Cynthia Houng
This study seeks to understand how residents of the San Francisco Bay Area constructed definitions of Nature in the late 20th century, and how that construct in turn affected the development of the Bay Area landscape between 1940 and 1980, focusing specifically upon the construction and utilization of Bay Area parks. The dynamic interplay between designer and user reveals something of how humans relate to their environment as the park is physically adapted to shifting definitions of landscape and nature. Providing an entry point through which scholars can begin to […]
Saori Haigo
The coordination of cell movement is an integral process in development, affecting morphological shape as well as cell fate specification. While the importance of this process has been long realized, the molecular regulation of cell movement remains poorly understood. Saori plans to investigate the roles of two genes, fuzzy (fy) and inturned (in), in establishing cell polarity during convergent extension movements in the early frog embryo. Convergent extension is the process by which a population of cells redistributes itself by converging along one axis, thereby elongating along the perpendicular axis. […]
June L. Gruber
The primary objective of this project will be to examine the way in which patients diagnosed with schizophrenia use language to describe their subjective emotional experiences. Using a clinical interview, the Schedule for Deficit Syndrome, patients with schizophrenia will be asked to provide a brief narrative of salient emotional experiences in their lives (e.g. what makes you happy?). Trained research assistants will then transcribe and code the videotaped interview. Through the results of the study, the researcher hopes to shed light on the way in which emotion affects linguistic properties […]
Benjamin Goldstein
The recent growth of the Fair Trade coffee niche market in the United States suggests that consumers are beginning to concern themselves with the social conditions under which their coffee was produced. Fair Trade coffee consumers accept that the Generic Fairtrade Standards established by the International Fairtrade Labeling Organization (FLO) provide certain de jure guarantees regarding production conditions. Yet what is the de facto situation within the coffee cooperatives? Benjamin will travel to a Fair Trade certified coffee cooperative in Guatemala this summer to investigate the grassroots application of the […]
Margaret Zvanut
Emotional contagion is defined as the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and movement with those of another person. It is a major means by which one human being comes to feel and behave in the same fashion as another, and may be fundamental to empathy and prosocial behavior. For Maggie’s Senior Honors Thesis in Psychology, she will study whether emotional contagion can be seen in young human infants. To conduct this research, she will videotape infants of different ages (4 to 12 months) interacting with […]
Oron Frenkel
Pushed aside by a tradition of Cartesian dualism, the mystery of consciousness has recently resurfaced as a problem on the cutting edge of intellectual thought. My expanded honors thesis for Systems Biology will investigate if we can better understand what consciousness is, based on processes occurring throughout the whole organism, instead of just inside the brain. I will evaluate the ability of modern theories and experiments on brain processes to account for findings outside of neuroscience that suggest consciousness to exist on an organismal level. I hope to explore alternative […]
Jennifer Toole
Jennifer plans to write an English honors thesis that will comparatively analyze Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. She is interested in how these two writers censored sexuality in their writing even though their substantial income gave them the option of self-publication. Jennifer will explore what combination of social pressures and inward conflicts led to this. By combining historical contextualization with an intense critical analysis of the published texts as well as the drafts, manuscripts, and personal correspondences drawn from archives at Yale and the University of Sussex, she hopes to […]
Shanesha R. F. Brooks
Exploring the lyrical conversation between the jazz and blues poetry of Langston Hughes and contemporary hip-hop musicians, Shanesha will analyze the musical techniques and poetic structure of Hughess poetry and the lyrics of musicians Black Star and Jazzmatazz, musical poets who contribute to what she calls the New Poetic Genre. Identifying parallels between the socio-political and historical contexts of Hughes and of these contemporary musicians, Shanesha will research the consciousnesses conjured from resistance, the search for identity, and the subsequent struggle for self-expression. As a double major in English and […]
Timoteo Rodríguez
Throughout Mesoamerica the effects of archaeological practice and the prospect of tourism on communal farmlands have caused native communities and foreign scholars to interact in roles ranging from adversarial to collaborative. A major in social/cultural anthropology, Timoteo’s project is to examine the relationships of North American archaeologists to the Maya farming communities of Chunchucmil and Kochol in rural Yucatan, Mexico. The local communal farmland is a largely unexcavated, non-touristy ancient Maya archaeological site embedded with tens of thousands of artifacts and dozens of pyramids. Archaeologists seasonally conduct research in this […]
Elizabeth Bremner
Localization of biologically relevant stimuli in the world is a basic feature of sensory systems and is well studied for visual and auditory stimuli. It is well known that mammals are very sensitive to odors and can trace them to their sources, but it is not well studied nor understood whether this localization can be accomplished egocentricallythat is, with the head kept stationary. For her Senior Honors Thesis in Psychology, Elizabeth will evaluate the abilities of humans to egocentrically pinpoint odor sources in space. She will first address the behavioral […]