Christine Wong
The improvement of photovoltaic materials is currently a major concern for further development of sustainable energy devices such as solar cells. This summer, I will be developing high mobility, high work function transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) for such photovoltaic devices. These materials will have minimal parasitic absorption and resistive losses, and their application will be useful in increasing photovoltaic device efficiency. I will also be characterizing the TCOs using x-ray diffraction (XRD), UV-vis spectroscopy, and Hall measurements, and studying their evolution under rapid thermal annealing (RTA) in order to prepare […]
Neil Thomas
Bottom-dwelling marine animals produce microscopic larvae that are dispersed to new habitats via ocean currents. In order to direct their movements and settle on a suitable site, suspended larvae must respond to physical cues from the turbulent flow forces that act on them. Understanding the flow types that larvae are subjected to and their response patterns can give us insight into trends in marine larvae dispersion. To conduct this research, mesofluidic devices are built to simulate fluid flow around marine larvae, and their responses are recorded and analyzed. My project […]
David Taylor
The barrel cortex, a structure found in the brains of mice, plays an important role in processing sensory input from whiskers. Mice rely heavily on their whiskers to perceive the environment, and this makes the barrel cortex an attractive model for studying sensory processing. At this time, many connections between the barrel cortex and other brain regions are only superficially known. Using a double viral injection technique, I will specifically label the subset of barrel cortex neurons that project axons to the striatum, a structure associated with several functions including […]
Robert Potter
Mycobacterium tuberculosis manipulates the host response to prevent bactericidal mechanisms and promote its own survival. AKT is one enzyme that has been linked to proliferation of M. tuberculosis within its target. As a serine/threonine protein kinase, AKT is an important enzyme in signal transduction pathways for apoptosis. Inhibition of AKT during infection leads to increase bacterial death. By looking at the downstream effects of the AKT pathway, our goal is to determine, why? This will be accomplished by using site directed mutagenesis to create multiple alterations to the structure of […]
Henry Pham
Recorded in literature, it has been observed that mud banks can dampen overpassing waves, absorbing the energy stored in the waves. In the Theoretical and Applied Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, team members have built an artificial seabed carpet coupled with dampers and springs acting vertically at various locations on the carpet to mimic the effect of a muddy seafloor. I will be investigating methods to optimize the parameters of the carpet which include designing a power take off system, spring stiffness and damping coefficient of the carpet as well as many […]
Gregory Phillips
As nascent proteins are synthesized, specific polypeptide sequences can interact with the ribosome exit tunnel to arrest translation, effectively stalling the ribosome. Importantly, stalling is sometimes dependent on small molecules raising the possibility that drugs may be designed to inhibit the synthesis of specific proteins implicated in disease. My research aims to explore the question of how both the amino acid sequence of a nascent polypeptide and the presence of a small molecule interact with the ribosome to arrest elongation. Specifically, the Arginine Attenuator Peptide elicits elongation arrest in the […]
Ryan Rezvani
G-Protein coupled receptors (GPCRs for short) are a class of membrane proteins that bind to a specific chemical stimulus, an interaction which then initiates a cellular response pathway. Such a mechanism is present in most eukaryotic organisms, where it governs over processes like olfactory responses, neurochemical signal reception from chemical compounds, or the systematic release of hormones. The manipulation of GPCR-mediated pathways can allow for novel cellular responses to a ligand of choice, a phenomenon that can be expanded to the scale of a whole nervous system if implemented uniformly […]
Joshua Saul
Many organisms have the potential to regenerate damaged tissues; however, this potential decreases as the organism ages. Using the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, I will perform a screen to identify genes that are involved in up-regulating or down-regulating regeneration in damaged tissues as the organism ages. To conduct this screen, we have developed a new genetic ablation system that allows us to damage wing tissue in the developing fly at precise timings, as well as to express or knockdown any gene of interest in the damaged tissue. By scoring the […]
Camillia Azimi
In the Raulet lab, we are interested in studying the ability of a subset of innate lymphocytes called Natural Killer (NK) cells to respond to stimulation (responsiveness). NK cell responsiveness mainly depends on their ability to engage with a family of proteins called Major Histocompatability Complex Class I (MHC-I) molecules commonly expressed throughout the body. However, whether a particular cell type is responsible for setting the levels of NK cell responsiveness is still outstanding. During the summer, I will develop part of a bigger project aimed in identifying the cellular […]
Rachel Agoglia
Understanding the genetic mechanisms that underlie morphological evolution is a long-standing goal in biology. The threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) is an emerging model organism with features ideal for studying the molecular basis of morphological evolution. Several stickleback populations display evolved differences in tooth number, likely adaptive to match different diets. These differences in tooth number are largely controlled by a Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL), a genomic region controlling a quantitative trait. This QTL is located on chromosome 21 and contains an excellent candidate gene: Bone Morphogenetic Protein 6 (Bmp6). I […]