4D team members 8th grade homeschool student, Cadence Boucher, and Shaunna Morrison presented their collaborative work on the Network analysis of Virginia’s minerals at the Mineralogical Society of DC on Sept. 4, 2019. This work began a little more than a year ago when Cadence became interested in characterizing Virginia’s mineralogy for a science fair. However, her project has become much bigger than we ever imagined! Working closely with Ahmed Eleish, PhD student in Data Science at RPI, and other members of the 4D team, including Bob Hazen and Shaunna Morrison, Cadence has done detailed work in collecting and curating a database of Virginia’s minerals, advanced coding and network analysis on her database, presented her findings at AGU in 2018, and is currently working with Ahmed and Shaunna to write up her results for a peer-reviewed journal! After publication of this work, Cadence plans to tackle new approaches to understanding mineralogy with machine learning and advanced visualization techniques.
