Michelle Gallarza
The Northeast section of the San Fernando Valley is home to one of the largest populations of Latinos in the United States, second only to East Los Angeles.In contrast to the more well-known and affluent suburbs of the west Valley, this region faces issues stemming from poverty, residential segregation, environmental racism, and divestment. Meet Each Need with Dignity (MEND) is a poverty relief organization that has existed for over 40 years in the area’s most vulnerable community known as Pacoima. Michelle’s research seeks to uncover how this nonprofit organization has […]
Leilani Hunter
Leilani’s interest in glass bracelet fragments was sparked during the summer of 2013, when she participated in the Dhiban Archeological field school overseen by Professor Benjamin Porter. While discussing the potential for different artifacts to tell us about everyday life in the region, Leilani was intrigued by the sets of glass bracelet fragments that comprised a significant percentage of the excavated assemblage. Immediately her first questions began to form: Where were these bracelets made, how did they circulate, and come to be in Dhiban? Who wore them, and were they […]
Celia Cheung
Current Bio: After graduation, Celia spent a year researching abroad at Imperial College London, funded by the Whitaker Fellowship in biomedical engineering. In August 2016, she started medical school at UC Irvine, and is expected to graduate in June 2021. Currently, she is taking a year off to do more bioengineering research, but eventually plans to enter medical residency for pediatrics. Her passion is both for clinical practice as well as finding engineering solutions to unmet clinical needs. Haas Scholars Project: Alzheimers disease is the 6th leading cause of death […]
Lauren Grant
Catalysis, a critical field in synthetic chemistry, reduces the release of hazardous chemicals into the environment by decreasing the amount of reagents needed for chemical synthesis on industrial scales. Laurens research will investigate more sustainable methods of conducting chemical synthesis via the study of a new class of transition metal complexes based on niobium. In addition to being more sustainable than many alternate catalysts, niobium costs much less than other potential transition metals. With the collaboration of the Arnold Lab, Lauren will develop catalytic reactivity with the aim of synthesizing […]
Chad Martin Burns
In the mid-twentieth century, American cities constructed urban freeways in order to bring people from growing suburbs into the center of town. Urban freeways were a harbinger of municipalities giving priority to the needs of commuters versus city center residents. Today, one may ask: were urban freeways essential to the development of cities in a post-industrial era? What was the decision-making process for the location of freeways? Were quality of life implications part of the public dialogue? Chad plans to answer these questions by conducting a comparative historical analysis of […]
Wayne Jopanda
In Migrants for Export, Dr. Robyn Rodriguez describes the Philippines transformation into a Labor Brokerage State in which Filipinos are actively recruited to become Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). Wayne’s research examines how this system of labor brokerage has impacted the increasing undocumented Filipino population in the U.S. First, he will analyze the history of U.S. labor and immigration policies that allow for the exploitation of OFWs. Second, Wayne will study the advocacy efforts of OFWs and undocumented Filipinos to examine if these cases of labor exploitation lead to workers identifying […]
Samuel Diener
Samuel will investigate ways in which English writers of the 18th century, particularly Daniel Defoe, used accounts of piracy to question standard presuppositions about the emerging nation-state and promote Enlightenment ideas about government. As stateless individuals who lived and worked together, pirates were forced to create their own independent societies aboard ship and on land. Defoe used these pirate communities to experiment with ideas of statehood, freedom, property rights, and criminal acts, and to provide a comparison with the European nation-states which questioned the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise. In […]
Naphtalie Jeanty
The goal of Napthalie’s project is to see if male-identified homosociality or male-to-male sexual relations within black communities is something that can be traced among men in their gendered spheres of work during the 19th century through archaeology. She will participate in an excavation in Fort Davis, Texas, where Buffalo Soldiers were stationed from 1867 to 1891. She will be looking at primary documents and artifacts to see if any material evidence of bonds/relationships or sexual relationships among the African American soldiers can be found. Ultimately, evidence of these sorts […]
Bridget MacDonald
Children acquire complex knowledge about the world despite severely limited evidence available to them. While both children and adults use learned biases as a useful learning mechanism, children’s relatively small amount of prior knowledge results in fewer constraints on their hypothesis space as well as more open-minded approaches when considering possible causal relations. The prefrontal cortex of the brain is home to most executive functions that govern learning, yet the frontal lobes are the last area of the brain to fully develop. The eventual maturation of the prefrontal cortex builds […]
Matthew Phillip Kirschenbaum
Some are daily watchers, some click on a faulty URL, some start browsing during their pre-teens: most adults have seen pornography, and it is here to stay. After Porno Chic during the 1970s-1980s in which pornography was viewed in theaters, VHS pushed porn into the bedroom in the 1990s, provoking gay men to find private sexual outlets. Internet access has exacerbated this tendency, and at present, gay men in the United States encounter discourses of sexuality and H.I.V. through stigmatization and repression. For them, pornography is a social institution through […]