Lilou Redon-Gabel

Particulate air pollution contributes to millions of premature deaths worldwide annually and has major climate feedback effects. This is particularly true of black carbon (BC), a component of particulate matter (PM) that results from incomplete combustion sources and has not been as thoroughly assessed as other air pollutants. Gathering particulate air pollution data within communities most affected by industrial activities and vehicle traffic is necessary in developing solutions to mitigate the social and health inequities that result from exposure. My team at LBNL aims to analyze spatiotemporal trends of PM […]

Druv Punjabi

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are a category of exploding stars, and serve as one of the most important tools for probing our universe today. Because of their extreme and consistent luminosity, they are widely used to measure distances to faraway galaxies. Determining these large-scale distances allows a better understanding of the universe’s expansion, and thus of dark energy itself, the driver behind the expansion’s acceleration. Several recent studies have suggested that the luminosities of these supernovae can be better standardized if we factor in the properties of their host […]

Karthik Vegesna

Clathrin-mediated endocytosis is a crucial cellular event during which vesicles at the cell surface containing nutrients, receptor molecules, and viral proteins are formed and brought into the cell interior. The process works via the formation of a clathrin-coated vesicle which is internalized against membrane tension with the assistance of a branched actin network. In mammalian cells, this process is incompletely understood, especially at later stages of internalization. Mathematical modeling efforts have successfully been able to evaluate the mechanism by which actin filaments can generate force to spur internalization, but so […]

Michelle Soto-Melgar

Have you ever wondered why governments pass risky legislation–legislation that is likely to fail and goes against an administration’s own livelihood? My research will focus on symbolic law and the practicality of day labor solicitation ordinances. In the late 2000s, day labor solicitation bans emerged as an attempt to police and drive out Latino day workers from their communities. Many of these bans were legally challenged, ruled unconstitutional, and stopped from ever going into effect. Despite the legal challenges, some administrations pursued this regulation anyway, costing them millions in legal […]

Wendy Wan

Superconducting qubits, typically made from conventional metals such as aluminum or indium, are one of the best candidates for scalable quantum computing. However, these qubits are highly susceptible to environmental noise. To make the system more robust, scientists proposed to use topological qubits, a more exotic type of superconducting qubit made from a class of superconducting materials called spin-triplet superconductors. Due to the scarcity of naturally existing spin-triplet superconductors, the intrinsic properties thereof are largely under-explored, and there exist few good candidate materials for the next generation of quantum computers. […]

Allison Rothrock

High metal content, low levels of essential nutrients, and poor water retention make serpentine soil a uniquely challenging environment and a source of strong selective pressure. The yellow monkey flower, or Mimulus guttatus, an annual wildflower native to the western United States, has adapted to these harsh conditions; coupled with its wide range, this ability to survive on serpentine soil makes Mimulus guttatus a model organism for studying how plants adapt to local environments. This study will focus on three genes ‚Äî involved in root architecture and the uptake and […]

Paolo Sanchez

The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction, 66 million years ago, is considered a major landmark in Earth’s history with the demise of many prehistoric taxa and development of modern species. Famously known for the extinction of the dinosaurs, this event is linked to a high-energy meteor impact on the coast of Chicxulub, Mexico. However, the actual extent to which the impact influenced global changes remains obscure due to the vaporization of the meteor upon impact and satisfactory preservation of the K-Pg rock record. Thus, studies have analyzed microtektites, tiny bedrock-derived droplets […]

Annabelle Long

Women’s clubs are often exclusively remembered as advocating for progressive causes—education, suffrage, conservation—but little attention has been paid to the way that some of them gave rise to nationalist, anti-communist clubs for women. My interest in this topic builds on my research on a little-known clubwoman named Marguerite Dice. Born in 1884 to a Republican Union Army veteran father and politically connected mother, she dedicated her life to progressive women’s clubs, but spent at least 30 years advocating for conservative, anti-communist causes. Her life neatly tracks with the evolution of […]

Kara Smale

This dance history project is focused on identifying materials in the archive that record the contributions and major stage works of Santha Bhaskar, a prolific Singaporean-Indian dance choreographer whose career has spanned six decades between the 1960s and the present day. The primary resources for this project are the Singapore National Archives, Singapore National Library and the Singapore National Heritage Board, all of which have archives available for online access. In this project, I will collate and organize materials – newspaper reports, press clippings and photos related to Bhaskar’s contributions […]

Ryan Tuozzolo

My research hinges on a question of resonance. What, I pose, do we as readers hear echoed in the self-effacing abstraction of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s 1962 Árbol de Diana from the Romani-influenced folk narrative of Spaniard Federico García Lorca’s mid-1920s Romancero Gitano? The urgency of this issue stems from the post-industrial crisis of subjectivity, wherein, per Marxist theory of estrangement, the mechanical gears of capitalism mediate not only financial transactions, but also inter- and intra-personal relations. In an economic system founded on conceptual predetermination, per the logic of exchange-value, […]