Luc Nguyen

Transistors are the building blocks of modern technology. Layering additional materials on top can greatly change the characteristics of these devices, but it can be a difficult process. What if, instead, a molecule layer could be deposited instead, and manipulated into a desired state? This is possible by placing molecules on top of graphene and applying voltages to control them. However, this process is time consuming, and simulations are a necessary preliminary step in order to gain insight into the behavior of molecules. Previous simulations have shown promising results, but […]

Afton Okwu

Comedy, particularly live comedy, is one of America’s oldest entertainment forms, with Blackness a primary target. On the minstrel stage, race was put on display, with the comedic register a powerful tool in shaping the zeitgeist’s understanding of Blackness and the American racial hierarchy. Gender politics, too, by way of the mammy caricature, was confronted through minstrel drag. By the latter half of the 20th century and into the modern day, Black comedians like Flipp Wilson, Tyler Perry, Dave Chappelle, and Jerrod Carmicheal have taken the spotlight with the weight […]

Tiffany Pai

Insect-borne viral diseases such as Zika and Dengue cause over 700,000 deaths annually (1). For transmission to occur, the virus must spread within the insect and evade an antiviral response from the insect immune system (2). While pathways of the antiviral response are known, the mechanisms by which insect immune cells migrate to infected cells are poorly understood, limiting our ability to identify molecular targets for controlling disease outbreaks. In this work, we will determine whether insect immune cells migrate to virus-infected cells by crawling or by transport in the […]

River Richart

As the most available and popular form of entertainment, music plays a key role in society. Long has it acted as a forum for political discourse, but little is known about how its content may facilitate political belief change. This project seeks to understand this connection further by asking: How effectively do listeners of a political song receive its political message? Are listeners persuaded by the song’s message? What are some of the conditions that make a song successful to these ends? I will develop and employ an online survey […]

Catherine Ruiter

This research seeks to discover the economic impact of the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in news publishing. I attended the World News Media Congress (WAN – IFRA) to listen to primary sources from Google, OpenAI, Le Monde, BBC, the New York Times, and other key firms; discuss their plans for implementing AI advances in their business models. I then attended Google I/O, Google’s developer conference, where the firm released a myriad of new AI advancements and applications. I have since been engaging in a cross-referential qualitative analysis of […]

Pouya Sadeghpour

The laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms has enabled groundbreaking experiments in which atoms are confined in highly manipulable light fields and their interactions precisely controlled. These experiments are a powerful platform for simulating the physics of condensed matter systems with unprecedented control and read-out. So far, studies have been limited to atoms with zero orbital angular momentum in their ground states (such as Alkalis), or large orbital angular momentum and large magnetic moments (such as Lanthanides). Recently it has been proposed that the fermionic isotopes of Titanium, which […]

Mo Mao

Hepatitis B (Hep B) is a high risk infection that is disproportionately affecting Asian Americans up to date, though testing and vaccinations are available free to low-cost across multiple sites in San Francisco and the surrounding Area. Many studies have tried various community based methods to increase screening rate and number of diagnosed patients willing to accept treatment, yet they failed to address the reasons and solutions for the lack of initiatives of Asian Americans towards Hepatitis B. Therefore, this project aims to address the historical, political, and structural conditions […]

Aren Martinian

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 […]

Erin Li

Acetaldehyde is a highly reactive carbonyl species (RCS) found in the human body as a result of partial alcohol metabolism (1). Increased acetaldehyde levels are often associated with pathologies such as alcoholic liver disease and Alzheimers (2). Despite its toxicity, tools for monitoring acetaldehyde in live specimen are underdeveloped, and current methods rely on the processing and destruction of the intact specimen. My project aims to develop a dye-based probe that utilizes chemical reactivity with acetaldehyde to convert a homoallylamine-functionalized dye platform into its aldehyde conjugate, resulting in a shift […]

Shuangyue Li

Embedded within the intricate tapestry of cardiovascular diseases lies the cornerstone of vascular health. Arteries are vital conduits responsible for delivering oxygenated blood away from the heart and to the body. It is known that Notch signaling is crucial for the mature development of vascular identity and network, and previous research on loss-of-function Notch receptors demonstrates impaired artery growth and remodeling. Previous research at the Wang lab has shown that pan-endothelial constitutive expression of Notch4 causes enlarged arteries, but it cannot exclude the role of hemodynamic perturbations. My summer project […]