Anthony Principe-Contreras

My research focuses on Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” Vuong incorporates the epistolary form–narrated by his protagonist, Little Dog, to his mother–to elucidate how Little Dog explores his identity in 21st-century New England as the son of a Vietnamese immigrant. My research will consider how Vuong’s novel integrates scholarship from post-colonial studies, queer and gender studies, and most notably, studies of the novel form. By examining the novel through this diversified lens, I will argue that its contents mimics the social conditions we see in America […]

Giancarlo Tucci-Berube

In the realm of poetry, lyric, as a noun, signifies a category of poetic form, as an adjective, abstract subjectivity. The Italian poet, screenwriter, film director, and essayist-critic Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) takes up these definitions of lyric and through a diversity of mediums expands them beyond poetry, and beyond mere signification: articulating a possible critical consciousness of the concept itself. Pasolinis poetry and films are conceived through a lyric style or form that actively connects sensuality, rigorous thought, intellectual and political critique, experience of contradictionand in terms of the […]

Mason Haberle

Numerical linear algebra underlies much of the modern world. It is essential to a wide variety of situations, and, as such, it is of great interest to analyze and optimize the underlying algorithms. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in optimizing algorithms to reduce communication, which is frequently many orders of magnitude slower than performing calculations. The Hlder-Brascamp-Lieb inequality and the Red-Blue Pebbling Game are two powerful approaches to theoretical analysis of communication, and both are used to derive communication optimal lower bounds. Once these bounds have […]

Maple Wang

Mussels have the ability to adhere to wet surfaces through the byssus, a collection of protein-based threads, that are formed by the mussels foot. My graduate student mentor and I will investigate the use of mussel-inspired adhesive moieties to enhance contact and retention of polymers on mucosal tissues. In particular, I plan to use our mucoadhesive drug-loaded particles to explore the new concept of drug-induced regenerative medicine, wherein adult mammals are able to regenerate tissues in a scarless manner. The resulting mucoadhesive polymers will be useful in the future for […]

Kaamya Talwar Sharma

My research will examine queer subjectivity in urban India, focusing on the role of virtual spaces in the development of queer identities. Through interviews and virtual participant observation, my project will use a sociological, post-constructivist, post-colonial approach to explore what the process of realization of ones non-heterosexuality feels like in urban India. Specifically, how do globalization and class, as well as the associated language, discourses, and interaction with queer spaces, affect the queer urban Indians experience of sexuality? Related questions include how and why online and offline discourses on lesbian, […]

Bryan Chavez Castro

By examining the intersection of sound and image, this research will trace the convergence of popular music and Salvadoran literary and artistic traditions both at home and in the diaspora, with a particular focus on its engagement with images of violence. Drawing from the cultural production of the years of the Salvadoran civil war (1980-1992) and the postwar, I will track emblematic cultural objects that affront the reality of repression of the years leading up to the war, the bloodshed of the war, and the reverberations in the years that […]

David Noble

Post-transcriptional regulation is vital for cell survival and proliferation in diverse environments, but little is understood about the underlying regulatory networks or their mechanisms. Regulation of mRNA expression is an essential process in cells that involves RNA binding proteins targeting mRNAs to change their localization, expression, and stability. These RNA binding proteins do not act in isolation; they are often involved in various pathways that also regulate their function. Our lab group has designed and performed numerous high-throughput screens to collect data about genes and proteins involved in post-transcriptional regulation […]

Minjune Hwang

In recent years, rapid growth in self-driving vehicles was largely enabled by breakthroughs in computer vision and reinforcement learning (RL). Current research focuses on applications of RL-based, model-free methods through simulation rather than classical model-based optimization. However, model-free algorithms often fail to generalize beyond the environment in which it was trained. For instance, self-driving cars trained in a regular urban environment will suffer to drive safely and efficiently in road environments in developing countries where traffic signals do not exist, roads are under-structured, and drivers drive under implicit rules. Subsequently, […]

Katherine Roger

My research aims to understand the impact of invasive plant species on multi-level ecological relationships i.e. how do (or dont) invasive plants change the relational landscape of a region? To address this question, Ill be looking at the tripartite relationships between 1) native and non-native plant species, 2) butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera), and 3) the microbiota that live within butterfly and moth guts. Each of these relationships has coevolved through time, and I am curious to see how changing species assemblages impact not just individuals, but the tightly woven networks […]

Mason Sakamoto

Stem cells have been heralded as the future of medicine for their ability to develop into new tissues, repair regions damaged by disease or injury, and give rise to entirely new organisms. However, in order to fully harness the power of stem cells, we must first understand the environmental cues responsible for the cells behavior. Evidence is accumulating that the fate of stem cells is tightly controlled not only by biochemical signals but also by biophysical cues within the tissue microenvironment. This finding is particularly pertinent in human embryonic development […]