INK, as well as his plans for the future of the journal. 

Q: How did you get involved with INK? 

A: I was interested in submitting my research, and they were holding off because they were understaffed, but after a bit I saw that it wasn’t there anymore. I tried to see if I could become editor or at least see how I could get involved in trying to start it back up. They said, ‘If you want to become editor-in-chief, you can do that,’ and so along with Ashle Page, my co-editor, we’re going to start it up again with the help of Dr. [Chris] Ashwell and Judy Day and Heather King, who’ve been providing everything to help us out. 

Q: What is the status of INK now? 

A: We’re taking submissions right now, and I think we’re going to stop taking submissions for a little bit because we have older submissions that have been sitting there, and we still want to get that out because those students worked hard. We’re going to have peer and faculty reviewers to make sure, obviously, anything that gets published is accurate and that there’s no fatal flaws in whatever’s being submitted. So if that goes as planned then we’ll try and publish by the end of the semester. After that it’ll be a semester-by-semester publication.

Q: What was the subject of your research and how did you get involved in that? 

A: I’ve actually had two research tracks. Freshman year I started doing solid state physics research with Jack Rowe. I worked with a lot of XPS and AFM machines — it’s X-ray photoelectric spectroscopy, a fancy name for using the photoelectric effect and analyzing samples. It’s pretty cool stuff. And then I realized I wanted to take a look at doing more biophysics because I’ve been interested in medicine for a while. Right now I’m doing single-cell epigenetic research. So essentially the goal of the group that I’m working with right now, Dr. [Robert] Riehn, is we’re trying to find a precise manner in which we can map a cell’s genome so you can identify quite quickly the traits that would suggest a cancerous gene or a mutation or things of that sort. 

Q: Is that related to the Human Genome Project? 

A: It’s similar in the sense that we’re trying to map a gene to identify traits that could identify an illness down the road for someone. We’re essentially trying to map a gene and find out any information that could really help them either by prevention or treatment.

Q: What disciplines will INK focus on? 

A: This is pretty cool because instead of just doing STEM, we’re going to include arts and humanities. Just because it’s done in a lab doesn’t mean that’s the only way you can get into our journal. People who spend hours doing their work inside and outside of a studio or wherever, that work should be showcased too. 

Q: Does that include social science research such as studies relating to gender?

A: Absolutely. Literally anything that’s original work by the students we’re going to try and publish. Something I never knew about NC State, and this was my own fault because I just didn’t have any exposure to it, is just how cool the things are that students are doing behind the scenes. And when I say behind the scenes, I mean all the time that they dedicate to their own projects and passions — that’s what we want to showcase. These kids are you know, 17, 18 and they’re contributing to life-changing research. That’s why I got into it. Then I realized also that there are students who spend hours on their projects in the humanities, and I’m just not an artistic person so I don’t understand those sorts of things but these students work brutally hard to come up with great ideas, great projects, and people need to see that. 

Q: Do students get class credit in addition to being published? 

A: There are classes that give you credit for independent research, both in STEM and humanities, but the reason I really wanted to do this was because for students in STEM, it’s so competitive that you really want to try to get published as an undergrad and the hard part of that is that your professor is putting their name with you on a paper and that speaks to their credibility too so it has to be perfectly accurate information as far as you can help it. That’s kind of intimidating, so I wanted to try to introduce a stepping stone to give students the confidence that, if they can pass our requirements for review, then that’s a great thing, and you should be lauded for. 

Q: Do students have any other outlets for that kind of research here? 

A: Yeah. One thing I’ve been really active with, and I absolutely love are the research symposiums. You do your research, you compile your data, you make analyses and you combine that into a poster. It’s a huge part of the undergrad research community. There’s talks that you can go give also, but everything needs to be on paper, it needs to be organized and it needs to be clear and that’s where we come in. People need to know that they can publish eventually in a professional paper and they should have some sort of progression towards that. 

Q: Coming from a STEM background, are you going to have an editor whose background is in humanities to manage that side of the journal? 

A: Absolutely. We’re going to be working with the Undergraduate Research Council, but I actually missed a meeting with them because I was in the lab. We’re going to try and have an editor of sorts for each field because even though I may be “specialized” in physics just because I study it that in no way means I’m suitable to critique someone who does general relativity research. We’re going to try to get as specialized as we can and that’s also why we’re going to have faculty mentors too. 

Q: Who will make up your staff? 

A: The staff that we would have is the directors, Heather King, Judy Day and Chris Ashwell. In terms of review board, graphic design and those sorts of things we’ll just have to recruit. We’ve already had interest; I know a bunch of people in STEM that I would trust to be on that board. We want that peer review aspect, we want students reading each other’s work. That’s integral. Worse comes to worst, if we find a paper that’s really interesting but it’s completely out of our reach then we’ll try to contact someone here who’s a specialist in that field. 

Q: What would you say to future readers of INK? 

A: Feel free to send us your work, and we’ll take a look at it. I’m just excited that this is going to be around again because, I hate to say it, but there is a stigma that undergrads are lesser than grad students which in terms of experience in school, that’s true, but there’s people who are brilliant. And you don’t even have to be brilliant, you just work hard and have a goal.