Shreya Kareti
My project focuses on the French colonial presence in South Asia, focusing on the coastal town of Pondicherry, which was established as a French trading post (factory) in 1674 and relinquished to the Indian government only in 1954. Studies on French India are notably sparse in comparison with the significant scholarly attention that has been paid to British India and to French colonial holdings elsewhere. Because of this, I aim to complicate the narrative of a monolithic colonialism in India. I contend that the architecture and urban form of a […]
Palveen Sekhon
One crucial topic in ecology is understanding how animals respond to environmental pressures. My research aims to study the behavioral ecology of animal defenses in an evolutionary biology framework. Specifically, this project focuses on voluntary release of legs by arachnids. Although beneficial in the short term, this behavior can carry important negative consequences in the locomotion, physiology, and behavior of animals. Daddy long-legs are ideal for this research because of their unique morphology and behavior. Their accessibility also offers the possibility of performing extensive fieldwork and laboratory experiments in the […]
Seth Zhao
Privacy is one of the central issues of our time. All things being equal, we assume that most people prefer privacy; it is a foundational right enshrined in the penumbras of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments of the U.S. constitution as well as in several state constitutions (including those of California, Massachusetts, and Washington) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite our appreciation of privacy, police officers wear body cameras, customer loyalty programs track purchases, and the Transportation Safety Administration performs full body scans. This […]
Juan Flores
My project seeks to address how gang policing perpetuates divisions in fragmented communities, while jointly producing and reproducing criminality through the labeling of individuals as gang members. Gang policing claims to respond to conflict and rivalries between gangs, but how does this policing itself produce and perpetuate these divisions within the community? My argument will build on other scholarship but fill in the gap of how law enforcement, specifically gang police, continues to divide communities and their members. That there is no official definition of what it is to be […]
Noah Stevenson
Theoretical and experimental evidence suggests harnessing quantum mechanics to execute algorithms on qubit-based quantum hardware may allow for computation exponentially more powerful than is possible with classical computers. Characterizing how qubit states evolve in time is imperative for benchmarking quantum hardware; however, this has been difficult due to the inability to fully measure a quantum state without disrupting it. A solution is weak measurement, which recent work has improved for a single qubit by leveraging the data-processing power of a recurrent neural network (RNN). The time-evolution of qubits exchanging information […]
Jaime Zendejas
My research will focus on the development of a digital acoustic noise cancellation system. The system will be capable of taking recorded data, that has some amount of noise due to acoustic interference on it, and removing said noise from the data without affecting the data in any other way. This type of system is widely applicable to work done in many different STEM fields, but has particular importance in the field of physics. Many research projects in the field use some form of measurement of energy deposited into a […]
Mingyu Li
Neutrino-less double beta decay is a process that is forbidden in the current Standard Model of particle physics since it violates lepton number conservation. If observed, this type of decay can provide insight into fundamental neutrino properties, such as whether neutrinos are Majorana or Dirac fermions (i.e. whether they are their own anti-particles). This decay also provides information on the neutrino mass hierarchy and its mass scale. Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) is a leading experiment in this search and its successor, CUORE Upgrade with Particle ID (CUPID) […]
Nicholas Fujii
One crucial topic in ecology is understanding how animals respond to environmental pressures. My research aims to study the behavioral ecology of animal defenses in an evolutionary biology framework. Specifically, this project focuses on voluntary release of legs by arachnids. Although beneficial in the short term, this behavior can carry important negative consequences in the locomotion, physiology, and behavior of animals. Daddy long-legs are ideal for this research because of their unique morphology and behavior. Their accessibility also offers the possibility of performing extensive fieldwork and laboratory experiments in the […]
Keto, De Zhang
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are generally thought to be the thermonuclear disruption of a carbon-oxygen white-dwarf star, but their formation scenarios and exact progenitor systems are still ambiguous. SNe Ia are used as standardizable candles used for measuring distances in the universe. Famously, SNe Ia are being used to determine the acceleration at which the universe is expanding (i.e., Hubble constant). Knowing more about the formation and progenitor of SNe Ia may help correct some assumptions made when using SNe Ia to measure distances. The photospheric velocity of SNe […]
Nikhil Sahoo
In our research, we will use toric geometry to study the cohomological structure of complex Grassmannians. The cohomology ring of a Grassmannian varieties is described by the Littlewood-Richardson rule. One of the main open questions in Schubert calculus concerns the generalization of the Littlewood-Richardson rule to flag varieties. Such a generalization is highly desirable, because it is a manifestly positive formula that can be applied to other areas: in algebraic geometry, it helps describe complicated intersections; in representation theory, it helps to find irreducible, direct-sum decompositions of tensor products; in […]