Sarah Elisabeth Coduto

My research project is an analysis of queer childhoods. Taking as a starting-point Lee Edelmans notion of reproductive futurism, a term coined to refer to a cultural, political, and psychic investment in the figure of the Child who “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics as the emblem of futuritys unquestioned value (No Future 3-4), I would like to consider representations of children who refuse the future we invest in them. Broadly, I am preoccupied with violent children those who spit in the face of the exhortation, Think of […]

Lucy Whitmore

With the incredible amount of information available in the world, humans have to form many different behavioral strategies in order to account for the variety of situations and information we could encounter. This makes the ability to flexibly adapt behavior to different contexts a critical component of human intelligence. For example, when we use computers, we know that Macs and PCs use different operating systems. We can apply what we now from using a Mac laptop to a Mac desktop, but we know we cant apply that same knowledge to […]

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 […]

Ravi Mandla

One of the fastest heart rates in the world belongs to one of the smallest mammals, the Etruscan Shrew. Only weighing around 1.8 grams, this animal has a heart rate of 1511 beats per minute (in comparison, human heart rates are around 80 beats per minute). In contrast, the blue whale has a heart rate of about 8 bpm. This phenomenon of heart rate scaling can consistently be found throughout the animal kingdom, with smaller organisms possessing a higher heart rate compared to that of larger animals, though little research […]

Liona Muchenje

The uses of social media in developing countries particularly in Africa are generally under-researched. The few studies that have been conducted emphasized the impact of such digital tools on democracy, civic participation and other largely socio-political implications, leaving out the economic implications. After identifying this information gap, I formulated my research to study the emergent ways in which social media use and the informal economy intersect particularly in Zimbabwe, a country which has been struggling with rampant unemployment and consequently an increasing informal sector made up of self-entrepreneurial street vendors. […]

Verity Pinter

Intuitive theories that young children have about others behavior develop through exposure to patterns of covariation the degree to which two variables change together across time and situations as a child develops, incorporating new empirical evidence with prior knowledge. Over time and cultural exposure, children’s causal theories about other people’s behavior becomes biased toward culturally valued or relevant interpretations, resulting in culture-specific assumptions about patterns of behavior. Childrens understanding of and reliance on gender stereotypes influences their own sense of identity and social development. According to ever-present conventional gender stereotypes […]

Adrian Overly

Critical photoperiod, the threshold day length that accelerates or is required for flowering, allows plants to flower in response to seasonal cues that indicate environmental conditions should be favorable for seed development. Twenty-first century climate change, however, has led to changing precipitation and temperature patterns, and because day length will remain constant, the same photoperiod may not necessarily predict the best time of year to flower on a local scale. Species unable to evolve their flowering responses to photoperiod are at high risk for extinction. Understanding the genetic basis of […]

Lotus Lum

One million Americans suffer from Parkinson’s Disease (PD), a fatal neurodegenerative disorder characterized by neuronal death and motor symptoms such as bradykinesia and tremors. Unfortunately, there is no treatment that prevents, reverses or even delays PD. My research focuses on the protein called the Leucine Rich Repeat Kinase 2 (LRRK2), which is the most common site for mutations in PD. However, the mechanism by which LRRK2 causes PD is unknown. With the help of my lab at UCSF, I have uncovered that a sizable amount of intracellular LRRK2 is processed […]

Thomas Yerxa

Computers learn to solve problems by slowly and continuously changing their strategy, this makes solving problems that involve discrete steps problematic. I will be researching the use of hyper dimensional computing to implement differentiable memory structures that interface with neural networks. Many data structures are inherently discrete which makes them difficult to incorporate into schemes because of the strategy utilized by computers during the training process. Recent work has shown that neural networks that have the ability to learn how to use external data structures outperform traditional networks in an […]

Evelyn Li

Language is a crowning achievement of human civilization and a defining characteristic of human intelligence. There are over 5000 languages spoken in the world. Most people speak only a handful of languages, so translation is critical to overcoming barriers in communication. Unfortunately, translation is laborious and challenging, and cannot be done manually at scale. As a result, machine translation (MT) has been an active area of research in artificial intelligence. This research focuses on methods to improve MT. It incorporates the idea of neural machine translation, which builds a neural […]