Jonanne Talebloo

In today’s digital age, there is increasing worry about how children and adolescents are affected by their screen habits. Excessive screen time among them has been tied to various health issues like mental health concerns, physical ailments, obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and sleep disturbances. As parents play key roles during childhood and adolescence, parenting approaches, and home atmospheres have been recognized as influencers that may contribute to children’s screen use patterns. In general, more attentive parental supervision has been linked to reduced total screen usage among children and adolescents. Our purpose […]

Anthony Neil Tan

Maker programs for middle school and high school students have become commonplace as the demand for STEM professionals has exponentially increased in the 21st century. Many of these academic enrichment programs are administered by non-profit initiatives and they serve as a stepping stone for pre-engineering students on a trajectory towards higher education. However, metrics for assessing the impact of out-of-school programs have been poorly defined and data points that track student learning have been sparse. One area of interest is quantifying students’ mastery of skills gained through these programs and […]

Michael Tanios

My research investigates the neural mechanisms by which chronic high-fat diet (HFD) consumption alters hedonic feeding behavior, contributing to obesity. Obesity has rapidly become a global crisis, and with health concerns linked to chronic diseases, there is an urgent need for intervention strategies. Despite its prevalence, the neurological mechanisms that connect pleasure-driven eating to obesity remain largely unexplored. Understanding how the brain’s reward pathways adjust to chronic exposure to high-calorie foods is vital for closing the gap in our knowledge of how dietary habits influence brain function and contribute to […]

Danh Tran

Microbiome editing is a new and growing area in machine learning, focused on understanding and controlling how groups of bacteria behave and interact, something that has been hard to study previously. This research could lead to breakthroughs in personalized medicine and the environment. The Rubin Lab is integrating machine learning into microbiome editing to improve how we understand and change these bacterial communities. We are creating advanced models of bacterial DNA and mobile genetic elements, which will help predict bacterial behavior and make the editing process more efficient. By using […]

Roma Nagle

Structure determines function. This ground truth drives the exponential progress being made in biology. By understanding a molecule’s structure, scientists can harness its function for drug discovery, genetics, or even studying evolution. However, determining a molecule’s structure in the lab is not easy. Even with advancements such as cryoEM, there has been a significant push to computationally predict structures instead. This motivation is at the heart of my research in the Cate Lab. Can we use machine learning to predict the 3D structure of an RNA molecule from just its […]

Vivian Nguyen

Over the past decade, CRISPR-Cas9 has emerged as an unparalleled tool for single-gene disease therapy. Yet, the vast majority of the genome is currently untargetable by Cas9 due to its strict requirement for a specific protospacer adjacent motif (PAM). While there have been attempts to engineer Cas9 with broader PAM recognition, these variants exhibit significantly lower on-target specificity and higher off-target activity compared to wild type Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9. To expand Cas9’s targetable genomic space without decreased on-target activity and increased off target editing, this research aims to engineer novel […]

Emilie Petit

Endometriosis is a serious disease that affects 1 in every 10 menstruating individuals, causing painful symptoms that can lead to infertility. Despite this pain, 6 out of every 10 patients remain undiagnosed, as the current method of diagnosis is invasive laparoscopic surgery. This project works to directly address this healthcare disparity. Evidence has supported that endometrial cells have different physical and biological properties from healthy cells. Ongoing research from the Sohn Lab has created methods that can analyze cell properties to differentiate healthy and diseased cells. We intend to employ […]

Annelise Prince

Cardiovascular disease is behind 1 in 5 deaths in the US due to muscle cells of the heart, cardiomyocytes, lacking regenerative abilities after injury leading to dysfunction. Understanding the composition of human heart tissue means there is a better model to understand the baseline regenerative potential of the human heart to eventually uncover novel therapeutic strategies to promote the regeneration of cardiomyocytes and decrease heart-related deaths. Inspired by a 2016 Nature paper that used thick histological samples of animal heart tissue, I will develop a procedure to estimate the true […]

Rohan Rattan

The configuration of a plant’s root system is crucial in its inherent ability to access essential nutrients in soil and secure water. Furthermore, tuning root form has long been a goal in plant engineering. Plant synthetic biology now makes it possible to develop tools to reprogram root systems. However, this endeavor faces challenges, including the complexity of designing synthetic genetic programs and the intricate cross-talk between developmental processes. Type-B Response Regulators are a family of transcription factors in the two-component cytokinin signaling system that modulate the expression of genes involved […]

Ryan Read

Subjective perceptions of risk can profoundly influence decision making. Recent work suggests that people perceptually inflate risks learned through experience compared to those learned through description. However, due the difficulty of neurophysiological recordings in humans the neural mechanisms underlying this description-experience gap (DE gap) remain unclear. To address this issue, Ryan will behaviorally explore whether the DE gap exists in non-human primates (NHPs) using behavioral tasks based on previous studies in humans. If NHPs display the same biases and follow a similar learning model it would indicate fundamental similarity in […]