Pin Pin Jacquelin Poon
Ron Cook
Nearly all life on Earth depends on oxygenic photosynthesis, the process by which light energy is used to create sugars and oxygen from water and carbon dioxide. In plants and algae, it is carried out in organelles called chloroplasts, which are cousins of photosynthetic bacteria known as cyanobacteria. Both chloroplasts and cyanobacteria contain membrane-enclosed sacs called thylakoids, and the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis take place in the thylakoid membrane. Here, light hits the protein complex Photosystem II (PSII), and this energy is used to split water into oxygen, protons, and […]
Carson Quinn
The way that brain cells wire together to form circuits underlies almost every facet of mental function, whether that be memory, thinking, or sensation. In my project, I seek to better understand what happens on a molecular level that allows for these specific circuits to form. Specifically, I want to elucidate the role that the maturation of synapsesthe connections between neuronshas on the shape, structure, and connectivity of the neurons making up these circuits, and how experience drives these changes. I will do this using the zebrafish visual processing system, […]
Linda May Lee
Meghana Eswarappa
“Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral disease that places about three billion people at risk for infection yearly in tropical and sub-tropical regions worldwide. Infected individuals can be asymptomatic, or they can show clinical disease, including an acute debilitating fever (Dengue Fever) that can progress to life-threatening conditions of severe dengue, including Dengue Shock Syndrome (DSS). The goal of this research is to investigate whether cell-free nucleic acids in patient serum can serve as biomarkers to distinguish between cases of mild and severe dengue disease. I will accomplish this by characterizing […]
Jeni Hagan
Learning a motor skill takes a use of error-based learning to devise new strategies towards mastering that skill. Motor skills are perfected through attempting new solutions based on previous movement errors. The presence of motor noise, which is variability between repetitions of the same motor movement, can interfere with error learning as the previous movement error could be from incorrect planning or baseline motor noise. Past research on motor learning has found that while under certain conditions high motor noise is beneficial in learning during a motor task, it is […]
Priya Kshirsagar
An algebraic variety is a generalization of a solution set to a family of polynomial equations. De Concini and Procesi developed a canonical method of compactifying any symmetric variety. This resulting compactification, called the wonderful compactification, has many favorable algebraic and geometric properties. Alexeev and Brion developed a method of degenerating any spherical variety to a toric variety. Many tools, such as combinatorics, can be used to study toric varieties in great detail. Thus, my main goal is to develop and study toric degenerations of the wonderful compactification. Eventually, I […]
Tresa McGranahan
Dingyuan I. Sun
Inhibition or mutation of transmembrane proton pumps is associated with human airway diseases, such as pneumonia and cystic fibrosis. However, the underlying molecular mechaisms remain poorly understood. A mucociliary epithelium lines the upper repiratory tract and clears the airways from inhaled pathogens. Inhibition of the proton pump gastric H+/K+ATPAse (ATP4a) causes defects in the mucociliary development through impaired canonical Wnt/-catenin signaling. Furthermore, other proton pumps were implicated in Wnt signaling regulation.I propose that proton pumps in general influence Wnt pathway activation and development of mucociliary epithelia. In my project, I […]
Avery Kim
The large scale matter distribution allows to answer the fundamental questions about the Universe including the cosmological constituents and the origin of the Universe. The Universe seems homogeneous on a very large scale (~100 kpc), yet on the smaller scales such as on the order of clusters and galaxies, the cosmological structures exhibits non-Gaussianity. This non-Gaussian matter field created by non-linear gravitational evolution is proved to be hard for modeling. Since the majority of matter is almost non-interactive dark matter, the science we learn from a direct observation has a […]