Monica Deza

Previous research in the Economic field has found that immigrants’ social, economic, educational and family decisions differ depending on whether they come permanently or temporarily, with important effects on earnings and income. Other work has demonstrated the effects of immigrant parents’ education and income on their children’s future outcomes. However, there is a notable gap between these two literatures: Previous studies have largely ignored the impacts of immigrants’ return migration plans on their children’s future earnings and human capital. My objective with this research is to combine these two existing […]

Cherie Hill

Currently in modern dance there are few successful black female choreographers and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder of the dance company Urban Bush Women, is one of them. In Zollar’s piece, Batty Moves, she combines theater and concert dance styles to create a work that invokes socio-political commentary on the stereotype that black women should have big butts, signifying hypersexuality. Cherie Hill’s project will include a content analysis of Batty Moves that will culminate into a choreographic production. In the analysis Cherie will be looking at how Zollar utilizes formal […]

Daniel Elias Zoughbie

During a recent stay in the West Bank, Daniel identified a staggering diabetes problem with serious gaps in treatment delivery and diabetes education. Consequently, he intends to establish and document approximately twenty micro-clinics composed of small groups of Palestinian diabetics meeting in designated houses or businesses for the purpose of diabetes education, screening, treatment, and monitoring. The main innovation is that each micro-clinic will share the prohibitive cost of maintaining a glucose monitoring device — an instrument readily available in the U.S. but rarely used in underdeveloped areas. This will […]

Mary Gardner

Tourism, as Jamaicas largest and fastest growing industry, is vital to the countrys growth and development. Montego Bay, the second largest city in Jamaica, is the tourist capital of the island. The juxtaposition of a large local and tourist population in Montego Bay has created a unique form of physical and material segregation. Mary’s research project will explore how this space and, along with it, the tourist experience, is produced through the forces of marketing by the tourist industry, the physical segregation from the rest of the city and the […]

Saul Wainwright

Since 1994 there has been an explosion of South African corporate investment into the rest of Africa. It is a unique brand of investment because it does not fit the traditional extractive type of investment seen in Africa. Instead, much of this investment is in the form of grocery stores, shopping malls, cell phones and banking. Saul will be exploring the motivations for these investments into what are typically high risk and unstable economies. One of the essential questions is why are the South African companies leading the charge? Saul […]

Alex Omar Bratkievich

There are strong indications that the factors influencing the alternation between existential (“There’s a book on the table”) and canonical (“A book is on the table”) constructions might be the same cross-linguistically; for example, existentials across languages exhibit the definiteness effect: indefinite Noun Phrases are preferred in pivot (post-verbal) position. Mikkelsen (2002) proposes that the effect is a consequence of constraints governing the subject position. Since the definiteness effect can be overridden, she suggests an analysis within the Optimality Theory framework to model constraint interaction relative to a hierarchy of […]

Christopher Jay van Belle

As a part of Steven Brenner’s lab, Chris will be analyzing a large set of novel sequences extracted from oceanic and other environmental microbes. Using computational methods such as Hidden Markov Model searches, he will compare novel environmental peptides to currently known peptides that are available in public databases like Ensembl, TIGR, and nr. Chris will help identify protein domains that are over- or under-represented in the ocean relative to the public datasets, as well as identify domains that may have crossed kingdom barriers. He will also investigate how these […]

Carrie Ann Bodley

Water is crucial to human existence and critical to social and economic development. What happens when this vital resource becomes enmeshed in a violent geo-political struggle? Israel has occupied the West Bank for thirty-seven years, maintaining control over West Bank water resources. Israel’s water infrastructure and technology are far more advanced than that of the Palestinians, which would seemingly benefit the latter. However the Palestinians and many in the international community argue otherwise. They argue that these policies are restrictive and prohibit Palestinian socio-economic development. Carrie’s project will take her […]

Mona Urbina

Mona’s proficiency as an environmental horticulturist and her interest in urban ecosystems led her to the Frankie lab, where she has been preparing pilot bee-gardens. Over time, urban sprawl has fragmented habitats necessary for the survival of California native bees and their natural host plants. Mona aims to document the most bee-attracting native plants to promote urban gardens that will provide new habitats and resources for native bees. She will survey bee-flower relationships at Mount Wanda at the John Muir National Monument (where exotic grasses are crowding out pollinator dependent […]

Tyler Shores

Tyler’s project will examine postmodern parody as a model of discourse, and will seek to account for parodys ubiquity in a specifically mass cultural context. Although parody is of course nothing new, there is something particularly of philosophical interest about postmodernist parody. By introducing the notion of subjectivity into the discussion, the focus will emphasize the more individual implications of postmodernist parodys effects, whereas much previous literature on the subject has tended to focus upon its ideological and political implications. The instances of parody which will be investigated will range […]