Phoebe Goulden

Water is a precious resource in California and in many Western states, but it often hasn’t been managed as such. Impacts of overuse on surface water are easy to see, but groundwater, which occupies the spaces between pieces of rock and soil underground, is more easily overlooked. In 2014, California passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, SGMA, which recognized the detrimental effects of withdrawing too much groundwater and set out a plan for local sustainable management of underground water sources, called aquifers. The research I contribute to aims to help […]

Siyana Hristova

This summer I will be working on analyzing neurological data from consumer memory studies aimed at differentiating between and better understanding the neurological processes that occur during decision-making in the human brain.

Madeline Kushner

I’m particularly interested in how mentorship relationships form in the workplace and academic settings, and what may precede or facilitate their development. One essential component of a mentor-mentee relationship is the ability to feel comfortable asking for advice. This summer I will begin data collection on a project examining gender differences in how people think they think they will be perceived when they ask a superior for advice, versus how they are actually perceived.

Linshanshan Wang

Low back pain is the leading cause of disability and is closely linked to disc degeneration. Intradiscal biologic therapy is a promising strategy for managing disc degeneration. However, an unresolved issue is whether a degenerated disc has adequate nutrient supply to support the higher metabolic demands required by these therapies. The overall premise of our project is that low cartilage endplate (CEP) permeability limits disc nutrient supply and cell function, and that we can identify patients with adequate nutrient supply who might benefit from intradiscal therapy through non-invasive assessment of […]

Addie Wilson

Many people are familiar with the musical “”Chicago,”” which follows the stories of women imprisoned for murdering their (often abusive) husbands. In reality, however, a vast majority of women in 1920’s Chicago who killed their husbands were exonerated by all-male juries. This phenomenon has been described as the “”new unwritten law.”” Women in Chicago were protected from criminal convictions for husband-killing by an unofficial legal understanding that gave impunity to many who were accused of this particular crime. This summer, I will continue to investigate the origins of the new […]

Luke Birdsong

I will distill Tweets from 10 different individuals and organizations that are recognized as leaders in the alternative food movement in regards to how they (or how they fail to) mention, portray, and discuss farmers and their contributions to the food system.

Rosa Lee

Telomeres are repeats of DNA bases that cap the ends of chromosomes, involved in protecting our genetic information. Telomerase is the enzyme responsible for maintaining telomere length – when activated, it adds repeats to telomere ends. Consequently, telomerase activity is implicated in aging and cancer, carrying important therapeutic implications. For the past year, I have been working with a postdoctoral fellow, Kelly Nguyen, in the Nogales Lab and Collins Lab to characterize the function and structure of shelterin, a protein complex involved in recruiting telomerase to the telomeres. In addition […]

Dean Berkowitz

Biodiversity is essential for providing ecosystem services to humans in addition to supporting ecological networks. While conservation efforts have prioritized protecting biodiversity hotspots in recent years, desert biomes remain undervalued, even as climate change threatens dryland ecosystems. For the past two semesters, I have worked on a project which seeks to better understand how environmental variables have shaped evolutionary processes underlying biogeographical patterns of native vascular plant communities in the Mojave National Preserve. This summer, I will learn wet lab techniques to extract and sequence genetic information from the specimens […]

David Reid

The work this summer will entail laboratory analysis of prehistoric food remains, such as charred nutshells and fruit seeds, retrieved from archaeological soil samples, which will take place at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto. We will also collect additional soil samples at the Jomon period Goshono site in Iwate Prefecture, and do museum research at the Saru River Historic Museum, Hokkaido.

Shivani Sundaram

In my project, I will attempt to determine whether an isolated population of threespine stickleback fish from Scout Lake has undergone natural selection within a period of six years. I will do this by counting tooth number and determining if there has been a change in average tooth number across multiple generations. In addition, I will be investigating the different chromosomal loci and alleles that contribute to and determine total tooth number in several stickleback clutches. To do this, I will be genotyping their genomic DNA at these loci and […]