Julissa Muniz

Today California has the largest womens prison population of the nation, with a population size of 6,409. Between 1972 to 2010, the number of women in correctional facilities nationwide increased by approximately 646%, the fastest growing prison group of the nation. In spite of these alarming numbers, little is known about the prison subculture that exists within California’s women correctional facilities. My research seeks to expand the male dominated discourse of incarceration by exploring how racial systems of social control operate within California’s correctional facilities through in-depth ethnographic research. The […]

Kiara Covarrubias

The Chinese Exclusion Act is considered the most racist law in U.S. history; it entailed quarantining immigrants for up to two years on Angel Island, resulting in a collection of poetry carved by the detainees onto the walls of the detention barracks. Given the tumultuous history of immigration from south of the border, where is this poetry for Mexican and Central American immigrants? While immigration has been extensively studied through various academic perspectives, the literature from the immigrants themselves has largely remained untouched. By identifying the trajectory of literature by […]

Catherine Nguyen

Members of the Burkholderia genus are Gram-negative intracellular bacteria that are highly pathogenic to humans and animals. Some species are capable of manipulating the actin cytoskeleton in eukaryotic cells for intracellular movement, which promotes cell-to-cell spread and evasion of the host immune system. However, the mechanism of actin nucleation is not understood. This project will determine how actin nucleation mediated by the conserved bacterial factor Burkholderia intracellular motility A (BimA), which is required for actin-based motility, differs among three Burkholderia species. Identification of BimA motifs that are important for actin-binding […]

Joseph DeRose

Type Ia supernovae are the thermonuclear explosions of critical mass white dwarves which have reached the Chandrasekar mass through accretion of mass from their binary companion. The near constancy of their maximum intrinsic brightness is the key to the use of these events in cosmological studies. Unfortunately, systematic errors associated with the diversity of type Ia supernovae continue to limit their usefulness as standard candles. I will use a very large spectroscopic and photometric data set gathered by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) in order to identify correlations between the […]

Nikolay Nichiporuk

After the tragic death of Kitty Genovese, a woman who was stabbed to death in front of several neighbors, a scientific investigation was made into the bystander effect. Bibb Latane of Columbia and John Darley of Princeton were the first to study the phenomena. Latane & Darley (1968) designed the classic bystander research paradigm where a comparison between helping rates of individuals who witness a crime versus a group of people who witness the same crime. Across their studies, they have found that 75% of people helped when faced with […]

Emily Doyle

I am currently exploring the question of the ways in which the phrase as if — as it appears in novels by Henry James, particularly What Maisie Knew — implicates integration into a social existence in which the curious and problematic acceptance of both reality and unreality is required of the self, particularly the pre-adolescent self. This is a vital question because, first, it offers a foundation from which to examine the complex interplay between several important novelistic factors: the self in relation to the other, the socialization of the […]

Alina Enoiu

Many communities in the San Francisco Bay Area struggle with food insecurity or the lack of access to healthy and affordable food, making them more likely to suffer from diet-related diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Because these communities have a base of corner stores where people already shop, such as liquor stores or other smaller-scale stores, bringing healthy options to local corner stores may be a more effective strategy than developing larger supermarkets. My project will examine whether the federal governments strategies of providing financial incentives to storeowners is […]

Scott Farley

Wildfires annually burn hundreds of thousands of acres of the Western United States, forcing mass evacuations, burning residences and costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Using a Geographic Information System (GIS), my project aims to model the wildfire potential of the Angeles National Forest, a large and diverse natural area just outside the city of Los Angeles. Considering variables such as fuel type and moisture content, temperature, precipitation, slope, and winds, I will determine the areas of the forest most conducive to a destructive fire. Using these ‘hot spots,’ I […]

Parinaz Fozouni

All animals share a common ancestor that underwent a transition to evolve multicellularity. To better understand this transition, we compare animals to choanoflagellates, their closest living relatives. Multicellular animals faced many challenges not shared by their unicellular ancestors. One such challenge was the evolution of mechanisms to defend against pathogens seeking to exploit the new niches present in a multicellular organism. My project aims to lay the groundwork for asking whether Toll-like receptors (TLRs), critical components of the innate immune system, evolved in the earliest animals to answer this challenge. […]

Xuchen Hu

Desiccation tolerance is an organisms ability to withstand removal of as much as 95% of its intracellular water and be able to resume normal metabolism upon rehydration. However the molecular basis for tolerance is not completely understood. Budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is one of the rare species that exhibit this amazing trait and is an excellent organism to study desiccation tolerance. Upon desiccation, yeast, like other desiccation tolerant organisms, accumulates the disaccharide trehalose. However, mutants that are unable to make trehalose exhibit significant tolerance, suggesting the existence of other molecules […]