Jianhua Lim
The human body experiences various mechanical loads which cells respond to correspondingly to maintain homeostasis. However, drastic stimuli changes might lead to various diseases and degeneration. To enable regenerative medical strategies, we must first understand the connection between cell and organ mechanics. With this motivation, my mentor is developing a deformable microfluidic chip that can apply these mechanical loads to a single layer of cells. Currently, the chip is tailored for loads in the annulus fibrosus of the spine, but other systems with similar loading could be considered. The current […]
Cynthia Zhong
Lauren “Aris” Richardson
From infancy, people are told stories. The patterns, morals, and relationships in these stories help children form schemas to interpret the world. While cultures have prominent stories that are passed down to most children (e.g. Romeo and Juliet), people spontaneously invent narratives for purposes of entertainment, distraction, or teaching. My research aims to understand how androcentric bias (the bias that centers the experiences of men over the consideration of other genders) functions at an interpersonal, individual level during storytelling; more specifically, how a character’s agency or communality in a story […]
Joanna Veres
Being able to understand and predict the behavior of bovine intervertebral discs under different mechanical stresses is important because bovine discs are often used as a stand-in for human discs in disc biomechanics studies. Current computational methods of modeling stress and strain mechanics in the disc are very inconsistent because they are unable to reliably and accurately depict fiber mechanics, due to the fact that they treat a non-homogenous, fibrous part of the disc (the annulus fibrosis) as a homogenous structure. This newly developed computational model is better able to […]
Eric Li
Quantum computing is a new paradigm that could revolutionize how we process information. For these applications, it is critical that the systems can maintain quantum coherence for long periods of time. In this project, we will investigate new acoustic designs to extend quantum coherence in superconducting quantum qubits and nanomechanical resonators. At low temperatures where quantum devices operate, the dominant energy loss in acoustic and superconducting resonators occurs due to coupling to two-level-system defects. The goal of our research will be to engineer a platform that can be used to […]
Blake Stoner-Osborne
When mosquitoes bite a host, they extract blood as a source of nutrition for their eggs. The DNA contained within mosquito blood meals can be extracted and identified using a method called DNA metabarcoding. Millions of DNA sequences of known organisms are contained within bioinformatic databases and extracted DNA sequences can be matched up to these known sequences. Using DNA metabarcoding of mosquito blood meals, I will map out mosquito predation from 5 locations across the state of California to test the hypothesis that mosquito predation will vary across locations, […]