John Towey

Research on the decline of organized labor has tended to focus on the decreasing rates of union membership in the national or international context, while ignoring public support for organized labor. Those social scientists who have focused on union support, on the other hand, have not included union membership in their analyses. I will synthesize these two perspectives on de-unionization by analyzing 42 years of data from the General Social Survey that include measurements of both union membership status and support for organized labor. The 29 General Social Surveys conducted […]

Alex Mabanta

Indian Muslims, a recent UC Berkeley study discovers, are more likely to elect politicians who use Islamic symbols in campaign materials. This stands in contrast to Indian Hindus, who have no preference for candidates who appeal to their vote through Hindu symbols. Asymmetric outcomes, therefore, permeates how religious identities are politicized between India’s two largest religious populations: Hindus and Muslims. India, however, is a nation of enormous religious diversity. In consideration of religious politicization among Indias numerous religious minorities there is little to no research in the field of political […]

Leah Tyus

The mermaid has been symbolic of desire and danger, beauty and monstrosity, and the human and non-human. Residing in the constant flux of paradoxes, the mermaid remains a beautiful enigma to all that encounter her. She is perceived at a distance, yet remains within close proximity because she is our reflection. As a reflection of the self, the mermaid is a product of the human imagination, reconfigured and transformed to articulate our personal reality. There is more to the mermaid that promises truth, and I hypothesize the truth is in […]

Milan Amin

Temporal discrimination of acoustical signals plays a key role in how we perceive sounds. It affects the perception of loudness, timbre and pitch and it determines the rate at which we can parse phonemes in speech. A robust way to assess temporal integration is to determine the flicker-fusion rate: the rate at which a train of clicks is heard as a continuous sound with a low pitch instead of as a series of short sound elements. This rate is approximately 40Hz in humans corresponding to our lower bound of pitch […]

Lucy Ma

My research seeks to examine the functional consequences of locomotor experience. Current research insists that the onset of walking leads to psychological changes that have not been appreciated or expected. Some studies show that an infant’s receptive and productive language seem to improve dramatically after acquiring the ability to walk. However, critics are doubtful because this finding is based off of survey data gathered from parental report. I believe that a direct measure of infant language comprehension can serve as a converging research operation and provide more persuasive evidence. I […]

Joshua Varkel

I will be analyzing/making sense of a collection (~30,000 pieces) of lithic materials from a 20,000 year old archaeological site in the Azraq Basin of Jordan. I will then put all the information obtained from the lithic remains into a GIS and run various statistical and spatial analysis, which will allow me to quantify my results and help understand the structure of the site through time and space.

Cecily Manson

Within pantheistic ideology there is a clear, central conflict: the birth of a new deity poses a threat to the existing cosmic order. This complication will be my focus this summer as I perform close analyses of the Archaic Greek poems that have since provided the canonical representations of the Olympian pantheon: Hesiods Theogony and the Homeric Hymns. A specific episode in the Theogony known as the Typhonomachy will be my launch point for examining in greater depth female deities in their maternal role, and the way in which their […]

Winnie Yao

Necroptosis, a regulated form of necrotic (inflammatory) cell death, has been shown to naturally occur in activated T-cells, a type of white blood cell crucial in cell-mediated immunity. Presently, the death domain- containing kinase protein RIP1 is suggested to recruit the key necrotic regulator protein RIP3 to form a necrosome, a protein complex, and induce necroptosis under certain conditions in T cells; however, exactly how these two proteins interact with each other to mediate between the two cell death types, necroptosis and apoptosis, is not well understood. The molecular pathways […]

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 […]