Zheng Oong

The Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) is a species of jay that shows incredible morphological diversity across its range in the North and Central America. Our previous genetic work using nuclear DNA (microsatellites) and mitochondrial DNA has shown evidence of strong genetic structure across populations. This summer, I will be working closely with my mentor to thoroughly analyze both the microsatellite and mitochondrial DNA data to better understand patterns of population differentiation within the jays. Furthermore, we will also perform analysis of morphological and ecological niche data and compare them to […]

Kyung Geun Kim

The underlying biophysical properties of cortical neurons such as different ion channels distribution determine their behavior. Currently, neuroscientists do not have a method to accurately determine the distribution of different ion channels in different parts of a neuron. This creates a big gap in understanding neuronal mechanisms in health and diseases. In this project we are developing a framework for predicting a neuron’s ion channels distribution by fitting models to empirical voltage recordings of cortical neurons. However, the immense computational complexity in addition to the nonconvex nature of this fitting […]

Suzanna Chak

This summer, I will continue to work on a project studying the role of macrophages in acute lung injury. Macrophages are part of the innate immune system and are important for preventing the spread of infection and in the healing process. We have been studying how macrophage affect fibrosis (scarring) of the lung and the local inflammatory response after injury.

Jacob Giffin

My research entails operating an MRI scanner for a study conducted by the Cal Mania (CALM) program. The goal of this study is to better understand how factors such as reward sensitivity and planning play a role in various anxiety and mood disorders. My role in this study is to conduct brain scans on subjects while they undergo multiple functional tasks that help assess their reward sensitivity, planning, and emotion regulation. Analysis of these scans will show what brain regions are active during these tasks, and thus will help us […]

Molly Kraus

The European Migrant Crisis, as it has been popularly entitled, left millions of refugees from Syria to Afghanistan floundering for accurate information on the legal infrastructure of immigration in Europe. As a research apprentice for Berkeley School of Law, I have been able to study the digital proliferation of refugee rumors on sites such as Facebook and News that Moves to evaluate how this digital infrastructure has reshaped the informational and legal narratives of refugee communities. I also help analyze data from UNHCR on the conditions of Greek refugee camps, […]

Ben Kopania

The purpose of this project is to examine the effects of species assemblages and forest structure versus geomorphological setting on ecosystem carbon stocks in the mangroves of the Americas. This summer I will work on building statistical models that will help us understand these relationships between different forest characteristics and carbon stocks. By comparing these models to similar models for mangroves in other parts of the world, we will gain valuable insight into how ecological processes vary between mangroves from different global regions.

Dayna Stout

The research project focuses on social, economic, and political changes that have contributed to the racial differences in marijuana use of adolescents during the past few decades. We are analyzing historical trends based off various nationally conducted surveys on adolescents marijuana use. With use of these surveys, and previous research, we are attempting to understand the underlying factors that contribute to the historical shift in marijuana use between African-American, Hispanic and White adolescents.

Umar Maniku

My research has me examining discrepancies or large differences in reported security institutions troop numbers for different countries from year-to-year – whether there are problems with the coding or if they were caused by events occurring in that nation for that year. By cross-checking different published reports, military expenditure data, and news sources, a thorough picture can be drawn of the events occurring within a nation over a number of years. This is all part of ensuring the database of troop numbers that the research project is currently preparing is […]

Andrew Zhang

This project involves developing a serverless distributed machine learning framework to lower datacenter costs and achieve better utilization of resources. The idea is computers sometimes have unused computing resources that cannot be used up by conventional tasks, such as VMs, but these unused resources can be used by special serverless tasks, and we intend to write a framework for machine learning that takes advantage of serverless computing. This summer I will work on a python interface and a deep learning model existing Cirrus code.

Maria Sandoval-Navas

My research focuses on Colorectal cancer screening in a Latinx church community. Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of death in the United States and the rates of screening for Latinxs are low. Thus, we are targeting this population, in order to address these two problems. I will be working along side Vicky Gomez, who has been working with this community for years. We have recruited members of the church who have either experienced or had someone close to them experience a battler or loss due to colorectal cancer. These […]