Amit Akula
The California Report Card (CRC) is a social media platform that collects public feedback on timely issues and uses a peer-to-peer evaluation network to filter for the most constructive and insightful comments provided. Already successfully deployed with over 8000 visits, the CRC has already indicated high public interest in disaster preparedness. My lab is working to create a new version of the CRC focused on disaster preparedness. We hope to use the CRC as a tool to foster public awareness and dialogue around earthquake safety and wildfire prevention. Since the […]
Grace Lee
Retrotransposons are sections of our DNA that can replicate and insert themselves into our genome to create duplicates and invite mutations. They make up around 40% of our genome, yet their roles in most biological pathways is not yet completely understood. We see a significant derepression of certain retrotransposons when we analyze the expressions levels of retrotransposons in cancer cells. This derepression tells us that they are activated and take part in tumorigenesis, though the precise mechanism is unclear. To begin to understand these retransposons, we must first develop an […]
Taylor A. Vega
The brain, the seat of cognitive and behavioral control, and the mechanisms that give rise to these thoughts and behaviors are still widely unknown. My research aims at exploring the neural circuits that aid in our everyday decisions and behavior. Using electroencephalography (EEG) as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we are examining neural oscillations in the alpha band (8-12 Hz) and its relationship in regulating the integration of information over large cortical areas, specifically in the fronto-parietal salience network as well as activity in the default mode network. […]
Meghana Eswarappa
“Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral disease that places about three billion people at risk for infection yearly in tropical and sub-tropical regions worldwide. Infected individuals can be asymptomatic, or they can show clinical disease, including an acute debilitating fever (Dengue Fever) that can progress to life-threatening conditions of severe dengue, including Dengue Shock Syndrome (DSS). The goal of this research is to investigate whether cell-free nucleic acids in patient serum can serve as biomarkers to distinguish between cases of mild and severe dengue disease. I will accomplish this by characterizing […]
Yaul Perez-Stable Husni
Past attempts to define the prose poem as a genre depend on the oppositional status of prose and poetry, thinking then of the prose poem as a space for synthesis. However, because these accounts imagine stable definitions of prose and poetry, specific prose poems can only invokeand not reconfigurethose definitions. Through literary analysis, I will trace the development of the prose poem in American literature in the twentieth century, with attention to how individual literary texts rework the aforementioned opposition between prose and poetry, and how these texts in turn […]
Sean Khalifehzadeh
When student-athletes are in the midst of managing their athletic and academic obligations, what factors contribute to higher rates of graduation success? Looking at the academic readiness of student-athletes, the culture of the campus, and academic support, I will attempt to understand how student-athletes from two UCs navigate through the academic rigors of a research university in addition to fulfilling their personal and contractual obligations as athletes. Employing a mixed-methods approach, using both surveys and interviews, I will attempt to study what athletes feel works for them, and what doesnt. […]
Anneliise Rehn
The pace and nature of language change has significant impact on everything from grammar textbooks to natural language processing. With the internet providing new and inventive avenues for this change, we have an opportunity and a necessity to study these avenues. My SURF project researches a new grammatical construction which has emerged on the internet wherein because can be followed by a single word, usually a noun, but in some cases an adjective or interjection. I will create a database with quantitative and qualitative data, a sub-corpus extracted from the […]
Alexander N. Kraft
The Hardy Boys series of young adult mystery stories began publication in 1927. At the same time, psychologists were beginning to view adolescence as a stage of development distinct from childhood and adulthood, the concept of generational identity was gaining traction in popular discourse, and the hard-boiled genre of mystery novel was in its early developmental stages. Hardy Boys novels were published yearly throughout most of the twentieth century, both recording and influencing the development of models of youth, the new concept of teenagerhood developed in the forties, and the […]
Christina Shih
I intend to study how oncogenic stress weakens and kill animals using the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, because currently it is not clear how and why cancer kills animals. It is known that cancer patients suffer with cachexia, the major loss of fat tissue and skeletal muscle mass, which is a significant factor in increased mortality rate in cancer patients. I have already established a working system by expressing an oncogene Ras in the intestinal stem cells of adult flies to induce cancer. In order to manipulate additional genes in […]
Priya Kshirsagar
An algebraic variety is a generalization of a solution set to a family of polynomial equations. De Concini and Procesi developed a canonical method of compactifying any symmetric variety. This resulting compactification, called the wonderful compactification, has many favorable algebraic and geometric properties. Alexeev and Brion developed a method of degenerating any spherical variety to a toric variety. Many tools, such as combinatorics, can be used to study toric varieties in great detail. Thus, my main goal is to develop and study toric degenerations of the wonderful compactification. Eventually, I […]