Angela Laureano
Angelas research will analyze the institutional and personal barriers affecting formerly incarcerated people trying to pursue higher education. This study will highlight their personal narratives, as they attempt to overcome structural barriers. Previous qualitative research on formerly incarcerated people who participate in prison college programs reveals that having access to education support is crucial for their involvement in higher education post-release. Scholars, however, call for more research looking at the effects of these academic programs in prison and their impact on participants once released. Through qualitative interviews with formerly incarcerated […]
Jamie Hein
Between 1977 and 2016, the U.S. womens imprisonment rate increased over 800%. In California, while the rate of mens incarceration has decreased over the past decade, the number of prisoners who suffer from mental illness has risen significantly. It is imperative to explore these numbers as they pertain to womens institutions, and to understand why racial and ethnic minority women with mental illness and substance abuse issues are more likely to be channeled into prison and jail than treatment programming. By carrying out archival research and interviews in Chowchilla, CA […]
Voulette Hattar
Rafael Yamir Gómez-Carrasco
Rafael extends Jos Muozs queer utopian hermeneutic by synthesizing it with Henri Lefebvres theories of the quotidian and spatialization. Muozs method of analysis provides a framework for understanding minoritarian performance of futurity practices and embodiments of a world that should be. However, his analysis only briefly engages with everyday space and does not fully investigate how it performs futurity. After developing a Lefebvrian tuned queer utopian hermeneutic through literary analysis, Rafael will study urban New York City to understand how the quotidian is transformed into space, and the potential for […]
Xinyi Zhang
Parkinsons disease is the second-most common neurodegenerative disorder, which currently has no effective treatment. The development of treatments can benefit from better understandings of how the neurodegeneration propagates in the brain. The most crucial contributor to the propagation is believed to be the transmission between neurons of the pathological protein, -synuclein. To study the unresolved transmission mechanism, Xinyi proposes an RNA-Seq study on neuronal models to measure the transient responses of cells exposed to -syn over time. RNA-Sequencing is a powerful tool for unbiased investigation of the highly coordinated responses […]
Sydney Garcia
Everyone experiences stress to varying degrees. Past scholarship has connected awareness of the news to stress while linking stress to adverse mental and physical health outcomes. Given that minority groups are significantly overrepresented in news relating to criminal activity, and news coverage under the Trump Administration has increased negative depictions of immigrants, Sydney will travel to Californias Central Valley to investigate the impacts of such coverage on Latinx farmworkers. She will use daily diary methodology to uncover the relationship between daily self-reported awareness of the news, stress levels, emotions, and […]
Jehan Yang
Utilizing 27 degrees of freedom, the human hand is a complex manipulator capable of tasks ranging from fingerstyle guitar to precise surgery. To replicate the human hand would produce a highly versatile tool in robotics and prostheses. Robots in the future might perform surgery while arm amputees could perform as well as anyone in sports and arts. Current hand replications have limitations of high expense and weight, with trade-offs in precision. For his project, Jehan aims to create an inexpensive and light manipulator, with improvements for precise control. He will […]
Michael Cerda-Jara
Michaels research investigates the role of higher education in employment prospects for people with criminal records. In 2018, Michael successfully executed an experimental audit study of job application callbacks for college-educated applicants with or without criminal records, which surprisingly, found no difference between the two. However, this still leaves unanswered whether the applicants race, or timing of the attainment of the college degree affect the number of callbacks. For Michaels Haas Scholars project, continuing to focus on college-educated men, he will add these variables to his prior audit research design. […]
Bryan Truitt
The Incan quipu was a record-keeping and computing system based on knotted rope, encoding debt, land ownership, genealogy, and other information, but its precise meaning has been lost through colonialism. The arbitration of archival inclusion is an exercise of power, and scholarship, as practiced in the western academy, is a negotiation with or an interpretation of the archive. Yet inclusion is not enough: the organization and decontextualization of indigenous archival objects reflects the fragmentation of indigenous ways of knowing under colonialism. Using artistic production as a framework for critical inquiry, […]
Nicholas Carey
Kaposis Sarcoma Associated Herpesvirus (KSHV) establishes lifelong infections and can cause a variety of cancers and proliferative disorders in immunosuppressed individuals. Recent evidence indicates that oral contact is the primary route of transmission for KSHV. The goal of this project is to elucidate the mechanism of reactivation for transmission of KSHV in the hopes of developing novel treatments to reduce the incidence of infection in the community. Nicholas will infect human oral keratinocytes with several KSHV mutants, and qPCR will be used to analyze transcription patterns to determine the role […]