Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk
Despite much progress that has been made, a troublesome racial hierarchy remains in the United States. How do power differences play out in cross-race friendships, where power may have unique or detrimental consequences? It has been found that cross-race friendships are less close. While some may aruge that this lack of closeness is due to race itself, I hope to discover whether an individual’s sense of power within a friendship may function to limit the sense of closeness they feel with the cross-race friend. By examining facial expressivity, hand movements, […]
Julia Elizabeth Himes
The blue ringed octopus (H. lunulata) is a highly toxic animal, secreting tetrodotoxin (TTX) as a means of defense and prey capture. H. lunulata is an important organism for studying toxicity and its role in behavior, evolution, and reef ecology. Today, these octopuses are taken from the wild for study, and few survive in captivity. The goal of this summer’s project is to design a method of rearing H. lunulata from egg to maturity. This is very difficult, as the paralarval hatchlings or this species are pelagic and require a […]
Gene Marie Tempest
My project examines the revolutionary role of the art students at the cole Nationale Suprieure des Beaux-Arts, France’s elite college of painting in Paris, and the historical significance of the posters they produced for the French student movement of May through June 1968. Of the 150,000 posters, I will primarily focus on those anti-fascist and anti-Nazi in scope, seeking to answer the question: What was the relationship between the soixante huitards (the sixty-eighters) and the memory of the collaboration years? Through oral history interviews I will engage the artists themselves […]
Monica Susana Hidalgo
The religious and phantasmagorical realms of Dantes Inferno and Hans Christian Andersens fairy tales have fascinated generations of readers to enter into a phantasmagorical realm whereby magic and metaphor camouflage a rather fanatic quest for redemption. Through physical mutilations and psychological torture, these stories have condemned fictional female subjects to punitive action as a means of depicting the omnipotence God. Through biographical and autobiographical records, textual analysis, and literary discourse surrounding Dante Alighieri and Hans Christian Andersens distinct authorships, my research seeks to further examine the ways by which these […]
Stephanie Shih
Linguists have studied text-setting and proposed metrical templates for mapping text to music; however, their pioneering works on the subject have neglected music outside the Western classical genre. My research will explore the influence of music on text in jazz bop swing, since the rhythmic and artistic nature of swing differs greatly from Western classical music. Through analyzing the coupling of the rhythms of spoken language and music, I will utilize the linguistic methods of templates, rules, and Optimality Theory to answer the question, “What is the rhythmic structure that […]
Scott Michael Coyle
Changes in cellular programming are often thought to be mediated by changes in regulation at the level of transcription. However, there is increasing evidence that changes in the regulation of translation may play an equally important role in the reprogramming process. In our lab, we have found that the transition from a vegetative to invasive physiology in the yeast S. cerevisiae requires a novel mode of regulation of translation. I recently identified a protein, Asc1, which is required for this transition and potentially acts directly at the level of translation. […]
Sudev Jay Sheth
Responding to an earlier work by ethnomusicologist Daniel M. Neuman entitled The Life of Music in North India (1980), my research topic aims at understanding how the life of music has evolved in the quarter-century since that seminal study was published. The creation of both public and private institutions of teaching, research, documentation, archiving, and performance have significantly increased since Neuman’s work. Accordingly, I will explore how they have impacted the life of music rather than accepting at the outset that they have played a favorable role. I will be […]
Erin Michelle Cooper
Marina Nasrin Sharifi
I am characterizing a set of Chlamydomonas insertional mutants defective in carotenoid biosynthesis using pigment analysis, genetic crosses, and TAIL-PCR to connect mutations in specific genes with specific blocks in carotenoid biosynthesis,with the goal of elucidating in detail one or more steps in the Chlamydomonas carotenoid biosynthesis pathway. A better understanding of this is not only important for the understanding of the process of photosynthesis in general, but also in the comparison of carotenoid biosynthesis in the model organism Chlamydomonas with that in higher plants, possibly revealing interesting evolutionary and […]
Stefanie Stella Como
Past research by Shelton, Richeson, and Salvatore (2005) has shown that minority group members feel less authentic interacting with people outside of their ethnic group than with their in-group. There are many reasons why people feel inauthentic during such interactions, but one likely part of the explanation is based on regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997). This theorizes that people interact with the world in two ways. People who are promotion focused gear themselves toward aspirations and gains; conversely, prevention focused people vigilantly avoid negative outcomes (Seibt & Forster, 2004). In […]