Monica Swanson
Monica will study the little understood phenomenon of “death row volunteers,” inmates who give up the appeal process and “volunteer” to be executed. Seventy such “volunteers” have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. In order to test existing theories about this group and to propose her own, Monica will use a mixed research design, beginning with statistical analysis and supplementing it with case studies and qualitative interviews with defense attorneys and other researchers. She will travel to New York to meet with staff members at “Death […]
Ariana-Bree Stamper-Gimbar
A double major in Linguistics and Native American Studies, Bree will study the social stratification of American Indian English, a single dialect of English that is shared by Native Americans of very different backgrounds across the United States and Canada. Indian English shows parallels to Ebonics, but has been poorly researched by comparison. Bree proposes to investigate the sociolinguistic variation of American Indian English among Wintun and Kumeyaay tribal members within the tribally owned casinos of Cache Creek, Sycuan and Viejas in California, in order to investigate how speech communities […]
Paul Sager
La Petite Gironde, based in Bordeaux, France, was one of that country’s top regional newspapers from the 1860s to World War II. When the Germans occupied the country in 1940, all of France’s media fell under their control. Newspapers were the most visible expression of French collaboration with Nazi power. La Petite Gironde was no exception. At the moment of Liberation, in 1944, De Gaulle’s new regime was supposed to have rid the country of these symbols of infamy and replaced them with newspapers emerging from the Resistance. La Petite […]
Hoai Nguyen (Julie) Pham
For her Senior Honors Thesis in History, Julie proposes to investigate an under-researched aspect of the Vietnam War: the perspective of former members of the lower and middle echelons of the South Vietnamese military. She proposes first to examine the written record of the war, including print media, scholarly works, fiction and memoirs, to examine how American writers have portrayed the South Vietnamese military. She will then compare these depictions against self-representations culled from qualitative interviews conducted with former South Vietnamese military members in San Jose, home to the second […]
John Perng
An Electrical Engineering and Computer Science major, John’s research interests are in the rapidly exploding area of wearable computing, a rubric that includes palm pilots, pagers and cell phones. His goal is to design and improve a virtual keyboard for a personal electronic device called the Acceleration Sensing Glove. John has already designed a crude prototype of the glove, featured in Science News and Wired Magazine, that can be used as a mouse in a Microsoft Windows environment and can translate at least 64 different hand gestures into symbols. He […]
Michael Yuehhsun Lee
Michael will investigate the catalytic activity of enzymes solubilized in organic solvents using a technique called surfactant-assisted hydrophobic ion pairing. By furthering our understanding of the factors that effect enzyme function in non-aqueous media, Michael’s research will enable him to design a system whereby enzyme activity in such media is optimized. The results with have important practical applications in this novel branch of biotechnology. Michael plans to present his research at the National Meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers next year.
Sae Hee Ko
Ethylene acts as a unique gaseous plant hormone that is essential for fruit ripening; it is also associated with a variety of aging processes in plants, known as senescence. Sae Hee intends to investigate how the key enzyme (ACC synthase) in the biosynthesis of ethylene functions in order to find an effective inhibitor of this enzyme, thereby providing a means for biochemical control of the fruit ripening and plant aging process. The resulting research will be presented as her Senior Honors Thesis in Chemistry and will have direct applications for […]
John Jin Kim
John plans to alter the specificity of a well-characterized enzyme (IDH) from its natural substrate to a close relative (IPM) by using a process called directed evolution via random mutagenesis. Challenging a holy grail in biochemistry, John will attempt to change the specificity of the enzyme without losing its catalytic power. Although past attempts at rational protein design have produced only limited success, random mutagenesis is a promising new technique in which evolution that normally takes millions of years is compacted into a few months. John’s research will lead to […]
Umair Khan
For his Senior Honors Thesis in Molecular & Cell Biology, Umair will investigate the effects of a protein co-factor on the interactions between RNase P ribozyme and a model mRNA substrate. His research will deepen our understanding of how the protein co-factor affects the sequence-specific ribozyme’s structure and activity as it cleaves an mRNA encoding thymidine kinase of herpes simplex virus 1. By revealing how the ribozyme interacts with the viral mRNA, Umair will provide insight into the engineering of sequence-specific ribozymes as antiviral therapeutic agents, with important applications for […]
Katherine Hijar
Current Bio: Katherine received her Ph.D. in History from The Johns Hopkins University in 2009. After 11 years as a history professor at California State San Marcos, she is now a curator at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Her scholarly experitise is in U.S. social and cultural history, with emphasis on women, race, gender, urban history, and visual, print, and material culture. Haas Scholars Project: Katherine will travel to New York this summer to conduct archival research on visual and textual representations of women in the mid-nineteenth century. By […]