Jennifer Ding

Speciation has long been studied in the field of evolutionary biology, but many questions remain regarding the specific genomic interactions between diverging species. To study the genetic events involved in the development of reproductive isolation and speciation, I will focus on the Drosophila nasuta fruit fly clade which is currently in the process of diverging. I will use molecular assays to characterize gene flow through experimental secondary contact between recently diverged Drosophina nasuta subspecies and draw conclusions about the level and type of reproductive isolation between the subspecies pairs. My […]

Michelle Antonucci

Vision is a vital sense that many people reply on to navigate through their daily lives, and yet people with amblyopia (commonly referred to as lazy eye) can have their vision and depth perception severely impacted by this condition. With my mentor in the Levi Lab, I sought to develop an effective treatment for astigmatism-related amblyopia and test it in a clinic trial. The treatment is a perceptual learning task where the patient looks at a computer that presents different orientations of a black and white pattern. The task of […]

Justin Fu

Robots are typically deployed in highly controlled environments, but for robots to become usable in everyday situations, they must be able to learn to adapt to the environment. Reinforcement learning is a popular framework in robotics for teaching robots motor skills in unknown environments through a trial-and-error process. Recently, methods have been developed that allow optimization of high-dimensional control policies, which enables the use of powerful tools from machine learning such as neural networks to decide on which actions the robot should take and when. My project involves using various […]

Renan Aparicio

The prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases has reached an unprecedented level and is now a prominent threat to the health and wellbeing of our aging population. As a result, the demand for effective therapies has become of paramount importance. Studying proteins involved in neurodegeneration allows researchers to outline cellular pathways leading to disease, which in turn helps provide targets for drug molecules. Recently, scientists discovered a link between different neurodegenerative diseases and specific point mutations in triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2). TREM2 is normally expressed at the cell […]

Daniel Jeong

Many recent studies have shown that the brains frontal cortex strongly modulates the information processed in the primary sensory cortices. A strong contributor of this modulation, each of the frontal cortical pyramidal neurons can project axons to multiple different brain regions (e.g., thalamus, midbrain, striatum, and other cortical areas) and therefore have fundamentally different roles. However, it is still unknown whether the frontal cortical pyramidal neurons innervating different targets receive inputs from overlapped brain regions or from segregated regions. My research will focus on the cingulate cortex (Cg), the frontal […]

Lawrence Bai

Found in many species of bacteria and archaea, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR associated (Cas) proteins provide an adaptive defense mechanism against foreign invaders such as viruses and plasmids. By integrating segments of the foreign DNA into the CRISPR locus of the host genome, the bacteria remember the invaders and can subsequently produce CRISPR RNAs (crRNAs) to destroy the foreign DNA complementary to the crRNA. In particular, Cas9 plays a major role in using the short RNA as a guide to search for any DNA […]

Jason Lam

Organic Photovoltaic cells (OPV) are on the rise of changing modern technology. An advantage of photovoltaic cells is that it utilizes chemicals based on their properties that can harness energy from the suns radiation and provide a voltage. This green way of approaching power supply will help save Earths natural reservoirs and impede atmospheric pollution. However, standard organic photovoltaic cells (OPV) that uses P3HT and PCBM mixtures have only a power conversion efficiency (PCE) up to 4.5%. This inefficient percentage is what hampers OPV from excelling in todays technology. My […]

Stephanie Chang

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen responsible for a significant number of antibiotic resistant infections. It can infect almost any site of the body, but typically targets damaged epithelial tissues such as corneas of contact lens wearers, potentially leading to blindness. P. aeruginosa uses a Type 3 Secretion System, a needle-like structure, to introduce bacterial exotoxins into host cells which can cause cell death. P. aeruginosa has also been found to replicate intracellularly and occupy protrusions in the plasma membrane known as blebs. Previous studies from the Fleiszig lab have […]

Brett Garabedian

Plant biomass represents the most abundant collection of polymers on this planet. As a dominant carbon sequestration system, an upwards of 150 billion tons of biomass is produced worldwide each year, but humans currently utilize only 2% of this resource. Thus, there is a large margin to accommodate recent interests in lignocellulosic plant biomass as feedstock for biofuels and other commodity chemicals. A major bottleneck in the generation of commercially competitive biofuels from lignocellulosic plant biomass is the presence of acetate throughout the plant cell wall as this chemical hinders […]

Alexander Giuffrida

The majority of matter in the universe is dark matter which does not interactwith light. In several physical models dark matter includes a dark photon (A’) which plays a similar role to that of the photon in the normal sector. In addition,recent experiments at CERN have confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle which mediates the Higgs field that gives other particles mass. Now physicists are proposing theories beyond the Standard Model which introduce additional Higgs states, with one of them (A0), having a lower mass than the […]