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, […]
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 […]
Jorge Diaz Chao
We are building a novel platform that introduces a new dimension to asynchronous learning—like YouTube did upon launch—by empowering users with no coding experience to democratize their knowledge on tasks involving coordinated motor skills through Augmented Reality (AR) scenarios. Our work involves designing a user interface capable of inferring motor and linguistic cues from demonstrations and explanations, and writing an algorithm that synthesizes probabilistic code, namely Scenic, that models motion primitives to build complex behaviors. To do so, we employ tools such as symbolic learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) […]
Isadora Duskin-Feinberg
Dance historian Marion Kant exclaimed, “Ask any young woman on her way to a [ballet] performance…what most clearly symbolizes ballet and she will probably answer – the skirt and the pointe shoe. She will not quote sentences from the story and may recall only a few names of the characters…Has ballet no message?” The wider public focuses little on the messages of Ballet, such as academic research focusing mostly on the science of ballet. My research focus for this project will be comparing and contrasting the messages/depictions of ballet created […]
Benjamin Eisley
In the past few years, neural networks have gone from obscure to ubiquitous. This technology is shockingly versatile, but conceptually ill-understood: there is a large gap between practice and theory, and much has yet to even be conjectured. For example, scientists are baffled by the overfitting paradox. Overfitting is usually a problem when programmers model a complex system such as the brain. Programmers must base their model on finitely many examples of that system’s behavior. Traditionally, programs that perfectly replicate these examples forget the underlying system. Surprisingly, large neural networks […]
Nir Elber
One goal of arithmetic geometry is to enumerate the points on geometric surfaces with rational coordinates. Over the past century, it has been profitable to study the geometry of the surface directly. For example, a “cohomology theory” is a way to assign a sequence of geometric invariants to the surface; it turns out that one can use cohomology in order to count points. Given a surface, there tend to be many reasonable cohomology theories. This project is interested in the symmetries of a cohomology theory. Given a cohomology theory, it […]