Mars Redmon
Theory on development has its roots in organization among the Caribbean Left, especially in Jamaica. Kingston developed into an intellectual center with UWI Mona and a center of worker’s activity in the city. This development saw the emergence of a unique, Caribbean, Jamaican specific, political system in response to a theorized global system of centers and peripheries, which was crystallized by radical black activists. Despite Walter Rodney’s brief tenure in the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, from January to October of 1968, his time and the ban […]
Voica Armstrong
Political-economic conditions shape collective temporal experiences. Under neoliberal capitalism, we experience accelerated and fragmented time, with labor and leisure increasingly convergent. This is the lived temporality that postmodern science fiction authors inherit and, I argue, actively contest through formal narrative choices. For my project, I will close-read six select postmodern science fiction novels in relation to their socio-economic contexts, arguing that SF proposes alternative models of societal time. I seek to describe how and when science fiction’s various narrative forms become sites where the politics of time turn contestable and […]
Brian Kunzang
I intended to work on a project using deep learning to predict the growth of subsolid lung nodules. However, my mentor entered a collaboration that intrigued me: applying homomorphic encryption in a medical setting. Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption with which it is possible to perform computations on encrypted data. My project focused on creating a system to perform privacy-preserving clinical trial matching using homomorphic encryption. Clinical trial matching today is a laborious process of manually matching patients to trials, and many clinical trials fail due to insufficient […]
Eva Reineck
When patients describe cancer as an enemy to be fought or a thief that steals time, they are assigning agency and blame to the disease, and implicitly to themselves. These moral metaphors, which cast cancer as an entity with intent, shape how patients understand their illness and evaluate their own resilience. This project aims to look at how metaphors that frame cancer as a moral agent differ across patient, caregiver, and institutional perspectives in English, French, and Spanish, and investigates the psychological implications of these differences. This project introduces two […]
Keira Mahoney
Chronic infections occur when a pathogen persists in the body for a long period, requiring a sustained CD8 T cell response to control infection. During these infections, CD8 T cells must constantly differentiate from quiescent memory cells into functional effector cells. However, in most chronic infections, CD8 T cells become exhausted, which limits differentiation into functional effector cells. Toxoplasma gondii (T.gondii) is a pathogen that can establish a chronic infection in nearly all mammals, yet CD8 T cells avoid exhaustion, resulting in a well-controlled infection. The mechanisms enabling these cells […]
Elise Fisher
My research project seeks to reveal how the pronatalism movement in the U.S. manifests in modern popular culture, namely in the space between Mormon mom influencers and Silicon Valley tech bros. In recent years, media has been flooded with headlines fearing the declining U.S. birthrate, and subsequent profiles on “pronatalists” who seek to address this problem by having large families and promoting such a lifestyle. A danger lies in the failure to recognize that this movement is rooted in white supremacist ideology and fascist demographic preservation, now being parroted by […]
Chesney Evert
In 1915, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats mailed a poem to his friend, a six-line declaration of abstention from writing any war poetry. Not a year after Yeats enshrined his own vow of silence in verse, however, he wrote some of the most famous war poems in the history of the English language. It is against the backdrop of this negotiation—to stay silent, to write of war—that my research seeks to analyze the poet’s role in wartime and its transformation since the early 20th century. Reading poetry as a self-revelatory […]
Ryan Dong
Development of organs such as the ear, eye, and brain rely on precise control of fluid flow to confer specialized functions and maintain structural integrity. In the inner ear, hydrostatic pressure is regulated by fluid accumulation that is coordinated with pressure release, a mechanism dysregulated in many hearing and balance disorders. Our lab’s previous work has implicated the role of the inner ear’s endolymphatic duct and sac (EDS) as a tissue-scale pressure relief valve that facilitates periodic voiding of excess fluid. Identifying the genetic and cellular mechanisms that coordinate EDS […]
Kate Yang
Mammalian parental behavior dictates the survival and welfare of offspring, yet the underlying brain circuits responsible are not fully understood. Existing studies point to the medial preoptic area (MPOA) as the major brain hub for regulating pup care; however, MPOA neurons heavily rely on hormonal signaling to promote parental instinct. Sires and virgin mammals can display parental care despite lacking hormonal priming. Thus, there must exist alternative brain circuits independent of hormonal signaling regulating parental behavior. Changes in the release of the neuropeptide neurotensin (Nts) have been reported during pregnancy […]
Cody Rawlings
Disruptions in sleep, including delayed and fragmented rapid eye movement (REM) cycles are well-established features of neurological and mental health conditions; however accurate REM detection is limited to clinical settings and expensive devices. To solve this, we introduce a physics-based model of polysomnography (PSG) at non-contact, dry-wet multi-electrode (3×3) arrays placed near the eyes to assist point-of-care (POC) continuous sleep tracking technology. Recorded biopotential at each electrode segment depends on time-varying skin-electrode impedance governed by interfacial properties. Controlling ionic concentration at the skin-electrode interfaces shapes electrical double layer (EDL) formation […]