Ian Wong
In response to perceived violations of Hong Kong’s special autonomy, as enshrined in the “One China, Two Systems” framework, by mainland China, mass protests broke out in the city from 2019-2020. Viewing the city’s unique geopolitical position through cultural scripts, popular media framed the city’s pro-democracy movement in distinct ideological terms, stating that the residents of the financial hub were fighting for freedom and capitalism in the face of increased encroachment by “communist” mainland China. However, this tidy framework suggesting protestors took on right-leaning identities fails to account for the […]
Eva Hannan
My project follows two trends that have developed since the 1970s and appear to converge on the site of the imprisoned female body. The first trend is the globalized ‚Äúfeminization of labor,‚Äù where large numbers of women join the workforce. The second is the increasing number of females incarcerated within the United States. Specifically, I want to examine the rhetoric of records and documents concerning the female prison laborer. I am interested to see how the language that dictates the subjectivity of women in prison has shifted, as its population […]
Elina Wells
Immunosurveillance is the immune system’s ability to detect foreign pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses, and cancerous cells in the body. Many cancers evade immunosurveillance, through the use of mechanisms, which allow them to exist and spread undetected. Checkpoint blockade therapy – an immunotherapy treatment method in part developed at Berkeley – counters the “breaks” of immunosuppressive cells, imposed on inflammatory immune cells within the tumor microenvironment. Many current immunotherapies use Listeria monocytogenes as a way to induce immune cells that were previously exhausted to regain their effector phenotype and control […]
Diana Francis
Sleep behavior in Cassiopea, the upside-down jellyfish, challenges the common association between sleep and brain function. In lieu of a brain and centralized nervous system (CNS), Cassiopea has a decentralized net of ganglia that initiate pulsing activity at a slower rate during the night. My project seeks to understand how an animal that lacks a CNS undergoes a whole-body behavioral state change. More specifically, I will examine how this behavior affects the expression of several genes connected to sleep and activity using in situ hybridization and quantitative PCR. These genes […]
Kenneth Trang
Bacteria inhabit almost every surface on Earth, from tabletop to hydrothermal vents. Thus, it’s unsurprising that a diverse community of microbes also thrives within the human gut. However, these residents aren’t stowaways, as strong evidence has emerged in the last decade that a well-balanced community of gut bacteria is indispensable to human health. And yet, our understanding of the genetic factors involved in selecting what gut microbes can colonize and persist remain limited. This summer, I research the effect of host genetics on the composition of the gut-microbiome, focusing on […]
Heidi Yang
Adaptive radiations are rapid bursts of diversification of a single ancestor that give rise to many ecologically different species. While the ecological and evolutionary aspects have been extensively studied, little is known about the genomic mechanisms that produce such high genetic and phenotypic diversity. Transposable elements (TEs), DNA sequences that can change their position within a genome, are one potential genomic component, since they can quickly produce a wide variety of mutations when active. McClintock (1984) first proposed that TE activity may increase in response to “challenges to the genome.” […]
Sahar Zarafshan
The 26S proteasome is the last stop of the main protein degradation pathway in our cells, and it allows us to keep our bodies healthy by degrading old or non-functional proteins. The motor of the proteasome is responsible for engaging, unraveling and pulling the targeted protein into the core, where it is degraded. The pore loops, six in total, are located on the motor and are the parts of the proteasome that physically interact with the targeted protein. These six pore loops pull the protein to the core like hands […]
Owen Doyle
Alexandra Weiss
Compartmentalization lies at the heart of understanding cell biology. The eukaryotic cell is composed of organelles, each of which carries out a unique function. As the newly discovered complexity of the prokaryotic cell is becoming further understood, bacterial organelles are becoming an essential detail to comprehending how bacteria function. The Komeili group recently discovered a novel membrane-bound organelle called the ferrosome. It is hypothesized that the ferrosome may play a part in iron storage or bacterial stress response. Yet, the question remains: what is the function of the ferrosome? My […]
Eden McEwen
The twinkling of stars and other astronomical targets due to the Earth’s atmosphere is a long-standing disadvantage that ground-based telescopes face compared to their space-based peers. Large observatories have used adaptive optics (AO) to correct for atmospheric blurring, producing nearly diffraction-limited images. Ground layer AO (GLAO) seeks to apply corrections to a wider field of view than traditional AO by selectively targeting lower atmospheric layers. My SURF project will look at the last three years of data from the ‘imaka GLAO experiment to characterize the instrument’s correction over a variety […]