Oxford-bound senior collaborates on analysis of religion in the journal ‘International Organization’ “The Marginalization of Religion in
came to Lipscomb. Four years later,
Analysis of International Organization
intimidated by research when she first however, she finds herself not only
having produced a research project
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Her collaboration with Haynes on
(BA ’26), of South Africa, was quite
worthy of publication but also accepted to two universities with two of the
International Relations: A Content
(2000-2024),” explored how mainstream international relations scholarship treats the subject of religion.
Ajiboye conducted a content analysis
top graduate international relations
of the topic of religion in the academic
University and Kings College London.
one of the field’s most important
programs in the world: Oxford She chose to attend Oxford.
When she entered Associate
Professor Dr. Susan Haynes’ Research Methods course as a junior, she was
inspired by Haynes’ promise to include
journal International Organization,
journals, and categorized how religion was framed in 110 articles mentioning religion and published between 2000 and 2024.
“Our research asked whether
the top two students in the class in a
mainstream international relations
problem meeting that standard.
something that helps explain global
research project. She didn’t have any
scholarship treats religion seriously as
Four students publish Lippy Robotics’ latest work in deep reinforcement learning As part of Lipscomb’s rapidly growing undergraduate track in robotics engineering, four students were listed as authors on a recent article in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (AI), a multidisciplinary, open access journal that publishes peer-reviewed research on the development and real-world application of AI technologies. Ryan Vanderstelt (BS ’26), Cleiver Ruiz-Martinez (BS ’26), Blake Hull, senior, and Caeden Rosen, junior, were listed as authors along with their advisor on the project Dr. Juan Rojas, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Through his in-class and summer research with students, in the Lippy Robotics Undergraduate Research Lab, Rojas is using concepts of branched symmetries in computer coding, allowing the robot to replicate its past
experience with a task many times over and in many different ways, without
actually physically doing it that many
times, to figure out how to make robots
learn faster and learn from their mistakes on their own.
The article titled, Exploring Deep
Reinforcement Learning Acceleration by Superscaling Data Augmentation via
Branched Fractal Symmetries, outlines
the latest work Rojas and the students
politics? Or does it mostly ignore it and then panic slightly when it can’t ignore it anymore?” said Ajiboye. “My argument is that religion is not just neglected in international relations, but that it is treated unevenly.” Haynes also presented the work at the Christianity in International Relations Conference at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, and is working to find a publication avenue for the paper. “This is original research, done well, and I have never had another student that could produce quality work that would even be possible for joint publication,” Haynes said.
have done with Lipscomb’s state-of-the-art Franka Research Robot, a robot arm obtained in 2024 through a grant from the Louis R. Draughon Foundation. Vanderstelt and senior Gabe Everett also traveled to Vienna, Austria, in June to present the same work on the project at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation’s (ICRA) RoboARCH: Robotics Acceleration with Computing Hardware and Systems Workshop. According to Google Scholar metrics, ICRA is the premiere conference on robotics research around the world. Everett and senior Brice Gunter are taking up the continuation of the project as part of the 10-person student crew working with Rojas this summer.
ENGINEERING
Oreoluwa Sharon Omotola Ajiboye
A crew of 10 people are working with Dr. Juan Rojas (far right) this summer on coding robots to learn faster. Pictured here (l to r) are Brice Gunter, Gabe Everett, Ryan Vanderstelt and Cleiver Ruiz-Martinez.
LIPSCOMB.EDU/NOW
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