Eba Kim

In a recent groundbreaking paper by Bartal et al., Science 2011, entitled Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats, researchers discovered that when one rat of a pair of cage mates was placed in a restrainer while the other rat was free, the free rat learned to emancipate the restrained rat. This helping or empathic behavior persisted even in the absence of potential contact with the newly freed rat, which proved that the free rat engaged in this behavior for the sole purpose of liberating the trapped rat instead of expecting […]

Jonathan Kim

This summer I will be working in Ken Goldberg’s Automation Lab on a project in surgical robotics. Currently most surgical robotics systems are not “true robots”; rather, the actuator components of the systems mirror the motions of a human surgeon operator. I will be conducting research into the possibility of increasing the autonomy of such surgical robotic systems. I will be working on the Raven surgical robot system to integrate a vision component to the overall system. After this first step I will then be conducting research into what is […]

Louis Lau

I aim to study the role of antibody avidity in the immune response to dengue virus (DENV) infection, and antibody-dependent enhancement as a result of low DENV-specific neutralizing activity, which is thought to influence progression to more severe disease in secondary heterotypic DENV infectionproblematic natural infections in hyperendemic areas. Despite the great burden of dengue disease worldwide, no antiviral therapy or vaccine is commercially available, although several vaccines are currently being tested in clinical trials. The first proof-of-concept dengue live attenuated vaccine efficacy trial that were recently published by Sanofi […]

Mark Mullan

Water injection into oil reservoirs is a commonplace practice used to increase oil production beyond primary yields. Seawater is most commonly used, which creates conditions conducive to the activity of sulfate-reducing microorganisms (SRM) within the reservoir. Once established, SRM can generate immense quantities of hydrogen sulfide as a metabolic byproduct, resulting in various oil recovery problems including oil reservoir souring, crude oil contamination, and metal corrosion that later leads to oil pipeline explosions. Overall, microbial hydrogen sulfide production poses numerous environmental and public health issues, and represents a multimillion dollar […]

Khashayar Nattagh

The goal of radiation cancer therapy is to deliver a lethal dose of radiation to a tumor while sparing the healthy tissue along the beam path. My project studies the phenomenon of gold nanoparticle radiosensitization: where gold nanoparticles are used to increase the damage that a certain dose of radiation has to a tumor without increasing the damage to the healthy cells. Specifically, I am trying to determine why gold nanoparticles increase the effects of radiation, a question that scientists are debating today. I am investigating this by using cutting […]

Tai Ng

Streptomyces is a large genus of actinobacteria well known for their secondary metabolism, producing a large array of antibacterial, antifungal, and antiparasitic drugs. The compound of interest in this project is physostigmine, produced by Streptomyces griseofuscus. Physostigmine is a tryptophan-derived alkaloid that reversibly inhibits acetylcholinestrase. It is a candidate drug for treating numerous neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, myasthenia gravis, glaucoma, and orthostatic hypotension. Studying the biosynthesis of physostigmine can provide insight into the biosynthesis of a large family of alkaloids with the unique pyrroloindole skeleton. Furthermore, understanding the […]

Jonathan Ho

A particularly notable obstacle to the adoption of robotics in the everyday household is the difficulty of teaching robots to execute new tasks in unforeseen environments–this is currently a task only approachable by those with plenty of time and technical expertise. I am working on a system that aims to make teaching robots as simple as providing human demonstrations. It will use ideas from artificial intelligence to enable robots to generalize demonstrations to new situations and learn from failures as they interact with the world. My work will focus on […]

Arya Nikjoo

Elevated accumulation of glycosaminoglycans in tumor microenvironments of many advanced cancers, including breast cancers, has been associated with poor patient prognosis. Our laboratory has long been developing in vitro physiologically-relevant culture models that provide epithelial cells with an in vivo-like microenvironment, which is optimal to bridge the gaps between epithelial monolayer cultures and animal models. We have also developed glycosaminoglycan-based probes for identifying invasive breast cancer cells in vitro and in vivo. My project characterizes uptake patterns of these probes into a panel of normal and malignant epithelial cell lines […]

Robert Gleichman

Currently, it is difficult for robots to manipulate deformable objects. This is because deformable object’s plethora of states make it is difficult for the robot to figure out what next action will get it closer to its goal. One solution to this problem is to use human demonstrations. The robot can currently tie knots when given a demonstration of a knot tying sequence. This is done by finding a transformation from the rope state at test time to the rope state at the beginning of a demonstration. This transformation is […]

Pedro Amaral

My research this summer focuses on object recognition for robotics. The goal is to have a robot be able to look at several objects and be able to not only identify each object, but also figure out how each is positioned. I will apply deep learning algorithms that have proven useful in other vision tasks to this problem.