Alma Rechav Ben Natan
Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women – as high as 25%, while ovarian cancer accounts for 2.5% of cancers in women. Women who carry BRCA1 or BRCA2 non-functional mutations are predisposed to early onset of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. There are many variants of uncertain significance (VUS) in the population, which are limiting the clinical utility of genetic information – they might not be sensitive to the current clinically used therapeutic drugs. PARP inhibition (PARPi) is currently the only therapeutic drug that is used for […]
Lexi Zhou
The Striatum plays a critical role in decision making and action outcome evaluation. It is primarily composed of two distinct pathwaysdirect and indirect that receive excitatory inputs from the cortex and the thalamus and are differentially modulated by dopamine signals from the midbrain. There has been a wealth of experimental and theoretical work on how the dichotomy of these striatal pathways mediates choice selection. The classic go/no-go model proposes that these pathways play discrete roles in choice selection, with the direct pathway fires to select a rewarding option and the […]
Zoe Lung
Meiosis is an essential cell division process that involves the reduction of chromosome number, thus creating haploid cells from diploid cells. Since mistakes in this process can lead to aneuploidy and many genetic defects such as cancer, this division is highly regulated and consists of many regulatory checkpoints. One such checkpoint, referred to as the synaptic checkpoint, is necessary during the early stages of meiosis when chromosomes are paired with homologous partners prior to segregation. The specific mechanisms that are involved in regulating this particular checkpoint still remain unknown. Recently, […]
Rimjhim Agarwal
Dengue virus (DENV) is the leading cause of death in dengue-endemic areas. An infection resulting from DENV can manifest as serious human disease, such as Dengue hemorrhagic fever or Dengue shock syndrome. Currently there is no effective vaccine to prevent the infection. My project seeks to understand critical host-virus interactions between DENV and multi-protein innate immune cytosolic complexes called inflammasomes, which initiate downstream proinflammatory signaling. Inflammasomes are typically thought to detect pathogen-encoded ligands. In contrast, NLRP1the focus of this proposaldetects protease activity. I will be focusing on the molecular determinants […]
Hongli (Bob) Zhao
From modeling cardiovascular circulation, to designing power grids or complex financial derivative products, the study of how noise influences a probabilistic system’s state is vital for successful financial, biological and physical models. Uncertainty quantification aims to explore how uncertainty is propagated throughout computational models via constitutive laws of dynamics. Building upon previous literature, I start by focusing on coupled stochastic balance laws on each edge of a network, whose numerical characterizations of the solution can be achieved with the PDF method. On the other hand, the derivations are problem dependent […]
Siyang Li
Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) are high-energy millisecond duration radio signals of unknown astrophysical origins whose localizations are limited by the inherently low resolutions of radio telescopes. Recent theories propose that the origins of FRB may also produce nanosecond duration optical counterparts which, if observed with higher resolution optical telescopes, would allow astronomers to localize and identify the origins of FRB. Due to their extragalactic distances, optical counterparts to FRB can also be used to learn more about the fundamental properties and evolution of the Universe through probing the missing Baryonic […]
Namrata Ramesh
Superlattices of colloidal nanocrystals are a new class of materials that have been made to self-assemble from a liquid suspension. Their high compositional tunability results in a range of electronic, optical, and mechanical properties. Strong coupling of nanocrystals in the superlattice – a very recent advance – leads to dramatic changes in their energy levels and, consequently, their optical properties. Particularly in semiconductor nanocrystal superlattices, understanding how the coupling of nanocrystals affects the optical gap will fine-tune these already promising optoelectronic materials for many applications. This, along with the comparatively […]
Noah Cryns
Adolescence is a time of increased risk taking, novelty seeking, and exploration. These behaviors may have an adaptive function to facilitate dispersal from the natal nest but may also have relevance to addiction and morbidity in adolescence. Dopamine(DA) in the striatum is a likely candidate mediating such behavioral changes. However, studies investigating dopamine systems have often focused on adult mice and consummatory behavior. My goal is to design a study to better isolate the role of dopamine in adolescent dispersal behavior. To do this I will study exploratory locomotion in […]
Kathryn Li
During cell division, many cellular materials cannot be produced de novo and therefore must be partitioned equally between the two daughter cells. In the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, material produced in the mother cell must be actively transported to the growing daughter cell during cell division. Molecular pathways of how individual organelles are transported to the daughter cell have been well characterized. However, recent studies have shown that cellular organelles are largely interconnected, suggesting that they exist more as an extensive network rather than independent entities. My research aims to […]
Chris Randall
Over the summer, we propose to investigate the root multiplicities of (generalized) Kac-Moody Algebras. Our plan is to create an open-source computer package that allows for the computation of root multiplicities of Kac-Moody algebras, building upon the existing tools available to computational mathematicians, for instance, the popular library sage-math. Once we have developed and verified this package against known tables of root multiplicities, we aim to start investigating the root multiplicities of simple graphs, and attempt to address some outstanding conjectures on the distributions of root multiplicities. A greater understanding […]