Nader Morshed

Construction of protein structures from X-ray crystallography data is a difficult, time consuming, and error-prone process. With of 90,000 protein structures currently deposited in online data banks, tools to automatically construct, analyze, and fix models is essential for correct scientific analysis. My research is to apply techniques from the machine learning field to identify elementary ions, such as zinc and calcium, in available data. These atoms are often essential to enzyme function, but their identification requires knowledge of esoteric rules, making it great ground for computational automation.

Catherine Nguyen

Members of the Burkholderia genus are Gram-negative intracellular bacteria that are highly pathogenic to humans and animals. Some species are capable of manipulating the actin cytoskeleton in eukaryotic cells for intracellular movement, which promotes cell-to-cell spread and evasion of the host immune system. However, the mechanism of actin nucleation is not understood. This project will determine how actin nucleation mediated by the conserved bacterial factor Burkholderia intracellular motility A (BimA), which is required for actin-based motility, differs among three Burkholderia species. Identification of BimA motifs that are important for actin-binding […]

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 […]

Hai Hoang

What will happen if Myspace use can increase your narcissism? What will happen if Facebook use can increase your self-esteem and decrease your self-control? What will happen when only ten minutes of using Facebook may make you more willing to purchase online products? Those are some of the questions I want to answer in my study considering it is impossible to deny the great influence of online social network on our daily lives. More specifically, I want to examine if peoples personality and self-control may change after using Facebook, and […]

Joseph DeRose

Type Ia supernovae are the thermonuclear explosions of critical mass white dwarves which have reached the Chandrasekar mass through accretion of mass from their binary companion. The near constancy of their maximum intrinsic brightness is the key to the use of these events in cosmological studies. Unfortunately, systematic errors associated with the diversity of type Ia supernovae continue to limit their usefulness as standard candles. I will use a very large spectroscopic and photometric data set gathered by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) in order to identify correlations between the […]

Scott Farley

Wildfires annually burn hundreds of thousands of acres of the Western United States, forcing mass evacuations, burning residences and costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Using a Geographic Information System (GIS), my project aims to model the wildfire potential of the Angeles National Forest, a large and diverse natural area just outside the city of Los Angeles. Considering variables such as fuel type and moisture content, temperature, precipitation, slope, and winds, I will determine the areas of the forest most conducive to a destructive fire. Using these ‘hot spots,’ I […]

Rachel Agoglia

Understanding the genetic mechanisms that underlie morphological evolution is a long-standing goal in biology. The threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) is an emerging model organism with features ideal for studying the molecular basis of morphological evolution. Several stickleback populations display evolved differences in tooth number, likely adaptive to match different diets. These differences in tooth number are largely controlled by a Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL), a genomic region controlling a quantitative trait. This QTL is located on chromosome 21 and contains an excellent candidate gene: Bone Morphogenetic Protein 6 (Bmp6). I […]

YeeAnn Chen

Cancer is a potent disease that occurs when cells acquire certain mutations that cause uncontrollable cell growth. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that have been associated in cancer development. In our research, we specifically study the tumor suppressive effects of miRNAs on B cell lymphoma, a type of blood cancer in the lymph nodes. We have determined that the deletion of mir-34a or mir-34bc (tumor suppressive miRNAs) accelerate lyphomagenesis. More recently, it has been shown that there is a homologous cluster of miRNAs, the mir-449 family, suggesting similar functions. […]

Xuchen Hu

Desiccation tolerance is an organisms ability to withstand removal of as much as 95% of its intracellular water and be able to resume normal metabolism upon rehydration. However the molecular basis for tolerance is not completely understood. Budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is one of the rare species that exhibit this amazing trait and is an excellent organism to study desiccation tolerance. Upon desiccation, yeast, like other desiccation tolerant organisms, accumulates the disaccharide trehalose. However, mutants that are unable to make trehalose exhibit significant tolerance, suggesting the existence of other molecules […]

Parinaz Fozouni

All animals share a common ancestor that underwent a transition to evolve multicellularity. To better understand this transition, we compare animals to choanoflagellates, their closest living relatives. Multicellular animals faced many challenges not shared by their unicellular ancestors. One such challenge was the evolution of mechanisms to defend against pathogens seeking to exploit the new niches present in a multicellular organism. My project aims to lay the groundwork for asking whether Toll-like receptors (TLRs), critical components of the innate immune system, evolved in the earliest animals to answer this challenge. […]