Ted Daniel Llera
My goal is to identify the mechanisms of innate metabolic resilience and discover targets with translational potential for neuroprotection by characterizing the function of protein variants that make Arctic ground squirrels (AGS) resistant to cerebral ischemia. Studies show that cellular resistance to metabolic stressors is an intrinsic property of neural cells generated from AGS. Through functional genomic screens and computational analysis, they identified novel cytoprotective protein variants with amino acid substitutions that are unique to AGS but otherwise conserved in mammals. Among the identified proteins with the most striking metabolic […]
Yueyi Che
Glaciers are important freshwater sources around the world. They are especially significant during climate change because they serve as nature’s drought buffer to balance years with less rain. Understanding previous global glacier melting events will help us understand how glaciers today will respond to global warming. Many mountain glaciers are not well constrained. The goal of my study is to provide more insights into the unsolved Tioga glacier melting patterns in Yosemite National Park, located in the Sierra Nevada range in California, after the Last Glacial Maximum, the most recent […]
Emily Nguyen
Behavior is the output of complex neural computations in the brain; however, our understanding of how the motor cortex controls movement is not yet fully understood. This project investigates the key gap of knowledge in this field by demonstrating through quantification general principles of motor learning and coordination in a systems-neuroscience paradigm. To achieve this goal, I will analyze the variability of high-dimensional behavioral data during a novel 3D rat-reaching task. No motor behavior, such as a reach for a glass of water, is ever the same. There is always […]
Viktoriya Carpio
An Indulgence, a remission of temporal punishment of sin whose guilt has been already forgiven through the sacrament of confession, has played a major devotional role in the lives of all social classes in Late Medieval England. Although the Early Modern historiography and the negative portrayal in popular culture (Canterbury Tales by Chaucer) diminished the overall credibility of indulgences, I will try to discern the extent of Indulgence’s devotional and communal effects on the common English lives and people. By exploring their primary communal and religious context, I want to […]
Ockemia Bean
Rastko Nastic
A memristor is a device with the property that its electrical resistance depends on the history of applied voltage, and changes with the amount of current that passes through it. This atypical property of history-dependent resistance is analogous to how memory functions. As a result, memristors have been used in applications ranging from non-volatile analog memory to synaptic analogs and neuromorphic computing. However, there is a lack of in-depth understanding of the atomic-scale behavior that causes this property. My project aims to understand how the dominant dynamics, electromigration and ion […]
Amoolya Grandhi
Topological insulators, electronic materials that behave like insulators in their interior but can conduct current on their edges or surfaces, hold a lot of potential for improving the function and energy efficiency of various devices. These materials have unique electrical properties resulting from their conducting edge and surface states. Specifically, these states can transport charge with very low resistivity, leading to efficient conduction. Topological insulator materials are heavily influenced by the symmetry of their crystal structure─the pattern in which their atoms are arranged. For this reason, my project will investigate […]
Da Eun Jung
In the United States, abortion has been legal since the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), but abortion restrictions have been gradually increasing since then. In contrast, the Republic of Korea overturned its anti-abortion legislation on January 1, 2021. This project uses in-depth interviewing to study Korean women’s perceptions on abortion, opinions on the future state of abortion policies in Korea, and interpretations of the U.S. abortion debate. This study will examine how a forthcoming abortion legislation will reflect women’s opinions of abortion, speculate on how the policy […]
Aaron Kavaler
As processing power available to high performance computers has increased, the overall performance has bottlenecked due to the limits of data transfer and storage. For small and medium sized computational fluid dynamics (CFD) researchers, the size of generated data is becoming problematic. In particular, CFD data faces a large resistance to general compression algorithms such as Lempel-Ziv encoding found in .zip files. Applications in CFD including wind-turbine design and aeronautics demand accurate capture of fluid dynamics phenomena on complex geometries such as turbine blades or airplane wings. For these complex […]
Max Litster
Understanding literary narratives requires a strong grasp of the underlying language; unlike text drawn from Wikipedia, social media, or the news, literary prose is ripe with embellished descriptions and figurative language. Plot points are revealed in the form of nuanced events rather than explicit recollections: we read about a character’s ‘final breath’ rather than their death. The success of attention-based neural networks on an assortment of semantic inference and interpretation tasks suggests that they provide an effective model of human language, but a noticeable drop in performance when applied to […]