Addie Wilson

Many people are familiar with the musical “”Chicago,”” which follows the stories of women imprisoned for murdering their (often abusive) husbands. In reality, however, a vast majority of women in 1920’s Chicago who killed their husbands were exonerated by all-male juries. This phenomenon has been described as the “”new unwritten law.”” Women in Chicago were protected from criminal convictions for husband-killing by an unofficial legal understanding that gave impunity to many who were accused of this particular crime. This summer, I will continue to investigate the origins of the new […]

Luke Birdsong

I will distill Tweets from 10 different individuals and organizations that are recognized as leaders in the alternative food movement in regards to how they (or how they fail to) mention, portray, and discuss farmers and their contributions to the food system.

Rosa Lee

Telomeres are repeats of DNA bases that cap the ends of chromosomes, involved in protecting our genetic information. Telomerase is the enzyme responsible for maintaining telomere length – when activated, it adds repeats to telomere ends. Consequently, telomerase activity is implicated in aging and cancer, carrying important therapeutic implications. For the past year, I have been working with a postdoctoral fellow, Kelly Nguyen, in the Nogales Lab and Collins Lab to characterize the function and structure of shelterin, a protein complex involved in recruiting telomerase to the telomeres. In addition […]

Dean Berkowitz

Biodiversity is essential for providing ecosystem services to humans in addition to supporting ecological networks. While conservation efforts have prioritized protecting biodiversity hotspots in recent years, desert biomes remain undervalued, even as climate change threatens dryland ecosystems. For the past two semesters, I have worked on a project which seeks to better understand how environmental variables have shaped evolutionary processes underlying biogeographical patterns of native vascular plant communities in the Mojave National Preserve. This summer, I will learn wet lab techniques to extract and sequence genetic information from the specimens […]

David Reid

The work this summer will entail laboratory analysis of prehistoric food remains, such as charred nutshells and fruit seeds, retrieved from archaeological soil samples, which will take place at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto. We will also collect additional soil samples at the Jomon period Goshono site in Iwate Prefecture, and do museum research at the Saru River Historic Museum, Hokkaido.

Shivani Sundaram

In my project, I will attempt to determine whether an isolated population of threespine stickleback fish from Scout Lake has undergone natural selection within a period of six years. I will do this by counting tooth number and determining if there has been a change in average tooth number across multiple generations. In addition, I will be investigating the different chromosomal loci and alleles that contribute to and determine total tooth number in several stickleback clutches. To do this, I will be genotyping their genomic DNA at these loci and […]

Oia Walker-van Aalst

Under guidance from Professor Bowles and his graduate student (Ansel Klein), I will assist in quantifying soil health based on nutrient cycling and microbial activity metrics. I will assist in visiting 15 organic farms and subsequent field sampling of two fields per farm, taking soil samples using an auger and placing them in labelled bags to be brought to the lab for analysis. Specific field and lab measurements will include: potentially mineralizable N, POXC, total organic C and N, and microbial biomass C and N. The results will be analyzed […]

Zeltzin Angon

I am passionate about working on issues of climate justice and climate change, focusing on synergies between the natural and built environment–specifically land remediation. Having previously created maps of farms located in Yolo County, this summer I will continue my apprenticeship by sampling and processing farmers’ soil in order to learn about soil health and farmers’ practices.

Naz Dundar

This summer, I will be running laboratory and field experiments to understand what makes people willing to share their personal information with machines (or other humans). We are trying to understand whether things such as the mode of communication affect how humans build trust with one another or machines. Accordingly, one of the primary experimental manipulations we will be testing for is whether people are talking or writing with the other machine/human, how that affects the trust-building process and consequently how much personal information they share.

Audrey Litvak

I have been working in the Nogales Lab through URAP this past academic year with graduate student Avinash Patel. Previous work within the lab has shown that the general transcription factor TFIID binds promoter DNA at two major points: the downstream and upstream regions. Our research aims to understand how the downstream contacts are formed and to discern what the protein components of TFIID are sensing within the downstream promoter. This summer, we will be continuing our research efforts to answer these questions using a combination of biochemical and structural […]