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, […]
Clara Hung
Lensless imagers are low-cost, compact cameras with applications in medical imaging, photography, and more. Many designs for lensless imagers have been proposed, but the optimal design is not known as it is object-dependent. A method to capture images from different systems under similar conditions is needed to fairly compare system performance. Furthermore, as lensless imaging is moving towards data-intensive research, large-scale lensless measurement datasets are necessary for neural network evaluation. Yet, of the few existing datasets in the field, none fully address these demands. We propose a portable data acquisition […]
Tatum Hurley
Over 100,000 people rely on the Alameda County (AC) Transit system to move around the Bay Area every day. Yet, there is a notable lack of proper bus stop infrastructure to support riders, even as wait times can reach upwards of thirty minutes. I intend to perform a census of AC Transit bus stops in Berkeley and Oakland to collect data on amenities such as benches and shelters, and hostile architecture features such as bench obstructions. This project seeks to identify any patterns in the presence or absence of these […]
Layla Fan
Emotions play an essential role in mental health and overall well-being, and adaptive emotion regulation helps people deal with the challenges of everyday life. Emotion beliefs have been shown to influence motivation to attempt emotion regulation and emotional functioning. Emotion malleability beliefs represent the extent to which individuals perceive emotions as changeable, dynamic, or fixed, static, uncontrollable entities. Studies suggested that more malleable emotional beliefs were associated with lower levels of psychological distress, such as stress, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and negative affect. Among individuals with high anxiety levels, this […]
Pilar Jacqueline Farr
In 1856, the Lerdo Law took effect in Mexico, signifying a future in which liberalism would be the preeminent political philosophy to govern Mexico. Most historians of Mexican history point to this era (La Reforma) and its landmark Law (Ley Lerdo) as the first instance of land reform in the Republic. The Law privatized lands owned by corporations and not individuals, which meant that Church lands and Indigenous lands were the primary victims of the Lerdo Law. The Hijeulas project that I would pursue contests the idea that land reforms […]