Zoie Telkamp
The majority of young stars are surrounded by disks of gas and dust that will eventually serve as the foundation for planetary systems. These protoplanetary disks have been shown to possess a vast array of geometric properties and substructures that are most easily observed when the disks are inclined at an angle of at least 80 degrees, thus blocking the direct starlight. Using images of these “edge-on” disks taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, we can access key information about their structure, while gaining knowledge of how certain disk properties […]
Ishani Ghosh
I will examine how the Korean government uses Hallyu, the export of Korean culture as a soft power to increase the world’s exposure to Korea. I will analyze how Hallyu attracts foreigners to be a part of the Korean entertainment industry, roles given to foreigners and their treatment within the industry including pay gap difference between them and their Korean counterparts. I am going to investigate to what extent these foreigners increase Korea’s exposure in their respective countries and how these foreigners are perceived in Korea versus their country of […]
Emily Kleinfelder
This summer I am working on developing an everyday reasoning measure suitable for middle school aged children. Higher order reasoning skills are becoming a crucial part of taking part in world full of scientific and technological advancements but there is currently not a measure designed to see how students take the reasoning skills they learn in the classroom and apply them to a non-academic setting. For my honors thesis in psychology, I am planning on running a study with children participating in a scientific reasoning curriculum to see if the […]
Pranav Nagarajan
In high-energy astrophysics, the next generation of gamma-ray space telescopes will be used to study gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, pulsars, black holes, dark matter, and more with unprecedented angular resolution and sensitivity. However, accurately tracking Compton-scattering events in the detectors of these telescopes is challenging since most detector systems are not fast enough to time each of the individual interactions. Over the past two semesters, my research has involved using deep learning techniques to try to improve upon classical event reconstruction techniques. In the summer, I will focus on implementing and […]
Elizabeth Ordeman
This project aims to determine whether or not bottom-up evolutionary forces such as the enhanced ability to feed on toxic plants are responsible for the evolution of toxin resistance in milkweed feeding butterflies. This hypothesis favoring bottom-up evolutionary forces is contrary to that favoring top-down evolutionary forces such as enhanced protection from predators through the sequestration of ingested toxins. To study this question, we are utilizing CRISPR-engineered Drosophila flies that contain three key amino acid substitutions in their sodium pump. These engineered mutations correspond to mutations found naturally in milkweed […]
Lily Huang Chen
Words can differ dramatically in how widely they are known by others and this distribution has to be learned. For this study, we ask whether children refrain from using a novel word for an object when speaking to an interlocutor who does not know that word (“give me the bem”), by instead employing a description of the object composed of familiar words (“give me the blue one”).
Maja Ahmann
This research project explores the social psychological underpinnings of the debate around inclusion policies and free speech. As college campuses nationwide have instituted policies designed to promote inclusion (e.g., safe spaces, trigger warnings, hate speech codes, and pronoun usage policies), furor and debate have ignited. While proponents argue that inclusion policies protect marginalized and underrepresented groups from exclusion and discrimination, opponents argue that these policies coddle students and violate the First Amendment. The primary questions we seek to ask and answer are: 1) What are the psychological correlates of opposition […]
Apurva Prasad
My research this coming summer will be a continuation of my work in the Theunissen Lab since Spring 2019 where I have been helping to uncover the different effects of lesions to auditory cortical regions of the avian brain. Specifically, my research scope focuses on analyzing and assisting in collecting data produced by operant conditioning of songbirds with and without these lesions. The hope is that these findings will provide greater understanding to auditory memory in avians, with implications for preference, memory capacity, and discrimination of different vocalization sets.
Shyama Yallapragada
Relational reasoning (RR), the ability to consider abstract, generalizable relationships among various pieces of information, is a core component of reasoning and human cognition. In addition to evidence that indicates education hones reasoning, relational reasoning is shown to be an important predictor of academic achievement and other life outcomes. I have been working in the Bunge Lab (Building Blocks of Cognition) under the mentorship of professor Silvia Bunge for the past year. I have been quite passionate about learning more about different mechanisms of reasoning and how they play in […]
Jamie Calma
We developed a high-throughput seedling flood assay to identify wild species of tomato that are resistant against Pseudomonas syringae, a bacterial pathogen that causes disease in a broad range of plant species. The screen identified multiple accessions of wild tomato with varying degrees of resistance to the pathogen. We are characterizing and mapping the resistance phenotype in lines of interest, in order to identify the causative genes. Our work will identify new sources of genetic resistance to the plant pathogen in tomato.