Justin Choe

Despite the growing prevalence of diabetes, the exact biological mechanisms leading to the onset of this disease still remain painfully unclear. Type 1 diabetes in particular is caused by an autoimmune attack to an individuals insulin secreting beta cells; this cell population cannot be regenerated and an adverse condition known as hyperglycemia ensues. The immune cells and chemokines present in the pancreas at the onset of this autoimmune response are of interest when considering this disease. Recent studies have suggested that the activity of a particular G-coupled protein receptor may […]

Katie Hitchcock

Since its foundation in the early 20th century, ethological research has provided countless fascinating insights into the evolutionary significance of animal behavior. While the adaptive importance of behavior is often well understood, its molecular causes are still poorly known. Behavioral adaptations are often driven by sexual selection, one extreme example has been found in the males of the black widow spider species, Latrodectus hasselti and L. geometricus. As the result of strong sexual selection, these Latrodectus species have evolved obligate sexual cannibalism in which males somersault their abdomen on the […]

Leonardino Digma

The leading hypothesis suggests that the progression of Alzheimers disease (AD), the major cause of dementia, is driven by the accumulation of misfolded amyloidB proteins into plaques within the brain. The presence of these plaques in some cognitively healthy adults has complicated our understanding of AD and has raised the question of what exactly triggers cognitive decline. Recent studies employing network theory have revealed that the answer may lie in the details of the disruption of the brain network by the amyloidB plaques. This summer I will use fMRI and […]

Jessica Hong

Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) is a process through which cells internalize pieces of their plasma membrane (PM) and extracellular substances. Cells regulate signal transduction, membrane homeostasis, and nutrient uptake through this ancient and highly-conserved pathway. Previous research demonstrated that type I myosins are critical for endocytic internalization. The yeast type I myosin Myo5 is composed of a motor head linked to a multi-domain tail. Myo5 motor activity is necessary for PM internalization, and its tail domains are predicted to bind various cellular structures. Little is known about the precise role of […]

Jennifer Ding

Speciation has long been studied in the field of evolutionary biology, but many questions remain regarding the specific genomic interactions between diverging species. To study the genetic events involved in the development of reproductive isolation and speciation, I will focus on the Drosophila nasuta fruit fly clade which is currently in the process of diverging. I will use molecular assays to characterize gene flow through experimental secondary contact between recently diverged Drosophina nasuta subspecies and draw conclusions about the level and type of reproductive isolation between the subspecies pairs. My […]

Michelle Antonucci

Vision is a vital sense that many people reply on to navigate through their daily lives, and yet people with amblyopia (commonly referred to as lazy eye) can have their vision and depth perception severely impacted by this condition. With my mentor in the Levi Lab, I sought to develop an effective treatment for astigmatism-related amblyopia and test it in a clinic trial. The treatment is a perceptual learning task where the patient looks at a computer that presents different orientations of a black and white pattern. The task of […]

Justin Fu

Robots are typically deployed in highly controlled environments, but for robots to become usable in everyday situations, they must be able to learn to adapt to the environment. Reinforcement learning is a popular framework in robotics for teaching robots motor skills in unknown environments through a trial-and-error process. Recently, methods have been developed that allow optimization of high-dimensional control policies, which enables the use of powerful tools from machine learning such as neural networks to decide on which actions the robot should take and when. My project involves using various […]

Renan Aparicio

The prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases has reached an unprecedented level and is now a prominent threat to the health and wellbeing of our aging population. As a result, the demand for effective therapies has become of paramount importance. Studying proteins involved in neurodegeneration allows researchers to outline cellular pathways leading to disease, which in turn helps provide targets for drug molecules. Recently, scientists discovered a link between different neurodegenerative diseases and specific point mutations in triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2). TREM2 is normally expressed at the cell […]

Daniel Jeong

Many recent studies have shown that the brains frontal cortex strongly modulates the information processed in the primary sensory cortices. A strong contributor of this modulation, each of the frontal cortical pyramidal neurons can project axons to multiple different brain regions (e.g., thalamus, midbrain, striatum, and other cortical areas) and therefore have fundamentally different roles. However, it is still unknown whether the frontal cortical pyramidal neurons innervating different targets receive inputs from overlapped brain regions or from segregated regions. My research will focus on the cingulate cortex (Cg), the frontal […]

Lawrence Bai

Found in many species of bacteria and archaea, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR associated (Cas) proteins provide an adaptive defense mechanism against foreign invaders such as viruses and plasmids. By integrating segments of the foreign DNA into the CRISPR locus of the host genome, the bacteria remember the invaders and can subsequently produce CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) to destroy the foreign DNA complementary to the crRNA. In particular, Cas9 plays a major role in using the short RNA as a guide to search for any DNA […]