Cory Gerrity
In Compton telescopes with crossstrip germanium detectors, interactions on the detector strip borders where charge is split between strips result in significant signal loss that degrades spectral resolution. Thus, modeling this charge loss mechanism is essential for making corrections and maximizing the resolving power of the instrument. Yet despite this, the mechanism is not entirely understood. My project seeks to model charge collection and transport in the detectors of the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), a balloonborne gamma ray telescope operated out of the Space Sciences Laboratory. The research hopes […]
Christina Shih
I intend to study how oncogenic stress weakens and kill animals using the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, because currently it is not clear how and why cancer kills animals. It is known that cancer patients suffer with cachexia, the major loss of fat tissue and skeletal muscle mass, which is a significant factor in increased mortality rate in cancer patients. I have already established a working system by expressing an oncogene Ras in the intestinal stem cells of adult flies to induce cancer. In order to manipulate additional genes in […]
Joshua Sperling
Ching-Hsiu Hsu
A basic question in neurobiology research is how neural circuits are wired up to perform computations. A classic example of neural computation is that which underlies the visual systems ability to detect the direction of moving object. Input to the retina is encoded by photoreceptors, which are point detectors of light and by themselves cannot determine the direction an object moves. However at the output of the retina, there is a class of neurons that signal robustly when object moves in one direction over any other. These direction-selective cells have […]
Sean Sun
Cholesterol is an essential molecule to survival. Some of its functions include being a precursor to steroid hormones, a component of cell membranes and cell signalling. Without cholesterol, we would lose control of blood pressure and our body’s cells would fail to acquire nutrients necessary for survival. My project investigates Smith-Lemli-Opitz Syndrome (SLOS), which is an inborn error of cholesterol synthesis. Because only one non-functional gene causes SLOS, we can apply gene therapy to integrate a functional gene into the genome of a SLOS cell. To date, we have improved […]
Tresa McGranahan
Joy Hsu
Several lines of evidence support a role for Natural Killer (NK) cells in the immune response to tumors. We recently found that PD-1, a receptor capable of powerfully suppressing the functions of T cells, is expressed by NK cells. However, the cellular networks responsible for PD-1 expression on NK cells are not known. Here, we propose to study the contribution of Regulatory T cells (Tregs) in inducing PD-1 expression on NK cells, by using both an ex vivo and in vivo approach. The proposed research plan will provide important knowledge […]
Jimmy Yin
With a prevalence of about 18% of the American adult population, anxiety disorders are an increasingly important focus of mental health research. Such disorders can severely diminish the quality of an individuals daily life. In both the animal and human literature, fear conditioning has provided an important model of the abnormal development of learned fear responses associated with anxiety disorders. One important question has been whether anxiety is characterized by greater generalization of fear responses. This is typically examined by testing stimuli that vary along some dimension in similarity from […]
Joseph Kim
Billal Ahmed
Natural Killer (NK) cells are an important part of the Innate Immune System, surveying the body to recognize and eliminate cells determined to be abnormal. NK Cells can be activated through ligands that bind to excitatory receptors on the cell. The most well-studied excitatory ligands have been the NKG2D family of ligands, which bind to NKG2D receptors on NK Cells. Im using MCMV, Mouse Cytomegalovirus, as a model to study NKG2D ligand regulation in cells infected by viruses. M18, a protein in MCMV, by itself is necessary and sufficient for […]