Ashley Elizabeth Bendl
You may have heard the phrase You look just like your mother, but how often have you heard You look just like a bacteria? The former is an example of the type of genetic inheritance most of us are familiar with, vertical, or inheritance from parents to offspring. This project, however, involves horizontal inheritance: that is, the exchange of genes between species, otherwise known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). The project involves investigating how and why a horizontally transferred gene was transferred from viruses to insects several million years ago.
Connor Geudeker
Laboratory seismology uses a scale-model approach to complement the wealth of research on in situ earthquakes that cannot be observed directly. A simple mechanical system applies shear stress to two blocks with a roughened interface, such that it produces stick-slip behavior with energy signatures matching in situ earthquakes. Lab scale seismic sensors allow us to apply typical seismological analyses. Additional instruments provide measurements not available in the field, which are used to expand our understanding of the underlying processes as well as the results and limits of the seismological methods.
Maple Wang
Mussels have the ability to adhere to wet surfaces through the byssus, a collection of protein-based threads, that are formed by the mussels foot. My graduate student mentor and I will investigate the use of mussel-inspired adhesive moieties to enhance contact and retention of polymers on mucosal tissues. In particular, I plan to use our mucoadhesive drug-loaded particles to explore the new concept of drug-induced regenerative medicine, wherein adult mammals are able to regenerate tissues in a scarless manner. The resulting mucoadhesive polymers will be useful in the future for […]
Takao Kakegawa
While hybridization has historically been thought to hinder evolutionary processes, the idea that it might sometimes drive evolution instead has been gaining momentum in recent years, even in modern-day humans. Hybridization can sometimes result in extreme traits not observed in the parental species that allows hybrids to occupy new environments or eat new things. My graduate student mentor and I will address questions about how hybridization has impacted a group of Caribbean pupfish that have specialized on weird diets, like fish scales.
Savannah Cragin
Privacy is one of the central issues of our time. All things being equal, we assume that most people prefer privacy; it is a foundational right enshrined in the penumbras of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments of the U.S. constitution as well as in several state constitutions (including those of California, Massachusetts, and Washington) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite our appreciation of privacy, police officers wear body cameras, customer loyalty programs track purchases, and the Transportation Safety Administration performs full body scans. This […]
Meire Mehare
Arsenic is a toxic carcinogen causing multiple forms of cancer and low IQ in children. In California, about 55,000 people are exposed to high levels of arsenic via their community water systems. As current technologies are too costly or complex to implement, the Gadgil lab is developing an affordable and effective technology, called Air Cathode Assisted Iron Electrocoagulation (ACAIE) at community scale. In this project, to test ACAIE outside of the lab, my graduate student mentor and I are working with an elementary school in Central California that is currently […]
Seth Zhao
Privacy is one of the central issues of our time. All things being equal, we assume that most people prefer privacy; it is a foundational right enshrined in the penumbras of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments of the U.S. constitution as well as in several state constitutions (including those of California, Massachusetts, and Washington) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite our appreciation of privacy, police officers wear body cameras, customer loyalty programs track purchases, and the Transportation Safety Administration performs full body scans. This […]
Jesse Clements
New technologies such as police body cameras and deepfake algorithms have recently put questions of photographys value as evidence in the spotlight. However, photographic technologies have been part of the courtroom since the mid-nineteenth century. This project turns to the emergence of photography and cinema as evidentiary tools in the courtroom in an attempt to uncover the preconditions of our current moment of mediated justice. I will assist my graduate student mentor in advancing the larger project by constructing a newspaper archive for significant early court cases involving moving-image evidence, […]
Nicholas Fujii
One crucial topic in ecology is understanding how animals respond to environmental pressures. My research aims to study the behavioral ecology of animal defenses in an evolutionary biology framework. Specifically, this project focuses on voluntary release of legs by arachnids. Although beneficial in the short term, this behavior can carry important negative consequences in the locomotion, physiology, and behavior of animals. Daddy long-legs are ideal for this research because of their unique morphology and behavior. Their accessibility also offers the possibility of performing extensive fieldwork and laboratory experiments in the […]
Kevin Yu
This project involves constructing an online database of metaphors in Akkadian, one of the main languages of ancient Mesopotamia. The work is part of my graduate student mentors thesis, which looks at distinctive literary features of Akkadian literature. We will both analyze the internal structure of these metaphors and their distribution within a corpus of cuneiform texts. The theoretical analysis of the metaphors will be based on George Lakoffs Conceptual Metaphor Theory, while the distributional analysis will use a data visualization program called Gephi. Our online database will be based […]