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 […]

Amanda Sadra

My project focuses on the role of Coptic Christians in the ongoing Egyptian Revolution. Coptic Christians have a long history within the nation as the indigenous population, believed to have descended from the pharaohs themselves. The population has been largely marginalized in recent decades and prone to attacks of sectarian violence. This trend has been exacerbated since the January 25th Revolution of 2011. Through my research I hope to answer and clarify questions regarding the role of the Coptic Church members and clergy in the Revolution.

Jenkang Tao

Drugs of addiction use and “hijack” the neuronal systems normally used in reward learning, which makes finding a treatment specific for addiction highly problematic. Several biological markers of addiction have been identified and are potential treatment targets, but their relationship and role in addictive behavior remains unknown. One such marker is the cocaine and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) peptide that has been found to be upregulated in select groups of neurons in the brain following systemic injections of cocaine in animals. Although previous studies have characterized the CART peptide as a […]

Mariya Sakharova

In 1917, after 300 years of rule by the Romanovs, the Russian state collapsed. To understand the causes of the 1917 revolution, and the destabilization of the empire in 1905, the economics of agriculture are important to explore. After all, Russia was mostly an agricultural state and the peasant agriculturalists composed over two-thirds of the population. I am exploring how agricultural wealth was distributed during the late Tsarist period in the Central Black Earth region, an important political and agricultural center that underwent major famines and revolutionary activity. My study […]

Alyssa Tao

The immune system is the bodys way of responding to invading disease-causing microbes and mutation-induced tumor cells, which have the potential to become cancer. Thus, the immune response protects against both infectious disease and cancer, and its regulation and activation are extremely important for maintaining health. T-cells play a central role in the immune response both in recognition and in downstream pathways that lead to microbe or tumor destruction. A protein that is essential in the signaling cascade of the T-cell is ZAP-70 (Zeta-chain-associated protein kinase 70). I will be […]