Luc Nguyen
Transistors are the building blocks of modern technology. Layering additional materials on top can greatly change the characteristics of these devices, but it can be a difficult process. What if, instead, a molecule layer could be deposited instead, and manipulated into a desired state? This is possible by placing molecules on top of graphene and applying voltages to control them. However, this process is time consuming, and simulations are a necessary preliminary step in order to gain insight into the behavior of molecules. Previous simulations have shown promising results, but […]
Afton Okwu
Comedy, particularly live comedy, is one of America’s oldest entertainment forms, with Blackness a primary target. On the minstrel stage, race was put on display, with the comedic register a powerful tool in shaping the zeitgeist’s understanding of Blackness and the American racial hierarchy. Gender politics, too, by way of the mammy caricature, was confronted through minstrel drag. By the latter half of the 20th century and into the modern day, Black comedians like Flipp Wilson, Tyler Perry, Dave Chappelle, and Jerrod Carmicheal have taken the spotlight with the weight […]
Tiffany Pai
Insect-borne viral diseases such as Zika and Dengue cause over 700,000 deaths annually (1). For transmission to occur, the virus must spread within the insect and evade an antiviral response from the insect immune system (2). While pathways of the antiviral response are known, the mechanisms by which insect immune cells migrate to infected cells are poorly understood, limiting our ability to identify molecular targets for controlling disease outbreaks. In this work, we will determine whether insect immune cells migrate to virus-infected cells by crawling or by transport in the […]
River Richart
As the most available and popular form of entertainment, music plays a key role in society. Long has it acted as a forum for political discourse, but little is known about how its content may facilitate political belief change. This project seeks to understand this connection further by asking: How effectively do listeners of a political song receive its political message? Are listeners persuaded by the song’s message? What are some of the conditions that make a song successful to these ends? I will develop and employ an online survey […]
Catherine Ruiter
This research seeks to discover the economic impact of the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in news publishing. I attended the World News Media Congress (WAN – IFRA) to listen to primary sources from Google, OpenAI, Le Monde, BBC, the New York Times, and other key firms; discuss their plans for implementing AI advances in their business models. I then attended Google I/O, Google’s developer conference, where the firm released a myriad of new AI advancements and applications. I have since been engaging in a cross-referential qualitative analysis of […]
Pouya Sadeghpour
The laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms has enabled groundbreaking experiments in which atoms are confined in highly manipulable light fields and their interactions precisely controlled. These experiments are a powerful platform for simulating the physics of condensed matter systems with unprecedented control and read-out. So far, studies have been limited to atoms with zero orbital angular momentum in their ground states (such as Alkalis), or large orbital angular momentum and large magnetic moments (such as Lanthanides). Recently it has been proposed that the fermionic isotopes of Titanium, which […]
Charles Long
The United States faces challenges in its criminal justice system, with high rates of incarceration and recidivism. Volunteer programs targeting incarcerated populations offer potential avenues for rehabilitation and recidivism reduction. UC Berkeley’s Teach in Program exemplifies this approach, wherein UC Berkeley students assist San Quentin State Prison students in obtaining their G.E.D. While research supports the positive effects of volunteer work and interaction with marginalized populations on empathy development, limited studies have specifically examined the impact of volunteering in prisons. With religious outreach dominating the space of prison volunteerism, a […]
Jasmine Lopez
This project aims to enhance emotion perception training for individuals with Autistic traits by developing a guided-gaze assistance program using eye-tracking data from the best 10% of participants in the Inferential Emotion Tracking (IET) task (Chen & Whitney, 2019). The IET task requires observers to infer emotions from contextual cues alone, which has proved to reveal deficits in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (Ortega, Chen, & Whitney, 2022). Existing Autism interventions for emotion perception often focus solely on facial expressions, neglecting the complexity of real-life social interactions. By distinguishing […]
Chloe Ma
Ayesha Mahfuz
My research project as a SURF fellow focuses on developing innovative DNA probes to enhance the capture of targeted genomic sequences. Utilizing our lab’s open-source tool, AncestralClust, I aim to refine and expand the design of probes that can accurately and efficiently target specific regions within genomes such as ITS2 and C01. The latter comprises over 2 million sequences, presenting a complex challenge in bioinformatics. By adjusting various parameters within AncestralClust, such as the number of sequence clusters and the minimum descendants per branch, I strive to optimize probe design […]