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, […]

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 […]

Adrian Caceres

As a SURF fellow, my research explores the impact of societal and academic stigmas faced by formerly incarcerated or system-impacted (FI/SI) students who have participated in the Berkeley Underground Scholars Pipeline (BUSP) in contrast to those (FI/SI) students who made it to Berkeley on their own. Specifically, I examine whether participation in BUSP programs, such as cross-enrollment and others, helped these individuals feel less stigmatized compared to their peers who navigated their way to Berkeley without BUS support. This study aims to highlight the importance of structured support programs in […]

Lark Chang-Yeh

This research project will study the formation of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) ballroom communities and drag troupes in the San Francisco Bay Area and how these groups navigate issues of race, class, and cultural appropriation within a predominantly Black cultural framework and history. Ballroom is a historically LGBTQ Black and Latine cultural practice in which individuals compete in events known as “balls” in various realness categories. These performances are a site of self-actualization, liberation, and reclamation of gender from hegemonic culture. My primary research question is: How have AAPI […]

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 […]