Joseph Maa

Bacteria live in complex and diverse communities ranging from marine environments and soils to the human gut. Improving our understanding of bacterial communities is dependent on deepening our knowledge of how interactions between species affect community function and structure. In one specific interaction, phages participate in these bacterial communities by lysing members and releasing nutrients to the environment. Previous work has explored nutrient sharing interactions on larger scales and research suggests that within marine communities, in algal and phytoplankton populations, viral-mediated cell lysis is responsible for the majority of nutrient […]

Vladimir Kremenetski

Quantum computers promise tremendous gains in computational efficiency to a number of important areas in STEM. Among these, few are as promising as the ability of quantum computers to simulate atomic-scale (and thus quantum) systems. A specific topic of interest in this area is using the simulations to find the ground state energy of particularly cumbersome energy systems. However, many barriers still exist in the way of this theoretical benefit becoming a real advantage. One such barrier is the difficulty of designing the gate layout . The goal of the […]

Edna Stewart

In mammals, soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) serves as the primary receptor for the signaling gas nitric oxide (NO). Binding of NO activates the enzyme, which leads to various signaling pathways that regulate many physiological functions, including vasodilation and neurotransmission. Activators of sGC are currently used as therapeutic agents for cardiopulmonary and urogenital diseases. I will be investigating an sGC homolog called Cyg11 present in the alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Preliminary results indicate that carbon monoxide activates the algal homolog more compared to nitric oxide, a novel activity that warrants complete biochemical […]

Cameron McBride

The development of nanoscale materials (materials that are around 10-9 meters in size) is something that promises to widely impact fields such as computing, medicine, and energy and change the landscape of technology as we know it. One type of promising nanomaterial is the Transition Metal Dichalcogenide (or TMDC) which is a crystalline nanomaterial made of a transition metal, such as Tungsten, and a chalcogenide, such as Selenium. When crystals of TMDCs are reduced to an atomic thinness, they exhibit unique electronic properties which make them useful for the development […]

Ryan Shih

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are sub-millimeter structures that combine electrical and mechanical principles to produce novel sensors, actuators, and transducers for complicated tasks at the microscale. While most MEMS research focuses on devices operating in air, biomedical applications and the parallel growth of microfluidics have stimulated efforts towards MEMS operation in fluid, especially biological media. Previous work under this program examined devices in deionized water and demonstrated successful operation of an electrostatic actuator capable of generating high force density. This work extends upon those findings and focuses on designing more intricate […]

Loren Jiang

I plan to develop a new meso-scale device for the mechanical stimulation of cell cultures using repulsive-force electrostatic actuators that I have helped fabricate and characterize in prior work. Cells live within a dynamic micromechanical environment, sensing and adapting to external mechanical forces, including tension, compression, fluid shear, and hydrostatic pressure. Basic cellular functions like proliferation and differentiation, as well as many diseases including osteoporosis and atherosclerosis, have been associated with these types of mechanical cues. Because of the complexity of in vivo models, a wide variety of in vitro […]

Samar Bhat

Under conditions of cellular stress, such as in times of starvation, infection, or exposure to potentially dangerous environmental agents, normal cellular processes are often compromised. One such process involves how the 5-cap structures of mRNA are used to recruit ribosomes, the cells translation machinery, to initiate protein synthesis. When this process is compromised, mRNAs use an element on their structure called Internal Ribosomal Entry Sites (IRES) to recruit ribosomes and initiate protein synthesis. Furthermore, it is believed that IRESs may initiate translation by interacting with the cells translation initiation factors, […]

Trent Gomberg

Dengue virus is an arbovirus that affects infects as many as 390 million individuals annually. Up to 96 million individuals express symptoms which range from flu like uncomplicated dengue fever to life threatening cases of dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue shock syndrome (DHF/DSS), the latter being characterized by severe vascular leak and dysfunction of endothelial cells, which form blood vessels. Interestingly, higher levels of dengue virus non-structural protein 1 (NS1), a protein secreted from infected cells, is associated with severe cases of dengue. NS1 has been shown to disrupt the function of […]

William Kumler

Did you know that phytoplankton produce half the world’s breathable oxygen? These enigmatic organisms are a vital part of the marine ecosystem and closely connected to our terrestrial world, but there’s a lot we don’t know about them. This summer, I’ll be looking specifically at phytoplankton blooms – dynamic events in which they reproduce rapidly and overwhelm thousands of square kilometers of ocean – and studying the signals phytoplankton produce when stressed. This project will help us understand how carbon is sequestered in the ocean and the implications for the […]

Nicholas Carey

We are studying the eighth human herpes virus; Kaposis Sarcoma-Associated Herpesvirus (KSHV). This is a sexually transmitted virus that establishes life-long infections. KSHV does not cause symptoms in most people but is known to cause three types of cancer (Kaposis Sarcoma, Pulmonary Effusion Lymphoma, and Multicentric Castleman Disease) in immunocompromised people, such as those with HIV/AIDS. It is estimated that 20-50% of people with HIV are also infected with KSHV. KSHV has several regions of DNA called open reading frames (ORFs) that are completely unique and their role in the […]