Channie Hong
Marketers frequently use price partitioning, where a product’s price is presented as separate components: a base price and a surcharge. For example, a movie theater might offer a ticket-and-popcorn bundle for $15, but instead present it as a $10 ticket with an additional $5 for popcorn. Research shows that consumers respond differently to partitioned prices compared to a single combined price, and several cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to explain this effect. Despite these findings, relatively little attention has been paid to how consumers interpret the structure of partitioned prices, […]
Alejandra Meza
Motivated by gravitational-wave signatures from binary mergers, my research probes the evolution of triple systems in which a binary is embedded within the gas-filled envelope of an aging single star. Massive stars commonly reside in hierarchical triple systems, where a binary is gravitationally bound to a single star. The post-main sequence expansion of the single star leads to the engulfment of the binary, initiating a common envelope episode. I investigate under which conditions these triple interactions lead to gravitational wave events with electromagnetic counterparts and how they inform the formation […]
Necla Erdogan
Myocarditis is a rare autoimmune condition defined by an accumulation of T cells and macrophages in the heart with associated cardiomyocyte death. It presents with a spectrum of severities including fulminant cardiac dysfunction and despite decades of research, has no effective therapies. I will use my lab’s highly penetrant spontaneous model of murine myocarditis where two T cell immune checkpoint molecules (Lag3 and PD1) have been genetically eliminated. The T cells infiltrating the heart recognize the cardiac protein, α-myosin. Interestingly, this protein’s paralog, β-myosin despite sharing 93% amino acid sequence […]
Barbara Borcherds
By analyzing the waves generated by earthquakes as they travel through the Earth, we construct seismic tomography models. These models have helped support the theory of mantle plumes–columns of hot rock rising from near Earth’s core to the surface, driving inter-plate volcanic activity at places like Hawaii, the Canary Islands, and Réunion Island. However, many different models exist, depicting disagreements on anomalies. This summer, I will investigate five leading global models accuracy at reproducing real earthquake data recorded in the south-central Atlantic Ocean, a region rich with mantle plume activity. […]
Ethan Jeong
Cellular development relies on transcription factors, specifically their Activation Domains (ADs), to regulate gene expression. Because ADs lack a fixed 3D shape, researchers have long struggled to understand their mechanism of action. The Acidic Exposure Model suggests that ADs transition between a “collapsed” inactive state and an “expanded” active state, where the amount of time spent in the expanded state determines their activity. Currently, measuring these movements is limited to single-molecule techniques. This project aims to develop a high-throughput method using split green fluorescent protein (GFP) to quantify these dynamics. […]
Serkan Salik
Mean curvature flow is a way of evolving some initial surface in 3-dimensional space according to a rule that makes its geometry more homogeneous. Unfortunately, you can’t always do this for all time, and the flow frequently incurs “singularities”, where a region of the surface collapses and we are no longer working with a surface, so can’t keep flowing. To understand this singularity formation, we look at the surface at a very small time before it collapses and zoom in really close to the region that collapses. We get a […]
Katara Chang
Disturbances in circadian rhythm have been linked to health consequences such as increased risk of cancer, metabolic health, heart disease, and mental health disorders in humans. Research has also shown a connection between stress and alteration in circadian rhythm. Not all individuals, however, respond to stressors similarly. Stressors have varying effects on individuals, causing some to sustain depressed behaviors (susceptible) while others show resiliency, returning to pre-stressed status. This project will determine the shift in circadian rhythm as a response to stress, and the correlation between the degree of the […]
Frank Yin
Topological phases beyond Landau’s symmetry-breaking paradigm are central to quantum many-body physics. Since analytic non-perturbative methods are often limited, their study relies heavily on numerical simulations, with tensor networks emerging as powerful tools. Fractional quantum Hall states are a paradigmatic example, traditionally studied with one-dimensional matrix product states on cylinders, while recent work has explored related chiral and bosonic phases using two-dimensional tensor networks. Here, we study interacting bosons coupled to background gauge fields using two-dimensional isometric tensor networks. This framework allows us to probe bosonic Laughlin-like phases directly in […]
Nicholas Taplitz
Accelerating environmental change across the Arctic is altering decisions about infrastructure, safety, and long-term adaptation. While climate adaptation policies in Greenland and Nunavut often reference different forms of knowledge—scientific, Indigenous, and local—they vary in how directly these forms of knowledge are linked to decision-making. My project analyzes the language of policy documents from Greenland and Nunavut and draws on observations from scientific briefings, community presentations, and policy talks in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic to examine how different forms of expertise come to carry authority in Arctic climate policy. More […]
Tin Htoo
Cooling and trapping molecules has applications in precision measurement and quantum simulation. Unfortunately, laser cooling, which provides a powerful tool to cool molecules to microkelvin temperatures and load molecules into traps, is only possible on a special class of molecules with favorable energy level structures. To overcome this, we are developing a new trapping method that uses ultra-high laser intensities generated inside a high-finesse cavity, deep enough to confine buffer-gas-cooled molecules at temperatures up to 10 K. However, the cavity’s near-concentric geometry makes the cavity very sensitive to vibration and […]