{"id":14662,"date":"2019-05-28T16:47:52","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T16:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golive.clarku.edu\/news\/2019\/05\/28\/passionate-about-research-ram-sharma-19-surj-es-ahead\/"},"modified":"2025-04-04T14:23:21","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T18:23:21","slug":"passionate-about-research-ram-sharma-19-surj-es-ahead","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2019\/05\/28\/passionate-about-research-ram-sharma-19-surj-es-ahead\/","title":{"rendered":"Passionate about research, Ram Sharma \u201919 SURJ-es ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n            \n            <p class=\"intro news-subhead\">Editor puts his stamp on journal\u2019s look, breadth, and readership<\/p>\n            <p><html><body><\/p>\n Through the Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal, Ram Sharma &rsquo;19 says, &ldquo;We can boast of a community that is beginning to more accurately resemble Clark&rsquo;s vibrant research populace.&rdquo;\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In his introduction to the 2018-2019 volume of Clark&rsquo;s <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.clarku.edu\/surj\/\">Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal<\/a> (SURJ), outgoing editor-in-chief Ram Sharma &rsquo;19 notes some significant achievements that have taken place over the last year:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Journal readership has almost doubled<\/li>\n<li>More than 11,000 articles have been downloaded from the journal&rsquo;s website<\/li>\n<li>Approximately 40 additional Clark undergraduates have been involved with SURJ in a variety of capacities.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As a result, he writes, &ldquo;We can boast of a community that is beginning to more accurately resemble Clark&rsquo;s vibrant research populace.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Sharma, a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/academics\/undergraduate\/programs\/majors-minors\/philosophy\/\">philosophy<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/academics\/undergraduate\/programs\/majors-minors\/physics\/\">physics<\/a> double major, says each SURJ editor has an opportunity to put their own stamp on the journal. In his case, as the son of two graphic designers, he wanted to &ldquo;tweak the design so that it still resembles a journal, but is a little more risky in its look.&rdquo; He and the editorial board chose to align this year&rsquo;s issue of SURJ with the 50th anniversary of Clark&rsquo;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.clarku.edu\/research\/goddard\/\">Robert Hutchings Goddard Library<\/a> by including a two-page history of the library along with several photographs of the building.<\/p>\n<p>A member of Clark&rsquo;s honor society <a href=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/offices\/dean-of-college\/university-honor-societies\/gryphon-pleiades\/\">Gryphon &amp; Pleiades<\/a>, Sharma has worked to lay the foundation for several additional initiatives that would &ldquo;make SURJ central to undergraduate research on campus.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>To that end, he envisions a seminar series that would allow each of the seven faculty members of SURJ&rsquo;s advisory board to speak about their own research and address questions about the life of a researcher.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;There are things about research that we don&rsquo;t talk about,&rdquo; Sharma says. &ldquo;If I decide to do research, what am I looking at in life? What is the path? How does one deal with success and failure? How does one judge these things?&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Sharma would like to see SURJ sponsor an annual academic conference in which student and faculty research presentations are curated and arranged in a way that encourages small-group discussion.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the dialog I want to get into the guts of,&rdquo; he explains. &ldquo;I think the journal is the first step, but how do you build on it?&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Sharma, who also served as president of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ClarkUISA\">International Students Association<\/a>, envisions more journal articles that reflect the diversity of Clark&rsquo;s undergraduate researchers and the breadth of their research.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Submissions to SURJ are not equally spread through all disciplines; the number of STEM submissions, for example, is not representative of the incredible ongoing research on campus,&rdquo; he notes.<\/p>\n<p>Sharma found his way to Clark from Pune, India, a city of more than three million people located about three hours southeast of Mumbai. Despite that region&rsquo;s international reputation as a center of education and research, Sharma wanted to go somewhere &ldquo;radically different&rdquo; for his college education.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;At my age,&rdquo; says Sharma, &ldquo;you want to learn everything.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>In pursuit of that goal, he completed two honors theses, one in each of his majors. The first was based on research he&rsquo;s been conducting in soft-matter physics in the <a href=\"http:\/\/physics.clarku.edu\/~akudrolli\/nls.html\">research lab<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/www2.clarku.edu\/faculty\/facultybio.cfm?id=278\">Professor Arshad Kudrolli<\/a>. The second thesis, produced under the mentorship of associate professor of philosophy <a href=\"https:\/\/www2.clarku.edu\/faculty\/facultybio.cfm?id=803\">Ravi Sharma<\/a> (no relation), examined the &ldquo;Encomium of Helen,&rdquo; an attempt by the pre-Socratic sophist Gorgias to exonerate Helen of Troy from responsibility for the Trojan War. Sharma is intrigued by how the &ldquo;Encomium&rdquo; prompts larger questions about moral responsibility for one&rsquo;s actions, and the kind of knowledge needed before taking action.<\/p>\n<p>Sharma became involved with SURJ during his junior year, after meeting Alex Grayson &rsquo;18 in a philosophy of science course. Grayson,&nbsp; a SURJ editor, encouraged Sharma to apply to be on the editorial board.<\/p>\n<p>Sharma has passed the editor-in-chief baton to SURJ&rsquo;s current executive editor Shelby Spohn &rsquo;20. He&rsquo;s excited to see how Spohn puts her own stamp on SURJ. Since he&rsquo;s sticking around campus for another year to continue his physics studies through Clark&rsquo;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/academics\/accelerated-ba-masters-programs\/\">Accelerated B.A.\/Master&rsquo;s Program<\/a>, he&rsquo;ll be able to witness that progress firsthand.<\/body><\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editor puts his stamp on journal\u2019s look, breadth, and readership<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14663,"template":"","meta":{"story_color":"#525250","story_headerImg":14663,"section_label":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[223],"displayed_author":[381],"featured":[],"topic":[306,124,307,125,162,127],"class_list":["post-14662","story","type-story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clark-community","displayed_author-anne-gibson-ph-d-95","topic-major-in-philosophy","topic-major-in-physics","topic-philosophy","topic-physics","topic-research","topic-undergraduate-research"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.2 (Yoast SEO v27.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Passionate about research, Ram Sharma \u201919 SURJ-es ahead | ClarkU News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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