Tony Kim

Fatty liver disease is a global burden for public health, and is commonly associated with obesity and type-2 diabetes. Fatty liver mainly results from an impaired lipid metabolism in livers, showing reduced fatty acid oxidation and ketogenesis. However, the exact mechanism behind this phenomenon is not well understood. Our body begins producing ketone bodies by breaking down fatty acids during extended fasting, which are used as a substitute for glucose. However, one problem with studying ketogenesis is that ketogenesis is not well observed in hepatocytes isolated from an organism. A […]

Mel Kritikopoulos

Diasporic storytelling is not without the acknowledgement of language shifts. My research focuses on how contemporary authors in the Vietnamese diaspora use their inherited languages (French and English) to create works of multigenerational autofiction that offer insight into the experiences of their respective diasporic communities through a literary analysis of Line Papin’s ‘Les Os des Filles’ and E.M. Tran’s ‘Daughters of the New Year.’ I will use close reading, bibliographic research, and person-based reportage to ask two major questions: first, how does the form of autofiction reveal these modern female […]

Seul Ah Lee

Animals, including humans, form associations between rewards and cues that predict them through the process of cue-reward learning (CRL). CRL has long served as an advantageous tool in evolution for acquisition of rewards such as food and mating. However, CRL can also be maladaptive in disorders such as addiction, wherein drug-associated cues drive compulsive drug-seeking behavior and relapse. Past and recent studies have found that CRL largely depends on cue-reward contingency, or how much the occurrence of rewards depends on the occurrence of cues. CRL is attenuated when contingency is […]

Daniel Lee

Graphene-based “twistronics” – samples with multiple layers of graphene stacked possibly with twists – have shown to host a plethora of interesting physics, such as superconductivity and dissipationless transport. At the heart of all this physics lies the moire pattern – large periodic structures when two or more layers of graphene are stacked on top of each other with a twist. The geometry of the moire structure for a particular graphene twistronic determines its electrical properties. Recently, a “magic-angle” of 1.9° has been proposed for helical trilayer graphene (HTG), a […]

Tony Li

Edge computing explorations in POET(Private Optimal Energy Training) and large language model fine-tuning studies revolved around Gorilla LLM with RLHF(Reinforcement Learning Human Feedback)

Kevin Li

Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) is a key epigenetic regulator complex that acts as a gene silencer to maintain cell identity, depositing the repressive histone H3 K27 trimethylation mark at target genes. Faulty PRC2 regulation is involved in developmental disorders and cancer development, but mechanisms that direct PRC2 activity to target genes are poorly understood. Recent structural findings show PRC2 binding through its catalytic lobe, but do not provide a mechanism to explain how PRC2 localizes to target sites in vitro without its catalytic lobe. To address this knowledge gap, […]

Viktoriya Georgieva

With the current state of escalating climate emergency, generation of plants with improved ability to sequester carbon is of high priority. The Rieske subunit of the cytochrome b6f complex is a known rate-limiting step in photosynthesis. This protein, encoded for by the PetC gene, is found to increase photosynthetic efficiency upon overexpression in plants, demonstrating potential for increased carbon sequestration. However, due to current restrictions on GMOs, overexpression needs to be achieved nontransgenically to create a practical impact. Given that this has yet to be attempted, this project aims to […]

Lucia Rhiannon Harrison

All the it-girls are dissociating. Dissociative feminism has become the new cool-girl branch of white, neoliberal feminism which has been picked up by teenage girls online who idolize problematic characters who dissociate to cope with their trauma. Otessa Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation while drawing on elements of the gothic genre, satirizes this new media trope. I argue that the rise in dissociative feminism is indicative of a larger social incapacity to cope with trauma through a particular affective position of dissociation, in response to […]

Joshua Ho

Particle physicists seek to understand particles and the physical laws governing their interactions by building particle colliders. These colliders provide a large amount of data, and due to the probabilistic nature of particle physics, researches are turning towards ML to model complex physical processes. With the rise of foundational models like ChatGPT, particle physicists have been inspired to create a large scale, general purpose model that has been trained on a vast amount of data to serve as a strong starting point for various specific tasks, that can be fine-tuned […]

Heidi Huang

CRISPR-Cas holds great promise for treating Huntington’s Disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disorder. Despite Cas9 RNP’s minimal off-target effects and transient activity, existing RNP delivery methods fall short, limiting RNP therapeutics’ in vivo applications. To address this, the Wilson lab has developed a reversible linker for enhanced RNP brain distribution and editing efficiency. Building on this foundation, my project aims to reduce cytotoxic peptide aggregate formation, which impedes editing efficiency, in Cas9 RNP buffers. Specifically, my research seeks to optimize CRISPR RNP buffer formulations with selected additives to minimize aggregate formation, […]