Michelle Soto-Melgar
Have you ever wondered why governments pass risky legislation–legislation that is likely to fail and goes against an administration’s own livelihood? My research will focus on symbolic law and the practicality of day labor solicitation ordinances. In the late 2000s, day labor solicitation bans emerged as an attempt to police and drive out Latino day workers from their communities. Many of these bans were legally challenged, ruled unconstitutional, and stopped from ever going into effect. Despite the legal challenges, some administrations pursued this regulation anyway, costing them millions in legal […]
Wendy Wan
Superconducting qubits, typically made from conventional metals such as aluminum or indium, are one of the best candidates for scalable quantum computing. However, these qubits are highly susceptible to environmental noise. To make the system more robust, scientists proposed to use topological qubits, a more exotic type of superconducting qubit made from a class of superconducting materials called spin-triplet superconductors. Due to the scarcity of naturally existing spin-triplet superconductors, the intrinsic properties thereof are largely under-explored, and there exist few good candidate materials for the next generation of quantum computers. […]
Annabelle Long
Women’s clubs are often exclusively remembered as advocating for progressive causes—education, suffrage, conservation—but little attention has been paid to the way that some of them gave rise to nationalist, anti-communist clubs for women. My interest in this topic builds on my research on a little-known clubwoman named Marguerite Dice. Born in 1884 to a Republican Union Army veteran father and politically connected mother, she dedicated her life to progressive women’s clubs, but spent at least 30 years advocating for conservative, anti-communist causes. Her life neatly tracks with the evolution of […]
Kara Smale
This dance history project is focused on identifying materials in the archive that record the contributions and major stage works of Santha Bhaskar, a prolific Singaporean-Indian dance choreographer whose career has spanned six decades between the 1960s and the present day. The primary resources for this project are the Singapore National Archives, Singapore National Library and the Singapore National Heritage Board, all of which have archives available for online access. In this project, I will collate and organize materials – newspaper reports, press clippings and photos related to Bhaskar’s contributions […]
Ryan Tuozzolo
My research hinges on a question of resonance. What, I pose, do we as readers hear echoed in the self-effacing abstraction of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s 1962 Árbol de Diana from the Romani-influenced folk narrative of Spaniard Federico García Lorca’s mid-1920s Romancero Gitano? The urgency of this issue stems from the post-industrial crisis of subjectivity, wherein, per Marxist theory of estrangement, the mechanical gears of capitalism mediate not only financial transactions, but also inter- and intra-personal relations. In an economic system founded on conceptual predetermination, per the logic of exchange-value, […]
Miranda Jiang
In 1918, French officials reported a population of French-Indochinese mixed-race children living in the Saint-Médard region of France. These métis were the children of Indochinese workers and French women. Alarmed at the presence of interracial couples but resigned to their inevitability, the government allowed them to marry, expressing hope that the French women would exert their “assimilatory” power on their foreign husbands and children. These were a few among many métis in the French empire: throughout the 20th century, thousands of mixed-race children from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia passed through […]
Owen Yeung
The importance of citing reputable sources is common knowledge for anyone communicating information, but less is known about whether audiences actually investigate the sources, an increasingly important practice due to the prevalence of misinformation on social media. This is a crucial determinant of whether misinformation can spread online that is often overlooked: even if there is a sufficient “supply” of credible sources, they will not be utilized if media consumers do not have sufficient “demand” for source-checking. Extending this economic analogy, this “demand” also decreases with the effort needed to […]
Bradley Oh
Perivascular spaces are cerebrospinal fluid filled areas that surround the brain’s blood vessels and are involved in waste clearance and molecule distribution. When these perivascular spaces become enlarged (ePVS), they become visible on MRI and may represent a response to blood brain barrier pathology and neurodegeneration. Cerebral arteriopathy dominant arteriopathy with sub-cortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL) is an autosomal dominant inherited small vessel disease that causes deterioration of small blood vessels, strokes, and cognitive impairment as early as the fourth and fifth decades of life. Due to their presence along […]
Simon Han
Liver transplantation is currently the only treatment for end-stage liver disease, but engraftment of liver organoids holds promise as a viable approach to resolve the shortage of donor livers. While traditional organoid cultures take place atop two-dimensional (2D) plates, rotating wall vessel bioreactors (RWVs) can be used to culture three-dimensional spheroid organoids, augmenting cell-cell interactions through the low shear stress, low turbulence environment provided by RWVs. The use of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in organoids can further advance clinical translation, because using a transplant recipient’s own iPSCs may […]
Shuka Park
Female reproductive health is a pervasive issue in the medical field as 16.2% of married women ages 15-49 are affected by infertility. Recent studies reveal that poor female reproductive health arises, in part, from circadian disruption. Due to modern lifestyles, humans lack exposure to natural sunlight during daytime and receive excess artificial lighting during nighttime, which disrupts circadian rhythms. COVID-19 quarantining has exacerbated this issue, and despite knowing how harmful circadian disruption is for female reproductive health, the anatomy and physiology behind how the circadian and reproductive systems communicate remain […]