Fran Meyer
The paleoclimate of the Ordovician period (485 to 444 million years ago) is of particular interest to geologists and paleontologists because of a great biodiversification event followed by a mass extinction associated with a global glaciation. To answer why there was such a drastic change in climate, we must first understand when these trends began. While it is well-established that the beginning of the period was characterized by a warm climate and the end of the period by a major glaciation, the trajectory of cooling is poorly known. For this […]
Siddharth Chittaranjan
Microbes pose a wide spectrum of nonpathogenic and pathogenic challenges for the immune system. The encounters are governed by the interactions between the bacteriums adaptations and the hosts ability to mount a protective immune response. Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct) is an especially unique pathogen as the infections it causes in the genital tract are typically asymptomatic. While this suggests that Ct possesses an effective set of tools to cloak itself as a lesser threat to the immune system, these tools still vary in success, as Ct strains elicit different immune responses […]
Zihao Li
In the past few decades, due to the strict implementation of the one-child policy in China, it had been almost impossible to conduct any research related to having a second child. However, China has been gradually relaxing this policy. Since November 2011, parents who are both the only child in their families may have two children. Since December 2013, couples in which only one parent is the only child may have two children. Finally, since October 2015, all couples are allowed to have two children. This policy change provides a […]
Tia Cheunkarndee
Autophagy is a process of self-eating by which the cell targets specific cargo for degradation. While autophagy was initially believed to primarily be a response to stress or starvation, it is now known that it also plays important roles in cellular homeostasis and organismal development. This process can happen either non-selectively, where cargo is degraded randomly in bulk, or selectively, where degradation of a specific cargo, such as a protein aggregate, organelle, or pathogen, is specified by an autophagy receptor. In budding yeast, selective autophagy of the endoplasmic reticulum is […]
Jinen (Timothy) Guo
Quantum algorithms that take advantage of principles of quantum mechanics are able to solve certain problems (e.g. factorization of a large integer) much more efficiently than classical algorithms. One of the most promising candidates for qubit (the equivalent of a classical bit in quantum computing) implementation is the trapped ion. Although there have been promising results in trapped ion quantum information processing (QIP), it involves extensive use of lasers in cooling, readout, and qubit operations, which makes it challenging to scale up the system to many qubits. My research will […]
Arya Haghighi
The inhibition of glutathione, a buffer which maintains redox balance in neural cells, has recently been implicated as part of the pathology of multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic and debilitating neurological disease. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy is a non-invasive technique which can quantitatively measure glutathione, amongst other metabolites, in the brain using the semi-localized by adiabatic selective refocusing sequence (SLASER) and J-Difference Editing (JDE). This proposal aims to apply this technique to image the concentration of various metabolites implicated in the regulation of redox potentials in the central nervous system on […]
Maryn Sanders
The unique site of Antelope Valley River near Williams, California has for a few years been a place of interest and research because of the distinct sedimentary layering and the very regular pattern of hills and hollows. In the winter of 2017, a huge storm came through the site and induced four hundred landslides. Another storm then followed in the winter of 2019 at a much lesser degree of strength compared to the 2017 storm; however, it caused only about a hundred landslides, but all in new regions. The seemingly […]
Ryan Lee
Understanding the nature of insulating behavior in solids has long been an important problem in condensed matter physics and materials science. It is unclear how the electrons in many materials behave in their environment, where an atomic lattice and other electrons play a role in shaping their mechanics. As the use of insulators is commonplace, explaining their behavior will help us apply them in even more ways. Understanding the behavior of electrons in an insulator can additionally answer fundamental questions in physics, especially with regards to the quantum mechanics of […]
Erika Page
How does a modern social movement, dedicated to land reform in one of the worlds most inequitable societies, put its ecological and socialist ideology into practice in the Brazilian countryside? Through agroecology, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement Movimento Sem Terra (MST) offers an alternative to conventional agro-industrial farming strategies that have marginalized rural workers; created dependencies upon cash crops and agro-chemicals with extensive ecological costs; and failed to solve the issue of global hunger. Agroecological farming systems operate in accordance with ecological principles in ways that are socially, environmentally and […]
Junhao Fan
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 […]