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Bigham a participant in Monmouth College's Kieft Summer Research Program

Monmouth, Ill. (07/30/2021) — Cal Bigham, a senior from Aledo, Illinois, was one of 12 Monmouth College students to participate in the school's Kieft Summer Research Program.

An intensive eight-week experience that gives students excellent preparation for graduate or professional school, the program was created after the College received an estate gift of $2.3 million from beloved chemistry professor Richard "Doc" Kieft, who died in 2009.

The title of Bigham's project was "Improvements to an Online, Interactive Text Analytics Dashboard for Academics."

Text analytics, including machine learning, can be an extremely powerful tool when used alongside traditional literature research methods. The overall motivation of Bigham's project is to make this type of text analysis accessible to more people within and outside academia, by making it usable from any web-connected device and allowing powerful machine learning capabilities. The goal is to use the existing tool for several real-life case studies, in the process testing it and adding features to improve usability, flexibility and interactivity.

Monmouth has used Kieft's gift to fund several elements that the late professor believed were essential: attracting strong science students to Monmouth through scholarships; providing them robust research opportunities once they matriculated; and facilitating their travel to regional and national conferences where they could present their research.

"All of this research time is invaluable to a student's education," said Monmouth chemistry Audra Goach. "Doc Kieft knew how important this experience was for our students and we are grateful for him every day."

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