Sami Chang

The consumption of petroleum-based gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel continues to affect greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. Alternative fuel sources are needed, and recent breakthroughs in synthetic biology provide a promising solution: the engineering of microorganisms to generate drop-in biofuels, which are compatible with existing engines. Unlike electricity and natural gas alternatives, biofuels reduce greenhouse gas emissions by recycling the carbon dioxide that is emitted. However, biofuel derived directly from crops or oils may threaten land and/or food security. Thus, this project focuses on expanding the diversity of biofuels […]

Emily Ye

In invertebrates and humans alike, the nervous system fundamentally serves to detect sensory inputs and generate appropriate behavioral outputs. However, despite its ubiquity, our understanding of how this phenomenon occurs at the level of single neurons is far from complete. In the insect model Drosophila melanogaster, previous studies have provided some insight into how neural circuits govern various simple behaviors. For example, populations of neurons have been identified that control feeding and drinking – homeostatic processes conserved among a wide range of organisms. However, how this circuitry is modulated to […]

Helen Kang

Information theory has been key to our understanding of the brain, by elucidating mechanisms of neural coding in the brains sensory periphery. Recent mathematical work has derived a new measure called integrated information, which can quantify how much information emerges at the level of an entire network. Integrated information has already been used to study how the structure of brain networks might underpin large-scale information flow and may help explain mechanisms of information processing in both healthy and pathological brain states. Currently, integrated information can only be calculated for neural […]

Alexander Reed

The years 31 BC AD 14 saw the Western world undergo a great revolution in culture, politics, state, and society as the regime of Caesar Augustus dismantled and replaced the centuries-old republican system of government at Rome with an imperial autocracy. In the provinces of the Roman empire, the very fabric of the city provided a key platform for the promotion of the Augustan program. However, recent reassessments of the period have begun to suggest that many of the changes in urban form during this era may instead have been […]

Huws Landsberger

Low temperature plasma physics is of importance to antimatter research, where sympathetic (collisional) cooling with a matter plasma brings energetic antimatter particles to a temperature at which creation of antiatoms is possible. Resonant cavity cooling, or cooling of a nonneutral plasma by coupling the radiation field with the electromagnetic modes inside a trap cavity, is a useful technique to cool plasmas to wall temperatures (10K) but may be difficult to perform due to plasma location or trap geometry. Therefore, understanding the effectiveness of mode-mode coupling in plasmas is essential; by […]

Metta Nicholson

Wetlands are habitats valued for their ecosystem services, nutrient cycling abilities, biodiversity, and buffering capacity, but have been rapidly declining since the eighteenth century. Only recent efforts have attempted to address wetland decline, and such large-scale analyses of wetland composition face complications regarding the difficulty of site access and the impacts that direct field investigations can have on vulnerable species. To address these difficulties, remote sensing tools can be used to map and analyze wetland vegetation. However, wetland biodiversity indicators from remote sensing data remain limited in strength and are […]

Andy Quaen Chen

I will investigate how histones dissociate from the nucleosome during the process of unwrapping by using “Fleezers,” optical tweezers with the added capability of detecting single molecule fluorescence. In all Eukaryotic cells, DNA is packaged and compacted in the form of chromatin in the nucleus. The nucleosome, consisting of a histone octamer core wrapped by 1.7 turns of the DNA, represents the basic, repeating, unit of chromatin. Since the DNA is constantly transcribed, repressed, repaired or replicated in response to stimuli, nucleosomes and the superstructures they form must be highly […]

Duc Nguyen

Decision-making is a core aspect of the human experience, yet the mechanism underlying this process has not yet been fully understood, despite a long history of research in this field. There are many factors that play important roles in decision-making, such as outcomes, risk (probability of undesired outcomes), emotions, and interpersonal context. Early studies tended to focus on the effect of one specific factor on the process of decision-making, and disregarded others. Because of these studies, we have some understanding of how these factors affect decision-making. However, decisions in life […]

Elena Slobodyanyuk

The physical organization of chromatin in the nucleus plays a crucial role in the coordination and regulation of gene expression. Long-distance interactions between DNA regulatory elements called enhancers and promoters are important for establishing cell type-specific gene expression programs. Dysregulation of enhancer-promoter interactions can lead to aberrant gene expression and thus promote developmental abnormalities and tumorigenesis. Yin Yang 1 (YY1) is a ubiquitously expressed transcription factor in mammalian cells that has recently been implicated in coordinating enhancer-promoter interactions, thus facilitating transcription activation during embryonic development. However, it remains unknown how […]

Natalie Petersen

According to a 2013 National Health Statics Report, 30% of American women discontinue using hormonal methods of birth control within their first year of use due to side effects. Conventional steroid-based contraception comes with a variety of side effects, such as anxiety, depression, and weight gain, and therefore creates a demand for non-hormonal contraceptive with minimal side effects. Sperm cells have a specific set of molecular targets, increasing the possibility of developing a contraceptive with high specificity and low side effects. Our preliminary data indicate that sperm motility and their […]