Ainsley Cunningham

History critically enables us to go back into the past and recover the essential context necessary to understand our present, despite and in defiance of established colonial narratives that often seek to disperse and bury the truth. This project will explore the centrality of salt as a material, cultural, and political resource in North American Indigenous society, and the ways in which salt reserves became highly contested sites as European colonizers attempted to co-opt the body of profound environmental knowledge harbored by the Indigenous cultures with which they came into […]

Leah Kahn

Mollusk shells have been objects of fascination throughout human history, in part due to their striking ornamentation in the form of knobs, ridges, and spines. These elaborate structures are hypothesized to be so prevalent among mollusks because they protect against breakage by shell-crushing predators. However, the mechanisms by which ornamentation contributes to defense remain largely unknown. This project will use compression tests of 3D-printed shell models to study the mechanical behavior of spines in gastropod mollusks, in order to better understand how spine morphology affects resistance to forces such as […]

Chen Kai Huang

The gut microbiota plays a salient role in mediating host physiology and immunity. Several studies link immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) efficacy in extraintestinal cancers to gut microbiota composition, with commensals, such as Akkermansia muciniphila (A. muciniphila). Recently, studies found that A. muciniphila treatment during anti-PD1 immunotherapy showed potential clinical relevance; however, the differential effects on antitumor responses by the different strains of A. muciniphila are not yet elucidated. Becken et al. (2021) genotyped 71 strains of A. muciniphila, together representing the Am (A. muciniphila) I, AmII, and AmIV clades, and […]

William Hastings

The characteristics of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and measures of emotionally-related impulsivity (ERI) offer strong diagnostic potential in the identification of internalized and externalized disorders (Nakamura et al., 2020; Johnson et al., 2013). Yet, nearly two dozen papers attempted to locate the neural correlates of ERI with no success (Johnson et al., 2020) until recently, with the discovery of a morphological link between the OFC and measures of ERI (Elliott et al., 2021). Of interest to the present project, separate and prior work identified that the patterning of indentions (sulci) […]

Soobin Hong

Studying learning is crucial to understanding the human mind. Currently, active research is being done on the relationship between cognitive processes and memory systems. While most studies focus on the systems individually, much recent research shows that human learning can be better explained by considering multiple systems simultaneously. We focus on the RLWM framework, which suggests that reinforcement learning (RL) and working memory (WM) both contribute significantly to trial-and-error learning. It takes into account the limited capacity of memory, more efficiently accounting for dependence of learning on the number of […]

Yuming Huang

  Geometric flows, such as the Ricci flow, Yang-Mills flow, and harmonic map flow, are natural ways to smooth out geometric objects (metric, connection, and maps, respectively). In this project, we will explore the idea of using geometric flows to develop new analytic tools for studying geometric objects. A possible goal of this project is to use geometric flows to solve problems in dispersive PDEs that involve geometric objects.

Ockemia Bean

After embarking on the 100th anniversary of the decimation of the thriving African American community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as “Black Wall Street” (BWS), I was inspired to explore historical and modern wealth thresholds for Blacks/African Americans, leading to perceived threat or bias. My study aims to fill a gap in the literature by testing an unresearched inclination that “black wealth” is an aversive concept to white and perhaps also to black Americans.

Zia Bajwa

The specific question that my research investigates is how might we better understand and optimize implementation outcomes for a novel transdiagnostic sleep intervention designed for psychiatric populations. More specifically, the goal of this project is to inductively code providers evaluations of the Transdiagnostic Intervention for Sleep and Circadian Dysfunction (TranS-C), thus providing important insight into the efficacy of this sleep-focused program’s implementation. This project contributes new knowledge to the field of psychology by attempting to more deeply understand how to properly and effectively implement novel therapies, especially for those with […]

Jatin Batta

Human brains contain ridges (gyri) and indentations (sulci) that other species do not have – especially in evolutionarily expanded neuroanatomical locations, such as association cortices like the lateral prefrontal (LPFC) and lateral parietal cortices (LPC; Zilles et al., 2013; Van Essen, 2007; Voorhies et al., 2021). Indeed, many LPFC and LPC neuroanatomical features are specific to the human brain. For example, recent research has revealed that hominoid-specific tertiary sulci in LPFC serve as functional landmarks (Miller et al., 2021a,b) and their morphological features are predictive of cognition (Voorhies et al., […]

Lillie Bui

Sleep is a fundamental aspect of human health. One way that our body regulates sleep is through sleep pressure, the balance between sleep and wakefulness. The dysregulation of sleep pressure is a common occurrence in patients with Parkinson’s disease, manifesting in sleep disturbances such as insomnia or excessive daytime sleepiness. It is undetermined if sleep problems and neurodegeneration have common mechanisms, but one potential area of research is in reactive oxygen species (ROS), which have been implicated in Parkinson’s disease. Emerging evidence indicates that ROS accumulate during steady activity of […]