Ruoyi Yin
Probing core-exciton dynamics and its coupling behavior with carriers and optical fields by utilizing nonlinear wave-mixing spectroscopy can uncover the fundamental electronic and optical properties for materials and provide insights for electronic device manipulation. The nonlinear attosecond Four-Wave-Mixing (FWM) spectroscopy, using one extreme ultraviolet (XUV) light pulse followed by two optical pulses with controllable delays, has recently been used to evaluate gas-phase and condensed-phase materials. My project aims to use this technique to explore the core-exciton absorption in tungsten disulfide, a two-dimensional semiconductor and transition metal dichalcogenide. Photon energy range […]
Anne Nakamoto
Ted Daniel Llera
My goal is to identify the mechanisms of innate metabolic resilience and discover targets with translational potential for neuroprotection by characterizing the function of protein variants that make Arctic ground squirrels (AGS) resistant to cerebral ischemia. Studies show that cellular resistance to metabolic stressors is an intrinsic property of neural cells generated from AGS. Through functional genomic screens and computational analysis, they identified novel cytoprotective protein variants with amino acid substitutions that are unique to AGS but otherwise conserved in mammals. Among the identified proteins with the most striking metabolic […]
Yueyi Che
Glaciers are important freshwater sources around the world. They are especially significant during climate change because they serve as nature’s drought buffer to balance years with less rain. Understanding previous global glacier melting events will help us understand how glaciers today will respond to global warming. Many mountain glaciers are not well constrained. The goal of my study is to provide more insights into the unsolved Tioga glacier melting patterns in Yosemite National Park, located in the Sierra Nevada range in California, after the Last Glacial Maximum, the most recent […]
Aaron Kavaler
As processing power available to high performance computers has increased, the overall performance has bottlenecked due to the limits of data transfer and storage. For small and medium sized computational fluid dynamics (CFD) researchers, the size of generated data is becoming problematic. In particular, CFD data faces a large resistance to general compression algorithms such as Lempel-Ziv encoding found in .zip files. Applications in CFD including wind-turbine design and aeronautics demand accurate capture of fluid dynamics phenomena on complex geometries such as turbine blades or airplane wings. For these complex […]
Max Litster
Understanding literary narratives requires a strong grasp of the underlying language; unlike text drawn from Wikipedia, social media, or the news, literary prose is ripe with embellished descriptions and figurative language. Plot points are revealed in the form of nuanced events rather than explicit recollections: we read about a character’s ‘final breath’ rather than their death. The success of attention-based neural networks on an assortment of semantic inference and interpretation tasks suggests that they provide an effective model of human language, but a noticeable drop in performance when applied to […]
Jon Hillery
Numerical linear algebra underlies much of the modern world. It is essential to a wide variety situations, and as such, it is of great interest to analyze and optimize the underlying algorithms. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in optimizing algorithms to reduce communication, which is frequently many orders of magnitude slower than performing calculations. The Hlder-Brascamp-Lieb inequality and the Red-Blue Pebbling Game are two powerful approaches to theoretical analysis of communication, and both are used to derive communication optimal lower bounds. Once these bounds have been […]
Paulina Tarr
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic and currently incurable neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system. While whole brain atrophy for multiple sclerosis cohorts are on average more pronounced than the healthy population, thenatural change due to aging and inherent morphological variability of the human brain has remained a persistent barrier in interpreting whether significant percent variable change in an individual patient is diagnostically relevant. Using FSLs SIENAX/SIENA toolkit and UCLs SPM toolkit on over 10,000 patients and over 50,000 anatomical magnetic resonance imaging scans, we hope to break this […]
Rahul Sahay
The Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) Color Center in Diamond is an optically active defect that has been demonstrated to be an effective nanoscale sensor of external electric and magnetic fields. Crucially, unlike other such sensors (such as SQUIDs or Mossbauer spectrometers), the NV center is capable of in situ, or local, imaging of these external fields. Moreover, for NVs in a diamond anvil cell (DAC) setup, one can perform in situ measurements of electric and magnetic fields in materials at very high pressures. This opens up the possibility of using the NV […]
Nikolay Nichiporuk
After the tragic death of Kitty Genovese, a woman who was stabbed to death in front of several neighbors, a scientific investigation was made into the bystander effect. Bibb Latane of Columbia and John Darley of Princeton were the first to study the phenomena. Latane & Darley (1968) designed the classic bystander research paradigm where a comparison between helping rates of individuals who witness a crime versus a group of people who witness the same crime. Across their studies, they have found that 75% of people helped when faced with […]