Lulu Matute

Hundreds of environmental activists have been killed for defending land and natural resources in Honduras. Although Berta Cceres was one of many slain activists, she is the most renowned globally. This is largely due to her transnational coalition-building efforts and Goldman Environmental Prize recognition. Berta was an outspoken Indigenous Lenca leader and a feminist who advocated for indigenous land tenure. She spoke out against government corruption, the 2009 military coup d’tat, and U.S. interests in the country. Lulu will conduct ethnographic interviews with Honduran women living in the Bay Area […]

Mathew Madain

The centennial anniversary of World War I has generated much scholarship on large-scale atrocities against religious minority communities of the Ottoman Empire. However, historiography on the period has neglected to discuss smaller-scale religious violence that also occurred in Ottoman provinces, most notably against the Christian communities of Transjordan (1914-1916). Mathew will travel to modern-day Jordan to conduct archival research and to gather oral histories, in order to produce a narrative of the traumatic events experienced by the Christian communities of Ottoman Transjordan during the Great War. This project will further […]

Andre Lai

Characterizing the relationship between every cell type is necessary for understanding the human body and advancing human medicine. One major technological hurdle involves the ability to isolate, manipulate, and analyze individual cells in a high-throughput fashion. Existing methods are plagued by low cell capture efficiency and limited user control. For his project, Andre aims to design, fabricate, and test a novel microfluidic device that will address these limitations. He will achieve this by incorporating a multiplex design with layered architecture and integrated elastomeric valves to enable complete isolation, imaging, and […]

Caolan John

Since last decades discovery of graphene, scientists have searched for its magnetic cousin: a magnetic material that can be cleaved down to a single monolayer thickness. One relatively little-studied family of suitable materials is the transition metal selenophosphates, a class of layered, van der Waals-bonded semiconductor materials. Caolan aims to synthesize single crystals of two members of this family, FePSe3 and NiPSe3, in order to perform magnetization measurements in an effort to understand the role of selenium in determining the direction of magnetic ordering. These materials are exciting candidates for […]

Jasmine Jan

Current Bio: Jasmine is a first year MS/PhD at Berkeley in EECS. Haas Scholars Project: One focus of point-of-care devices is to improve accessibility of essential diagnostic tools by utilizing miniaturized, accurate and low-cost optical systems. Printed organic optoelectronics are one such technology that have the potential to improve the optical sensing schemes of these systems. Because organic optoelectronics are processed in solution, they can be easily scaled for large-area manufacturing and roll-to-roll processing, leading to low-production costs. Jasmine aims to design a point-of-care device utilizing printed optoelectronics for fluorescent […]

Sebastian Herics

Elven anti-air Nike Missile Sites ringed San Francisco in a line of atomic protection, poised for launch at Soviet bombers that never came from 1950 to 1974. Only Nike Missile site SF-88 has been preserved in a coat of fresh paint that crowds of the curious have toured since 1974 in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Sebastian Herics will be tracing the cultural memory of the Cold War by comparing Nike missile sites, both preserved and left to ruin, through the eyes of the military, the city of San […]

Ariadna González Aguilera

Ariadna’s research project will focus on the West Berkeley Shellmound, an ancient village site that was once situated on the San Francisco Bay shoreline in Berkeley, California. Her thesis is directed toward understanding how Native American societies interacted with their environment during the last 5000 years. Research will be conducted on animal remains from the shellmound, using curated materials excavated in the early and mid-twentieth century, to understand ancient fisheries and fishing practices. Archaeological analyses of fisheries can contribute to historical baseline data relevant for conservation biology, restoration ecology, and […]

Lissa Garcia

Lissa grew up in Chula Vista, California, where many are transfronterizos, students and workers who live in Mexico but commute to the U.S almost daily. Nancy Wonders advances the theory of border performativity where she argues borders are not only geographically constituted, but also socially constructed via the performance of various state actors in an elaborate dance with ordinary people who seek freedom of movement and identification. Thus, border performativity points to different technologies of control such as the social construction of the illegal and the securitisation of migration. Lissas […]

Rebecca Forbes

Current Bio: Since graduation, Rebecca has been working in Research Administration for the UC system. Through this job, she has been able to assist many UC professors and researchers in securing grants and contacts funding for a variety of research projects. Haas Scholars Project: Rebecca grew up in a small town and watched the rural drug scourge destroy the young lives in her community. Now, she is using her Berkeley education to understand this phenomenon. This summer she will be traveling to rural Tuolumne County, California to do ethnographic fieldwork […]

Dan Ferenc Segedin

In many materials, the application of an electric field leads to a separation of positive and negative charges, inducing a polarization in the material. In ferroelectrics, such a polarization exists in the material without the application of an external field. Analogously, the alignment of electron spins in ferromagnetic materials results in a magnetic polarization in the absence of an external magnetic field. Bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3) is a rare material in which both of these states exist at room temperature and are coupled: applying an external electric field can switch the […]