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 […]
Agamjot Bal
My project focuses on the production of recombinant NS1 of DENV1-4 and ZIKV strains from Nicaragua. These proteins will be used to investigate whether the antibody profile against NS1 is associated with DENV2 infection outcome in samples from the Nicaraguan Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study. Creating NS1 in this way will allow for proper protein folding, capture of the protein during purification, and assistance with coupling to microspheres for the Luminex analysis. This will provide further insights into NS1’s role in dengue infections and possibly open new avenues for in-house protein […]
Josh Barua
The emergence of unique semantic subdivisions of concepts across languages is a natural byproduct of cultural, geographic, and historical factors. One example of concept variation is the choice between “boli” and “pluma” when translating “pen” in Spanish. While both loosely translate to pen, boli typically refers to a ballpoint pen whereas pluma refers to a fountain pen (or even a quill in historical contexts). For non-native speakers, learning these subtle lexical rules that govern which translation to use can prove challenging without expert help. For my research project, we aim […]
Nishita Belur
In patients with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), repeated activation of dopaminergic neurons facilitates associative learning, as patients associate reward-predictive contexts with reward delivery, in this case, drug administration. AUD is difficult to treat because of the possibility of relapse, which can be modeled as reacquisition of a previously extinguished behavior in a reward learning context. Our focus is the “savings effect”, in which some “original memory” is “saved”, making reacquisition much faster than initial acquisition. The dominant model of reward learning, the Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning model, relies on prospective […]
Brynn Brady
The molecular basis of evolutionary change in morphology is not well understood. Although progress has been made linking genes to morphological phenotypes through genetic knockouts, little is known about how genetic variation underlies observed morphological differences between organisms in nature. Recent studies propose that changes in non-coding genomic regions that regulate transcription called enhancers explain most evolved morphological variation. My research will test the hypothesis that changes in an intronic enhancer of a known developmental gene, Bmp6, underlie evolved changes in tooth patterning in fish. I will perform genomic knock-in […]