Annie Yau

Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) is a condition of glucose intolerance onset during pregnancy, and is associated with increased risk of complications during pregnancy and increased likelihood of bearing overweight infants. Worldwide GDM affects approximately 4% of women, and studies suggest that GDM may be more common in Indian women. Early screening and treatment of women with mild GDM has been shown to reduce the likelihood of complications during pregnancy and prevent the onset of type-2 diabetes. Given the growing public health concern of GDM and type 2 diabetes in India, […]

Nicholas Lue

FlK is an enzyme found in the soil bacterium Streptomyces cattleya, in which it confers resistance to the toxic metabolite fluoroacetate by breaking down its activated form, fluoroacetyl-CoA. Interestingly, FlK has evolved to discriminate between fluoroacetyl-CoA and its nonfluorinated analogue, the metabolically crucial acetyl-CoA, displaying a million-fold higher catalytic efficiency for the former. Although previous work has elucidated some of the mechanisms of fluorine specificity in FlK, the role of the arginine residue at site 120 (Arg120) has not yet been explored. Recent research suggests that Arg120s positively charged side […]

William Tokumaru

One of the most promising ways to create a universal quantum computer is using trapped ions. We confine ions in electromagnetic fields and store quantum information in them by addressing their internal and motional states with lasers. However, electric field noise emanating from the surface causes anomalous heating in these ions, creating noise which impedes quantum processing. One possible source of this is hydrocarbon contamination on the surface. My research will focus on identifying and characterizing the molecular structure of the contamination by probing its molecular bonds using a Fourier […]

Lynn Ly

Gene duplication is a driving force in evolution – the genetic redundancy created by a gene duplication event can enable one gene copy to rapidly accumulate mutations and take on new functions, while the other copy performs the original function. Previous studies suggest that large-scale genome duplication closely preceded major evolutionary events such as the divergence of vertebrates, but the exact occurrences and evolutionary consequences of gene duplication have yet to be fully understood. The model moss Physcomitrella patens contains three homologs of the gene EMF2, which appear to have […]

Joseph Tang

There is a growing need for the development of a clean, sustainable energy supply from renewable sources. Among the many options currently under investigation, a promising route involves the conversion of plant-based biomass into biofuels. In order for this process to be viable at an industrial scale, one of the steps that must be optimized is the conversion of biomass-derived chemicals into products that can be used as additives to existing fuels such as gasoline or diesel. In particular, the optimization of the hydrodeoxygenation of intermediate platform molecules is crucial […]

Wesley Marin

The amount of genomic information being gathered in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (NCBI SRA) has been increasing exponentially over the past 8 years. Although the volume of genomic data being stored has recently reached the 2000 terabyte mark, methods for analyzing these data have struggled to keep pace, especially in the area of reinterpreting sequence for highly variable genomic regions. My honors thesis work will focus on development of new methods for immunogenetic data analysis, creating interoperable systems based on publicly available data. This summers project involves the integration […]

Melissa Markowitz

The study of reproductive isolation, or the inability of two species to mate and produce fertile offspring, continues to be an area of groundbreaking evolutionary research. Both the mode of reproductive isolation (pre-zygotic or post-zygotic) and the genetic distances between species can tell us a great deal about when and how ancestral species diverged to form clades of distinct species. In order to uncover any patterns in pre-zygotic and post-zygotic isolation as species diverge, I will be studying the stage, timing, and sex-specific nature of reproductive isolation in Drosophila nasuta […]

Bao Nguyen

Alternative splicing is a fundamental mechanism used by higher eukaryotic organisms to produce different outcomes from the same gene transcript through selection of variable splice sites. Alternative splicing gives plants the ability to modulate gene expressions in order to conserve energy resources and optimize interactions with their environment. There are many different plant-specific alternative splicing events and while they have been catalogued on a genome-wide scale, there remains little detailed knowledge about the specific, molecular mechanisms of these pathways. I am interested in studying a plant-specific alternative splicing pathway discovered […]

Lucine Oganesian

Music is often considered a universal language, an important component of every culture. It is a complex natural stimulus, composed of a hierarchy of basic acoustic components. However, not much is known about how the human brain represents these components. This summer I will investigate the cortical representation of low-level acoustic features, such as pitch, tonality, and spectral (frequency) components. I will analyze functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data and map computational models of music to brain activity to understand the hierarchical organization of basic acoustic features in the human […]

Prithvi Pande

The undergraduate chemistry curricula at UC Berkeley has been undergoing a series of changes in the past years to update the experiments and increase their relevancy to students as they move on through their college careers. The main goals of this curriculum redesign are centered on creating experiments that give students an understanding and appreciation for green chemistry, and designing curricula that embodies authentic practice allowing students to experience science as it occurs outside the classroom setting and giving them insights into how research is realistically conducted. The project I […]