Nalya Arabelle Fenella Rodriguez
Looking at the factors that led to the Salvadoran civil war, such as the social inequalities of the time, Nalya has found it important to further understand the implications of this political violence in the creation of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) street gang. Using Durkheims theory of religion, she has developed a theory on the religion of violence. This “religion” has created a system of perpetual violence in El Salvador, which was ironically exacerbated by US domestic and foreign policy on gangs and immigration. By interviewing people in Los Angeles […]
Casey Racicot
On August 6, 2012, the Chevron Refinery in Richmond, California exploded, hospitalizing 15,000 people and causing severe environmental impacts. In the weeks that followed the explosion, the infrastructure surrounding the refinery became stressed as businesses shut down, hospitals became overwhelmed, gardens and vegetation died, and peoples sense of stability shattered. The purpose of Casey’s project is to explore the extent to which residents in the surrounding areas felt a sense of community before and after the explosion, and the medias role in shaping these perceptions. Her research will explore the […]
Andy Nguy
Enzymes are highly efficient biological catalysts. Understanding how enzymes catalyze chemical reactions into physiological relevant rates is of great interest. Moreover, electron and proton transfers are ubiquitous in biological processes, yet it has now become clear that such electron and proton transfers may have quantum mechanical effects. Andy will be studying soybean lipoxygenase, a model enzyme that accomplishes it’s catalysis through a proton and electron transfer known as hydrogen tunneling, a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon. In an effort to better understand how catalysis is achieved through hydrogen tunneling, he will […]
Marvin Morris
Current Bio: After 3 years supporting the CEO of a SF based nonprofit (PRC), Marvin recently returned home to UC Berkeley as an executive assistant within the Principal Gifts and Strategic Initiatives, a unit within University Development and Alumni Relations. He supports the AVC of PGSI and both EDs. Haas Scolars Project: The so-called winged-demons of Etruria appear most prominently in funerary art on painted tomb walls, as well as on clay and stone relief, vase painting and sculpture. Yet, there has been little attempt to comprehensively study and interpret […]
Karen MacLaughlin
In first century Rome, increasing numbers of the elite class chose to commit suicide rather than forfeit their honor in the courtroom or on the battlefield. Although Stoicism had its detractors in Late Antiquity, suicide was considered by many Romans to be a rational choice. Roman Christians, however, drawn from all social classes, chose to submit to various methods of torture and death rather than participate in civic religious rites that deified the emperor. Their choice was considered to be just deserts for impiety at worst, and pitiful, at best. […]
Charlotte Hull
Martha’s Vineyard conjures up various cultural and historical myths. But what did community life really look like for British colonial settlers in the seventeenth century? Who were these people and what did they value? This summer Charlotte will examine the abundant town records that remain in local, Vineyard archives. Yet how do you unpack a community, or even a single human, from their legal footprint, from the tangled mass of wills and land deeds? This project pieces together a single life out of the dismembered details present in the documents […]
Jay Kumar Gupta
Humans display an intrinsic capability for prosocial behaviors: behaviors undertaken to benefit others. Stress disrupts this capability but also induces neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a brain region that functions in social memory. Understanding the relationship between stress and prosociality allows better treatment of diseases such as Autism Spectrum Disorder and depression, as the asocial nature of these disorders puts affected individuals at increased risk for anxiety. The neural and hormonal basis of this relationship is explored through a behavioral paradigm involving rats. Given that the hippocampus directly projects to components […]
Kristophe Green
Researchers have found that, in general, positive emotions lead to greater creativity (operationalized as increased cognitive fluency, flexibility, and divergent thinking) than do negative emotions. Increasingly, innovations and gamechanging insights are the product of not one creative person, but teams of people working together to produce results. It is essential to understand how creativity functions within groups, and how/which emotions play a role in increasing the creativity of these groups. Kristophes proposed research project addresses the question of how different positive emotions influence group creativity. Specifically, he will test whether […]
Sophia Sage Elia
Sophia is studying regular embeddings of complete graphs on powers of two vertices. A complete graph is one in which each vertex is connected to each other vertex. Loosely, if one starts with a prime power number of vertices, it is possible to symmetrically connect the vertices in such a way that none of the connecting lines cross on the surface of a torus (think doughnut) with a certain number of holes. There isn’t a constructive way to create a visual representation of the embedding of the graph. Sophia’s project […]
Connor Scott Clark
In the year 1890, more Italian-Americans immigrated to the United States than any other ethnic group. They brought their culture along with them, and Italian theatres began to spring up in their urban ethnic enclaves, where Italian performing culture could survive in the new world. However, America had been exposed to Italian theatre before its founding, and that appreciation for Italian performance contradicted rising distaste for Italian immigrants, who were viewed as ethnic inferiors via eugenics. How did Anglo audiences reconcile these two contrasting views on Italian immigrants and their […]