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 […]
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 […]