Shreya Chaudhuri
My family’s roots belong to the land of Dibrugarh, Assam – the tea capital of India. From exploitation at the hands of the British Raj to decolonization with my ancestors rematriating land, the tea farm that we have tended to has undergone many transformations. India’s tea industry, which has colonial roots, is one of the largest in the world, exporting $709,000,000 of tea annually. Recently, there has been rampant corporatization of the tea industry, which is supported by a $7.8 billion investment from the World Bank. Our land is dying, […]
Jacqueline Chavez
Indigenous erasure has been prevalent throughout history affecting the way people choose to identify with their roots. This is a struggle that 1.5 and second-generation Oaxacan-identifying students pursuing post-secondary choose to identify with their indigenous roots. By interviewing Oaxacan students about their experiences growing up and qualitatively analyzing their experiences, I seek to understand the power of storytelling and memory pathways with an emphasis on factors that have led to their identity formation. While some immigrant families tend to preserve their traditions and maternal languages, the intention of retaining their […]
Tansy Chen
Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) are aquatic bacteria capable of creating a unique intracellular organelle, the magnetosome, that is the location of magnetic crystal biomineralization. They are important models for the molecular study of compartmentalization and biomineralization as well as possible vehicles for biomedical applications. In the model organism Magnetospirillum magneticum strain AMB-1, the magnetosome island (MAI) encodes genes responsible for the creation, alignment, and maturation of a linear magnetosome chain, which ultimately allows the cell to orient and travel along Earth’s magnetic field lines in order to simplify their search for […]
Stephen Chen
Since proteins carry out the majority of work in living cells, how a cell operates is heavily determined by the relative abundances of different proteins at any given time. These relative abundances are largely determined by gene expression levels: the extent to which a gene is “activated.” Predicting gene expression levels from noncoding DNA sequence is a major unsolved problem in computational biology. Recently, machine learning (ML) has emerged as one of the most effective tools for this task. While significant work has been done with human genomes, much work […]
Annie Cheng
Labor poetry in China emerged from the growing exploitation of migrant workers in the post-reform era. Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, a worker-turned-poet has gained attention through her writing of female migrant workers’ gendered experience of the highly mechanized, desexualizing process of industrial production. While her work has received critical attention from feminist and eco-critical angles, it has often been read within a narrow factory setting. This project aims at filling the gap through close-reading Zheng’s work via an ecofeminist synthesis, which relates the oppression of women to that of nature. I […]
Cleo Cottrell
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) are two geophysical instruments used for minimally invasive survey projects. This research will focus on applying these instruments in an archaeological context, specifically to investigate the detection abilities of GPR and ERT in identifying faunal remains and bone beds in California. While the use of GPR to locate marked and unmarked graves has been documented, there is a lack of literature surrounding ERT use on bone beds and the use of both instruments in detecting faunal remains. To test these capabilities, […]
Keon Abedi
This project will investigate how the frequency of a mutation changes over time when in the presence of correlated environmental noise. This is an open question in the biophysics of evolutionary dynamics, which seeks a quantitative framework for Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The core idea of evolution is that a mutation’s frequency tends to increase over generations when it offers an advantage to its hosts. For example, in an environment with antibiotics, mutations conferring antibiotic resistance are strongly favored and can quickly become prevalent across a bacterial population; we […]
Ekansh Agrawal
X-linked Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (X-SCID) is a genetic disease that predominantly affects XY individuals. It is caused by mutations affecting the IL2RG gene on the X-chromosome and occurs in roughly 1/50,000 to 1/100,000 births. The genetic disease itself affects the expression of the common gamma chain found in a variety of immune cell receptors such as Interleukin-2 Receptor (IL-2) and interleukin-7 Receptor (IL-7). This can result in low numbers of T-cells, Natural Killer Cells, and low B-cells causing patients to be increasingly susceptible to diseases. Without treatment, undiagnosed children typically […]
Alejandra S. Aguilar Arce
The Spanish speaking population has been growing rapidly in the U.S in the past decades, particularly the Mexican dialect. For this reason, understanding the dynamics of dialect contact and bidialectalism between Spanish dialects is important. I aim to conduct research to investigate the extent of influence that the Mexican dialect of Spanish has had on other Spanish speakers and their native dialects within the California Bay Area. Despite extensive research on dialect contact in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, there has not been enough conducted in the […]
Ayah Aldajani
Children are notorious for being the sneakiest eavesdroppers, much to caregivers’ dismay. But could this mischief, actually be beneficial for their language development? According to research, overheard speech plays a significant role in children’s learning of words and facts, yet there is a gap in the literature when it comes to understanding which attentional cues indicate learning from overhearing. This raises the question: When children are surrounded by speech that is not directed to them, how do they decide what to attend to, and how can this support their learning […]