Viktoriya Georgieva
With the current state of escalating climate emergency, generation of plants with improved ability to sequester carbon is of high priority. The Rieske subunit of the cytochrome b6f complex is a known rate-limiting step in photosynthesis. This protein, encoded for by the PetC gene, is found to increase photosynthetic efficiency upon overexpression in plants, demonstrating potential for increased carbon sequestration. However, due to current restrictions on GMOs, overexpression needs to be achieved nontransgenically to create a practical impact. Given that this has yet to be attempted, this project aims to […]
Lucia Rhiannon Harrison
All the it-girls are dissociating. Dissociative feminism has become the new cool-girl branch of white, neoliberal feminism which has been picked up by teenage girls online who idolize problematic characters who dissociate to cope with their trauma. Otessa Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation while drawing on elements of the gothic genre, satirizes this new media trope. I argue that the rise in dissociative feminism is indicative of a larger social incapacity to cope with trauma through a particular affective position of dissociation, in response to […]
Joshua Ho
Particle physicists seek to understand particles and the physical laws governing their interactions by building particle colliders. These colliders provide a large amount of data, and due to the probabilistic nature of particle physics, researches are turning towards ML to model complex physical processes. With the rise of foundational models like ChatGPT, particle physicists have been inspired to create a large scale, general purpose model that has been trained on a vast amount of data to serve as a strong starting point for various specific tasks, that can be fine-tuned […]
Heidi Huang
CRISPR-Cas holds great promise for treating Huntington’s Disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disorder. Despite Cas9 RNP’s minimal off-target effects and transient activity, existing RNP delivery methods fall short, limiting RNP therapeutics’ in vivo applications. To address this, the Wilson lab has developed a reversible linker for enhanced RNP brain distribution and editing efficiency. Building on this foundation, my project aims to reduce cytotoxic peptide aggregate formation, which impedes editing efficiency, in Cas9 RNP buffers. Specifically, my research seeks to optimize CRISPR RNP buffer formulations with selected additives to minimize aggregate formation, […]
Clara Hung
Lensless imagers are low-cost, compact cameras with applications in medical imaging, photography, and more. Many designs for lensless imagers have been proposed, but the optimal design is not known as it is object-dependent. A method to capture images from different systems under similar conditions is needed to fairly compare system performance. Furthermore, as lensless imaging is moving towards data-intensive research, large-scale lensless measurement datasets are necessary for neural network evaluation. Yet, of the few existing datasets in the field, none fully address these demands. We propose a portable data acquisition […]
Tatum Hurley
Over 100,000 people rely on the Alameda County (AC) Transit system to move around the Bay Area every day. Yet, there is a notable lack of proper bus stop infrastructure to support riders, even as wait times can reach upwards of thirty minutes. I intend to perform a census of AC Transit bus stops in Berkeley and Oakland to collect data on amenities such as benches and shelters, and hostile architecture features such as bench obstructions. This project seeks to identify any patterns in the presence or absence of these […]
Shreya Chaudhuri
My family’s roots belong to the land of Dibrugarh, Assam – the tea capital of India. From exploitation at the hands of the British Raj to decolonization with my ancestors rematriating land, the tea farm that we have tended to has undergone many transformations. India’s tea industry, which has colonial roots, is one of the largest in the world, exporting $709,000,000 of tea annually. Recently, there has been rampant corporatization of the tea industry, which is supported by a $7.8 billion investment from the World Bank. Our land is dying, […]
Jacqueline Chavez
Indigenous erasure has been prevalent throughout history affecting the way people choose to identify with their roots. This is a struggle that 1.5 and second-generation Oaxacan-identifying students pursuing post-secondary choose to identify with their indigenous roots. By interviewing Oaxacan students about their experiences growing up and qualitatively analyzing their experiences, I seek to understand the power of storytelling and memory pathways with an emphasis on factors that have led to their identity formation. While some immigrant families tend to preserve their traditions and maternal languages, the intention of retaining their […]
Tansy Chen
Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) are aquatic bacteria capable of creating a unique intracellular organelle, the magnetosome, that is the location of magnetic crystal biomineralization. They are important models for the molecular study of compartmentalization and biomineralization as well as possible vehicles for biomedical applications. In the model organism Magnetospirillum magneticum strain AMB-1, the magnetosome island (MAI) encodes genes responsible for the creation, alignment, and maturation of a linear magnetosome chain, which ultimately allows the cell to orient and travel along Earth’s magnetic field lines in order to simplify their search for […]
Stephen Chen
Since proteins carry out the majority of work in living cells, how a cell operates is heavily determined by the relative abundances of different proteins at any given time. These relative abundances are largely determined by gene expression levels: the extent to which a gene is “activated.” Predicting gene expression levels from noncoding DNA sequence is a major unsolved problem in computational biology. Recently, machine learning (ML) has emerged as one of the most effective tools for this task. While significant work has been done with human genomes, much work […]