Wilson Wang
Since the 2010s, voguing, a historically Black practice has become cherished in clubs in China. Yet, African merchants in Guangzhou constitute a community of foreigners portrayed by media outlets as “infectious”. Why is there such a discrepancy between the reception of the Black corporeal (laboring Black bodies) and the reception of Black corporeal practices (aestheticized labor of voguing)? What constitutes the underlying racialization process in the current Chinese society, where the concept of racial taxonomy is deemed “occidental”, and the Blacks are deemed separate from any sociopolitical concerns? How does […]
Katrina Manaloto
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social impairments and repetitive, restricted behaviors. ASD is also associated with changes in learning. Currently, we model mechanisms underlying ASD by studying mice with ASD risk genes, enabling further research into neural circuits of learning in ASD. Previously, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) was identified as a brain learning and cognitive flexibility center. Reversal learning paradigms, where individuals first learn to associate choices with certain outcomes before outcomes are switched, are also widely performed tests of cognitive flexibility. Ongoing research […]
Megan Luo
Most proteins have one known fold with small conformational changes with no dramatic structural differences. “Fold-switching” proteins have two or more folds that can be occupied and the preference can be shifted due to change in local environment. While rare, fold-switching proteins are implicated in diseases including SARS-CoV-2, rabies and cancer, making them potential drug targets. Furthermore, biotechnological applications of fold-switching proteins, such as biosensors, could lead to impacts in many fields. Therefore, it is important to understand the ratio of populations and interconversion rate between both conformations of a […]
Nicole Lee
Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is a set of manufacturing techniques that is rapidly developing use cases across many fields. Part orientation is an important but often overlooked design requirement for 3D printing that impacts the properties of the final product. Printing a part in its optimal orientation can enhance the print speed, strength, and quality. The objective of this project is to analyze the effect of part orientation on print success using data collected from the 3D printing services offered by Berkeley’s Jacobs Hall. Understanding the relationship between print […]
Jennifer Lee
Understanding niche differentiation is fundamental for comprehending the complicated process of adaptive radiation, characterized by the rapid formation of many ecologically different species from a single ancestor. However, evolutionary biologists still highly debate how niche differentiation is achieved during the early stage of adaptive radiation. On the one hand, through character displacement, natural selection could facilitate differentiation and diversification between closely related species where they co-occur with no need for prior niche differentiation at the time of secondary contact. Alternatively, enough niche differentiation between species can be achieved in isolation […]
Liam Landon
The fungi-derived natural product dalesconol A is a biologically active and structurally intriguing polyketide. These qualities make an efficient, novel synthesis of dalesconol A incredibly useful, not only by enabling further investigation of its immunosuppressive activity, but by advancing the field of synthetic chemistry through the discovery of new strategies to access this challenging structure. The synthetic route outlined herein will explore the capabilities of tosylhydrazones as coupling partners in metal-catalyzed cascade reactions. Previous research regarding the use of tosylhydrazones in catalysis demonstrated their effectiveness in Pd-catalyzed coupling reactions, but […]
Pranav Kolluri
It is increasingly being recognized that diabetic bone disease, associated with an increased risk of bone fractures, cannot be detected effectively using traditional detection methods for osteoporosis. This is because patients with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), despite having normal or even high bone densities, are still prone to fractures. The Bone Quality Research Lab at UCSF has established that deficits in the cortical bone structure are associated with T2D and the increased fracture potential found in those with T2D. My research will further develop this finding by determining if T2D […]
Nicole Kim
Many antibiotics used today are natural products of bacterial secondary metabolism, and Streptomyces spp. in particular have been found to produce many small molecules with medically significant antimicrobial properties. Due to rising concerns of antibiotic resistance and stagnating antimicrobial discovery, isolates from understudied microbial communities such as post-fire soils may provide new species with undiscovered metabolic pathways, including for novel antimicrobial molecules. Streptomyces strain E1 is one such isolate, which has been shown to have antibiotic activity against Pyronema omphalodes, among other microbial species. My project seeks to identify the […]
Hamile Khan
The proposed project tackles a significant challenge in organic synthesis, specifically the development of a functional group tolerant method for the methylation of arylboronic esters. The main focus of this project entails the transformation of an aryl boronic ester into an aryl-methyl group via a copper-catalyzed methylation reaction with the slow release of methyl iodide. Previous methods were unable to tolerate functional groups due to the presence of stoichiometric base, resulting in the methylation of nucleophilic functional groups present on the aryl boronic ester substrate. In order to overcome this […]
Prabhleen Kaur
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) pathology is the leading cause of dementia, affecting over 6 million Americans. Detection of AD pathology remains challenging in early stages despite tau protein aggregation and amyloid beta (Aβ) plaques accumulating years before disease-defining symptoms. Decompose Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (D-QSM) is a new MRI technique that attempts to separately and quantitatively measure diamagnetic and paramagnetic susceptibility due to Aβ/tau proteins and iron deposition, respectively, within the same voxel. For the duration of this project, I will employ a histologically validated algorithm to reconstruct and register post-mortem human […]