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By Abigail Lauten-Scrivner, UM News Service

MISSOULA – Growing up on a ranch west of Missoula, �����ؿ� junior Joseph Knudsen’s childhood was spent tending horses, running off coyotes and learning how to keep the animals healthy. 

“That’s where I got my first taste of science and medicine, working with the family vet,” Knudsen said. 

After exploring different careers, including stints as a veterinary assistant, auto body worker, personal trainer, leather worker and phlebotomist, Knudsen landed in UM’s pre-medical sciences program, pursuing a chemistry degree and biology minor.

“I took a lot of years to figure out what I wanted to do, and medicine was what I always oriented back to and what was fulfilling to me,” Knudsen said.

As an undergraduate, Knudsen has leveraged UM’s assets as a “R1” top-tier research institution to help move his career ambitions toward fruition. He took advantage of the University's 13:1 student-faculty ratio by building authentic relationships with professors, got experience with research early by joining a lab as a first-year student and participated in UM’s Conference on Undergraduate Research the past two years. 

UMCUR is UM’s annual showcase celebrating achievements in undergraduate research, creative scholarship and experiential learning. The 24th annual installment will take place all day Friday, April 25, in the University Center, with a variety of oral presentations followed by a Q&A, poster exhibitions with audience discussion and several types of performances.  

“A major offering of the Office of Undergraduate Research is to guide students through what I call the ‘Three Cs’ of research and creative activities: conceptualizing the project, conducting the project and communicating the project with different audiences,” said Dr. Catalina de Onís, Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship director. 

“UMCUR strives to provide a convenient, accessible and well-supported multidisciplinary gathering for students to translate their projects for general audiences with the goal of moving people to care about their research and creative activities, including why their project matters and for whom,” Onís said.

Including Knudsen’s, the conference received a record 141 submissions this year from across campus. Presentation topics range from biological studies and Indigenous languages to environmental litigation and much more. 

“A lot of the professors are pretty accommodating,” Knudsen said of finding research opportunities as an undergraduate. “You have more of a chance to stand out here, because you're not in a room with 200 people.”

Joining Dr. Lu Hu’s atmospheric chemistry lab his first year allowed Knudsen to become the main contributor to the , which he built, programmed and installed atop the Missoula Public Library.

Hu’s lab researches atmospheric organic chemistry and air pollution, improving understanding of the atmosphere’s chemical composition and how it is impacted by human activities and natural processes. He encourages undergraduates to seek out research opportunities, as he did with Knudsen when they met in his preparation for chemistry class. Knudsen struck Hu as a determined and capable student. 

“It’s OK to approach faculty and see if there’s a position in the lab,” Hu said. “Some students may think they need to wait till year three or maybe senior year. I think starting early on, like Joseph, you should do that. Take advantage of being R1. There are so many fantastic labs doing all kinds of phenomenal things.”

Knudsen enjoyed the puzzle of building the HART Station from the ground up. It now collects meteorological and particulate matter data, helping alleviate information gaps, communicate the importance of air quality studies and understand the potential health risks of pollution. Knudsen also created a display at the library’s spectrUM’s Discovery Area so kids can visualize the data in a way that is engaging and understandable to young minds. 

“Joseph finished the HART Station very fast, but he spent time trying to get it technically right,” Hu said. “We essentially gave him some directions, and he took all the rest of the initiative. I think his work is equivalent to first-year or second-year graduate students’ work.”

Knudsen presented on the HART Station at UMCUR last year, translating the “how” and the “why” of the project for the general public. Ultimately, he clinched best oral presentation.

“I was pretty shocked,” Knudsen said. “I was sprinting around like everyone is at the end of the semester, and my phone dinged. I’d forgotten almost entirely that I’d entered into UMCUR. It was a nice surprise.

“Lu was excited too,” Knudsen added. “He’s always supportive as a mentor.”

At UMCUR this year, Knudsen will present his subsequent project with the atmospheric chemistry group: building instrumentation for a mobile laboratory that quantifies prescribed-burn pollution compounds in forest fire emissions. The modular design lets the lab to be put in either a vehicle or aircraft, facilitating readings from close to a fire’s source or in the thick of smoke. 

The data will help build better models for planning prescribed burns to reduce emissions and minimize public health impacts. Knudsen was awarded funding by NASA’s �����ؿ� Space Grant Consortium for the project, as well as the HART Station.

Knudsen saw his work in action last October, heading out with the lab on a sunny day to two controlled burns in UM’s Lubrecht Experimental Forest. 

“We got to be very close to the fire, coasting right alongside the fire crews,” he said. “It was pretty exciting to see all that work come to life and start collecting real information that’s going to be used in modeling and other studies.”

Knudsen’s UMCUR presentation will discuss the mobile laboratory’s details, preliminary data and how the project will play out over the long term, potentially impacting the way land is managed and prescribed burns are conducted to mitigate increasing wildfires.

“(The data) has very real ramifications for how we interact with nature and combat the climate change crisis,” he said. “It’s a huge interdisciplinary effort to use prescribed burns to minimize wildfires, but it also ties back to Indigenous means of land management that was the original way people existed in the Pacific Northwest. 

“Hopefully we can move toward a more sustainable future,” he added. 

Knudsen hopes to broaden his education by working in other labs to learn more about immunology and drug design. After graduating, he plans to pursue medical school and obtain a MD-Ph.D. with the intent to become a cardiothoracic surgeon and medical researcher. 

Participating in undergraduate research and presenting at UMCUR has helped him to pursue his goals, Knudsen said, noting that he would recommend other undergraduates to consider participating in UMCUR to help hone their ambitions. 

“You really don’t know what research looks like until you’ve done something like this – it gives you the full ark of research and lets people decide if they want to do this or not,” he said. “It's a real opportunity to grow and push yourself to rise to the occasion and not just work in science, but also be able to communicate it.”

A complete schedule of UMCUR events and presentations is available online. UMCUR is free and open to the public. 

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Contact: Dave Kuntz, UM director of strategic communications, 406-243-5659, dave.kuntz@umontana.edu.