Gregory Chin
Post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE), occurring after brain insult, is one of the most common epilepsies, affecting millions of people worldwide. The progression of PTE is marked by a period of neuronal network reorganization in which post-injury inflammatory responses are thought to contribute to a hyperexcitable neural environment, ultimately leading to chronic and spontaneous seizures. Previous research found that the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) during injury allows the serum protein albumin from the blood to enter the brain. Serum protein albumin binds selectively to transforming growth factor beta receptors (TGF-R) […]
Kaylee Mann
Many insects use ocelli to aid in determining their orientation in flight. Ocelli are a set of small eyes that are separate from the large compound ones on insects such as grasshoppers and dragonflies. We have designed a device that can be mounted on the head to optically stimulate these ocelli. Preliminary results show stimulation of these ocelli to be correlated with head movements. This summer, we will work to show that these movements correspond to a change in the insect’s perceived orientation and can be exploited to produce directed […]
Neil Thomas
Genetic inheritance is the mechanism for natural selection, and understanding it can give us insight into, for example, the heredity of disease immunity, and the genetic differences between males and females. Meiosis is the main process of genetic inheritance, shuffling the genes of parents to create the genes of offspring. During the process of meiosis, chromosomal DNA can split and trade nucleotides with each other while recombining. This recombination is a substantial additional source of genetic mutation, and has been shown to occur preferentially in certain hotspot locations on DNA. […]
Aditya Vignesh Venkatramani
Squeezed light is a quantum mechanical state of light with smaller uncertainty in a component of interest (i.e., amplitude or phase) than what is observed in classical light. This reduced uncertainty is equivalent to reducing noise in the component of interest, which thereby allows ultraprecision measurements. Parametric Amplifiers are devices that can generate squeezed light. Experiments have shown that these devices have some non-ideal behaviour, but there is insufficient data to rigorously characterize these non-idealities. This project aims at developing efficient and fast methods to quantitatively measure the squeezed microwaves […]
Asia Tallino
Urban Agriculture has been proclaimed around the world in the past few decades as an extremely effective method for not only providing food to a community, but also for providing jobs & more stable income generation. As the majority of the populations in the world are projected to live in cities by 2030, urban agriculture is becoming more recognized for poverty alleviation. However, in many places, such as Pikine, a city in the Dakar region of Senegal, urban farmers are struggling to find the economic support and land they need […]
Caitlin Lowe
King Henry VIIIs split with the Catholic Church in 1534 brought about the social and political turmoil known as the English Reformation. This religiously tumultuous time period was made more challenging by a resurgence of the Black Death. In order to study the social, political, and emotional responses to the politically imposed mass religious conversion of England during the English Reformation, I plan to research Early Modern print books that involve the Bubonic Plague. I’m asking the questions, how can literature be used to express doubt in a society ruled […]
Natasha vonKaenel
In Argentina, during the economic meltdown of 2001, many factory owners fled the country, leaving hundreds of workers with no income and no clear idea of what lie ahead. In the months that followed, workers centered in Buenos Aires occupied their factory buildings and restarted production as a worker-owned cooperatively managed workplace. Some of these factories created Cultural Centers, hoping to make their factory a hub for the local community by providing health services, teaching classes, or holding art exhibitions or craft fairs. This research will focus on how an […]
Matthew Boggess
Everyday actions require both the selection of the correct action and then the correct execution of this action. For example, when playing tennis, one has to both select the correct stroke to use and then correctly execute this stroke. The basal ganglia and cerebellum are two systems in the brain thought to be responsible for action selection and execution respectively. My research aims to develop a computational model of these two systems in order to investigate how they interact to produce complex motor actions. This model will be biologically constrained […]
Jimmy Yin
With a prevalence of about 18% of the American adult population, anxiety disorders are an increasingly important focus of mental health research. Such disorders can severely diminish the quality of an individuals daily life. In both the animal and human literature, fear conditioning has provided an important model of the abnormal development of learned fear responses associated with anxiety disorders. One important question has been whether anxiety is characterized by greater generalization of fear responses. This is typically examined by testing stimuli that vary along some dimension in similarity from […]
Yu-Han Serena Ma
In the early twentieth century Japan stood at the apex of East Asia. It ceased to be a secluded island and became an empire that stretched from Sakhalin to Taiwan, an empire that even the West feared. However, securing the empire required the Japanese state to turn away from territorial expansion and to focus on articulating a national identity appropriate for the new empire. To assure the Japanese people of its continuity and legitimacy, this national identity had to be built upon the past. History textbooks, therefore, became one of […]