Sean Sun
Cholesterol is an essential molecule to survival. Some of its functions include being a precursor to steroid hormones, a component of cell membranes and cell signalling. Without cholesterol, we would lose control of blood pressure and our body’s cells would fail to acquire nutrients necessary for survival. My project investigates Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome (SLOS), which is an inborn error of cholesterol synthesis. Because only one non-functional gene causes SLOS, we can apply gene therapy to integrate a functional gene into the genome of a SLOS cell. To date, we have improved […]
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 […]
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 […]