Hazel Huang
Chronic pain co-occurs with emotional distress, indicating an affective component of pain aside of the physical sensation. While prior work has identified brain regions such as the anterior cingulate cortex and insula as key contributors to affective pain, current neuromodulation treatments are limited by an unclear neurophysiological mechanism underlying affective pain. This project aims to identify spatiotemporally precise neural signals of affective pain using intracranial EEG recordings from seven patients with chronic pain. Applying machine learning on power spectral density features of collected signals at different regions of interest, I […]
Yajur Preetham
Quantum computers built from superconducting circuits face a fundamental scaling problem: each qubit requires its own control wires running into an extremely cold refrigerator, and those wires act as heat loads that make it progressively harder to keep the system cold as you add more qubits. Also, the qubits operate at around 5 GHz, where thermal photons are only suppressed at extremely low temperatures (~10 mK), meaning the refrigerator must be kept extraordinarily cold to prevent stray photons from decohering the qubits. This project aims to develop high-frequency interconnects that […]
Ryan Rinerson
Hawaiʻi Sign Language (HSL) is the indigenous sign language of the Hawaiian Islands. It has been critically endangered since 1939, when American Sign displaced HSL use at the school for the Deaf on Oʻahu. In 2013, researchers in association with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa pioneered HSL documentation, creating several revitalization lessons and starter HSL-English book dictionaries. Large-scale language documentation has not continued since the end of the initial project and HSL is in immediate need of further preservation. My SURF project will advance HSL documentation through collecting linguistic, […]
Sandra Ding
Bilingual children often face a hidden crisis in our education system: when they struggle to read, it is hard to tell if they are simply learning a new language or if they have a learning disability like dyslexia. For Chinese American students, this confusion often leads to a wait-to-fail approach, where genuine reading struggles are dismissed as temporary language barriers or misidentified as behavioral issues. This delays critical early intervention and causes deep academic and emotional distress for children. My SURF project addresses this gap by developing an evidence-based Bilingual […]
Angelina Heller
The blood-brain barrier is a network of cells that form a barrier between blood and brain tissue. This serves to protect the brain from pathogens and excess metabolites like glutamate or amino acids. The blood-brain barrier controls what compounds from the blood enter the brain, but sometimes, this system weakens. Increased blood-brain barrier permeability has been associated with common psychiatric disorders such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression. My summer research project explores how cognitive traits related to these psychiatric disorders relate to blood-brain barrier permeability. Particularly, this project investigates how […]
Grace Bigelow-Leth
All organisms rely on built-in systems that eliminate damaged or harmful cells to maintain healthy tissues. In cancer, however, these protective pathways can be bypassed, allowing malignant cells to continue growing. This makes regulated cell death pathways attractive targets in oncology. One promising pathway is ferroptosis, a form of cell death driven by iron-dependent damage to lipids in cellular membranes. Ferroptosis suppressor protein 1 (FSP1) helps cancer cells avoid ferroptosis by protecting membranes from this damage. Recent studies suggest that some tumors become highly dependent on FSP1 for survival, and […]
Qiuyue Chen
Before genetic information can be exchanged during reproduction, certain regions of DNA—called recombination hotspots—must become accessible within tightly packed chromatin. How these sites are opened is a fundamental question in biology. My project investigates how two proteins, PRDM9 and HELLS, work together to make these regions accessible. PRDM9 acts as a guide, recognizing specific DNA sequences, while HELLS functions as a molecular machine that can reposition DNA packaging structures to expose the underlying genetic code. I aim to understand how PRDM9 activates or regulates HELLS to open chromatin at the […]
Laura Liu
During my internship in China, I witnessed villages that had declined from populations of 300–400 residents to fewer than 30. Rural areas occupy most of China’s land, yet urban-centered development has left many villages depopulated and economically fragile. My research evaluates tourism as a potential pathway for rural revitalization through the case of Librairie Avant-Garde (LAG) bookstores. In “Building Bookstores in the Countryside”, Qian Xiaohua, founder of LAG, describes how rural bookstores reconnect villages with outside visitors and generate new economic & social activity. Existing research on tourism in rural […]
Gabriela Cruz
My project asks how victims of femicide on the El Paso-Juárez border are represented in literature: what is the line between representing and recreating violence? The problem of femicide on the El Paso-Juárez border is an ongoing and multilingual issue; this project examines these issues through the perspective of literature. I specifically focus on the representation of violence against women in “Desert Blood” by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and “2666” by Roberto Bolaño. While my project primarily focuses on these two works of literature, my research is informed by archival […]
Nandhini Sundar
Interferons (IFNs) are signaling molecules that help the immune system detect and destroy cancer cells and viruses. Because of this, IFN pathways are often targeted as treatments for lung cancer and infection. However, increasing IFN activity can also reduce growth of alveolar type II (AT2) cells, which are essential for gas exchange and regenerating lung tissue after injury. Previous work in my lab found that knocking out a protein called Casein Kinase 2 (CK2) using CRISPR-Cas9 in an organoid model increased interferon signaling without harming AT2 cell growth. However, Cas9 […]