Jiahong (Benjamin) Zhang
Epilepsy currently afflicts more than 50 million people worldwide. While anti-epileptic drugs are effective at treating 70% of this population, the rest have to resort to invasive surgeries to alleviate their seizures. The electrical interactions of neurons in the brain are described by a set of stochastic partial differential equations. Seizures can be thought of as electrical waves propagating on the brain. In this project, I intend to manipulate the mathematical model to develop a new noninvasive way to control seizures in conjunction with a concept from physics called localization. […]
Dylan Grant
My project explores the intersection of notions of precarious labor with the depictions of office culture in the work of Douglas Coupland and David Foster Wallace. My approach focuses on the simultaneity of multiple conflicting forces as the driver of anxiety, an affliction that, at its root, results from uncertainty. The “turn” from the road of an earlier generation to the office suggests a turn from a “free” or open-ended life to a static existence, but we find in Coupland and Wallace office workers who are mobile and uprooted. The […]
Larry E. McDaniel Jr.
My research project will ask if a consistent classroom discourse on relevant curriculum to ones ethnic group, historical ethnic heritage, and cultural makeupspecifically African Americans in this caseis a powerful enough force to curtail or positively shift the behavior of African American adolescent students who display negative behavior in a classroom setting. This research is not to suggest that African American students are intrinsically ill behaved; thus, a curriculum needs to play the role of mediator. However, it is to acknowledge that these children, more often than not, bring economic […]
Nicholas Zobrist
Microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) are an emerging technology in the field of radiation detection and have broad applications in physics, including understanding star formation as well as directly detecting dark matter. MKIDs are particularly useful for their ability to be combined easily into the arrays of hundreds to thousands of sensors needed for these experiments. However, MKIDs have not reached the fundamental energy resolutions provided by other incumbent detector technologies like transition edge sensors or micro-calorimeters. We have proposed a design, which should increase the performance of these detectors, […]
Nicole Goldberg-Boltz
We are frequently required to halt or alter ongoing actions when an unexpected event is presented. For example, when we start crossing the street and we see an unanticipated car, we have to suddenly halt. In neuroscience, this sudden suppression of movement is referred to as response-inhibition. Response-inhibition deficits have been linked to disorders such as ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and substance use disorders. However, the exact neural pathways engaged in response inhibition are undefined, which I am interested in uncovering. For my project, I will focus on three proposed areas […]
Kari Miller
Discovering the genes underlying evolved morphological changes is a major goal of evolutionary biology. The threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) is an excellent model for dissecting the genes underlying evolutionary adaptation. Recent freshwater stickleback populations have evolved dramatic morphological changes relative to ancestral marine populations. I propose genetic analysis of freshwater gill raker reduction, a change in head skeletal bones known to be important in feeding on larger prey present in freshwater. Previous work has mapped gill raker reduction to multiple regions of the genome, including a strong-effect region (termed […]
Carolyn Zola
From 1923 to 1929, a period characterized by economic prosperity in the United States, Mather and Company created and distributed hundreds of motivational workplace posters that were hung in offices and factories across the country. Covering a broad range of topics, the posters sought not only to inform workers on matters related to workplace safety but also to redefine worker identity by using the language and ideology of the labor movement, while dramatically reshaping the meanings of such language. My research project, which will form the basis of my senior […]
Berk Brown
In search of methods to best galvanize people into healthy action, our modern culture has turned health and fitness into an industry that focuses primarily on external factors such as weight, shape, and sex appeal. Though these aesthetics may work at getting people into the gym, they have not been as successful at helping them stick to their exercise routines. Statistics have consistently indicated that 50% of those who begin an exercise program abandon such regimens within three to six months. For this reason my research aims to identify which […]
Edward Mogck
In the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. started to change the ways in which states engaged with those with mental illness and developmental disabilities. Broadly, these changes were part of a phenomena known as deinstitutionalization, where states sought to care for fewer mental patients and work towards incorporating them back into the community. California was at the forefront of this movement, ending many of its services for the mentally ill with the intention of shifting care to the communities. As a result, the early 1970s saw many of California’s mental […]
Jung-Eun Shin
Can there be too much of a good thing in biochemical systems? We propose that in a system where one component interacts with two different substrates, there can be too much of the dual substrate-binding component such that the rate of reaction will begin to decrease. To test this hypothesis, we study a model regulation system: small noncoding RNA have been identified that work to tune mRNA expression. Hfq is a protein that aids in formation of a small RNA-mRNA duplex. Hfq is the dual substrate-binding component, and the sRNAs […]