Eyouel Abate
On Earth, sunlight reflected from our planet softly illuminates the Moon’s dark side, a phenomenon known as Earthshine. My project explores whether a similar effect occurs at Mars, where reflected sunlight from the planet may create a subtle hidden signal in data from NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft—a phenomenon I refer to as “Mars-shine.” The MAVEN Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) instrument was originally designed to detect high-energy electrons and protons produced by solar activity, yet its measurements also contain unexplained background signals. I will investigate whether some of this signal changes systematically […]
Emily Bell
Cellular automata are rule-based systems in which each cell updates its state based on its neighbors, and despite their simplicity, they can generate surprisingly rich and complex patterns. This project asks what happens when those rules run not on classical bits, but on qubits: the building blocks of a quantum computer. On a five-qubit superconducting processor, we implement classical cellular automata using mid-circuit measurement and real-time feedforward, where the system reads the state of neighboring qubits mid-computation and immediately conditions its next step on the outcome. Unlike prior work that […]
Adrian Fry
The dollar auction was developed by economist Martin Shubik as an example of how immediate decisions which seem reasonable can lead to irrational choices in the long run. The form of the auction is as follows: A dollar bill is auctioned to n players who may bid in ascending five cent increments. In a typical round, any player except for the current highest bidder can place a bid which is five cents higher than the current highest bid. If multiple players bid at once, the bid is assigned to one […]
Francis Waligora
Although satellite-based remote sensing has revolutionized the mapping of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations and air quality, identifying its localized emission sources and sinks remains challenging. High operational costs of satellites and the lack of spatial resolution limits finding of emission sources in complex urban environments. This limitation is particularly important for methane, whose urban emissions arise from diverse sources, making them difficult to detect and attribute. This project will perform a spatiotemporal analysis of atmospheric methane variability in urban environments using a network of calibrated low-cost sensors. Though each sensor […]
Michael Wu
My project investigates a sharper form of Gaussian convergence behind the Central Limit Theorem, one of the foundational results of probability theory. The theorem says that when many independent random effects are averaged together, their normalized sum becomes increasingly bell-shaped. However, weak convergence—that is, convergence in distribution—can miss finer structures, especially rare-event behavior in the tails of a distribution. I will study this phenomenon through the Log-Sobolev inequality, a powerful tool in modern probability, information theory, and analysis that measures how strongly a distribution controls entropy and concentration. A natural […]
Wendy Feng
My research examines how initial forest thinning (a silvicultural practice) intensity dictates the long-term, coupled dynamics of canopy growth (leaf area) and canopy water use (transpiration). Transpiration—the movement of soil water through plants and its evaporation into the atmosphere—accounts for 60–80% of forest hydrological cycling. This flux is regulated by internal plant hydraulic transport that meets growth demands, as well as by external factors, namely soil water availability and atmospheric evaporative conditions. Canopy growth determines the leaf area available for transpiration. While thinning initially reduces leaf area, the resulting open […]
Bruno Leopoldo
Modern computing technologies are increasingly facing a limitation not in chip performance, but in the movement of charge through nanoscale metal interconnects. In the process of shrinking these wires below about 20 nm, their electrical resistance rises sharply due to electron scattering. Consequently, data transport becomes slower and less energy-efficient. This raises the question of whether new materials at these scales, namely quantum materials, can evade these classical limits.This project investigates whether topological semimetals (TSMs) can surpass our industry-standards. Topological metals host unusual electronic states that allow them to perform […]
Melody Wu
Carrier dynamics play a fundamental role in enabling control, scalability, and performance of next-generation electronics. However, carriers react on timescales of a fraction of a femtosecond. To observe their processes in real time, attosecond light pulses in the extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) regime must be employed. 2H-MoTe2, a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC), is a promising candidate for next-generation electronics due to its complex carrier properties. With the novel attosecond transient grating spectroscopy (ATGS) technique, carrier and transport dynamics can be explored on an ultrafast timescale with background-free signals and element specificity. We […]
Ailsa Sun
For all of the 21st century, monolithic kernels have dominated the operating-system landscape. Recently, Chinese systems infrastructure has grown largely independent from Western codebases, with companies deploying Hongmeng, HarmonyOS, and Kylin microkernels to commercial devices across Asia. Despite the magnitude of users adopting these systems, security literature has remained focused on western targets. We propose a first probe into the security attributes of HarmonyOS 5, narrowing our focus to side channel attacks. Microkernels rely on heavily optimized IPC (Inter-Process Communication) protocols and thoughtful use of shared memory. Side channels are […]
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 […]