Dipin Kaur

While it is the largest democracy in the world, Indias human rights record with respect to conflict zones has been unsteady at best. In many areas of the country with past and ongoing conflicts, the commission of human rights violations of the government has been continuous and widespread. The failure of the Indian state to investigate these human rights abuses committed by its own departments has created a structure where, in these areas of conflict, basic human rights have been suspended and faith in the democratic system, the police and […]

Cory Gerrity

In Compton telescopes with crossstrip germanium detectors, interactions on the detector strip borders where charge is split between strips result in significant signal loss that degrades spectral resolution. Thus, modeling this charge loss mechanism is essential for making corrections and maximizing the resolving power of the instrument. Yet despite this, the mechanism is not entirely understood. My project seeks to model charge collection and transport in the detectors of the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), a balloonborne gamma ray telescope operated out of the Space Sciences Laboratory. The research hopes […]

Ruiyao Gong

The Dazu Rock Carving is the only Buddhist cave site in China representing the development of Buddhist teachings during the Song dynasty (960- 1279). My research mainly investigates the Buddhist statues of Dazu site, with a special focus on Mahamayuri Vidyaraja, or the Great Peacock King at Baodingshan, Dazu. The Great Peacock King, a deity who can cure all evils in Esoteric Buddhism and who always rides on a peacock, is rarely depicted in other Buddhist caves. Dazu has three statues of him, however, at Baodingshan, Northern Mountain and Shimen […]

Ching-Hsiu Hsu

A basic question in neurobiology research is how neural circuits are wired up to perform computations. A classic example of neural computation is that which underlies the visual systems ability to detect the direction of moving object. Input to the retina is encoded by photoreceptors, which are point detectors of light and by themselves cannot determine the direction an object moves. However at the output of the retina, there is a class of neurons that signal robustly when object moves in one direction over any other. These direction-selective cells have […]

Mallika Lal

Antibiotic resistance in the Enterobacteriaceae family, which includes Gram-negative bacteria E. coli and Klebsiella, has become a serious public health problem. Many bacteria of this family produce extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBLs), which are enzymes that can degrade most beta-lactam antibiotics. Therefore, carbapenems, a type of beta-lactam drug, are increasingly the drugs of last resort for ESBL-producing bacteria. However, an enzyme called Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC) threatens to render carbapenems completely ineffective, leaving few choices for treatment in patients with infections caused by KPC-producing species. In fact, the CDC has designated carbapenem-resistant […]

Joy Hsu

Several lines of evidence support a role for Natural Killer (NK) cells in the immune response to tumors. We recently found that PD-1, a receptor capable of powerfully suppressing the functions of T cells, is expressed by NK cells. However, the cellular networks responsible for PD-1 expression on NK cells are not known. Here, we propose to study the contribution of Regulatory T cells (Tregs) in inducing PD-1 expression on NK cells, by using both an ex vivo and in vivo approach. The proposed research plan will provide important knowledge […]

Billal Ahmed

Natural Killer (NK) cells are an important part of the Innate Immune System, surveying the body to recognize and eliminate cells determined to be abnormal. NK Cells can be activated through ligands that bind to excitatory receptors on the cell. The most well-studied excitatory ligands have been the NKG2D family of ligands, which bind to NKG2D receptors on NK Cells. Im using MCMV, Mouse Cytomegalovirus, as a model to study NKG2D ligand regulation in cells infected by viruses. M18, a protein in MCMV, by itself is necessary and sufficient for […]

Eliel Anttila

A worldwide abundance of glacially deposited sediments in early Neoproterozoic strata suggests the onset of a great global cooling event that began approximately 720 million years ago. Sometimes referred to as the Snowball Earth Hypothesis, this period of massive climactic change resulted in the propagation of glaciers at very low latitudes, and potentially covered the entire surface of the planet with ice. Determining the geographical, climatological, and biological changes that happened prior to the onset of this event can allow us to better understand the processes that led to such […]

Elena Martynova

Science is a synonym for analytical thought, rigor, meticulousness and rationality. However, some of the greatest scientific discoveries, inventions and even proofs relied on the complete opposite of that intuition. In mathematics, mother of all sciences, intuition is routine: there is no point in dedicating decades to proving a conjecture if one does not have an intuition that it is solvable. Existing research has approached intuition primarily through a linguistic lens; my research project will extend the reach of intuition to the domain of mathematical problem solving. More precisely, I […]

Giovanni Roman

My research project explores the role student-faculty interaction has on community college students and their goals to transfer to a four-year university. I am specifically focusing on Latina/o students who are more likely to attend community college and who are also one of the major underrepresented groups in four-year universities. This being said, however, there are also limits in homogenizing the entire group of Latina/o community college students. For this reason, I plan to look at Latina/o subgroups separately in order to get a deeper and meaningful understanding of each […]