UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH AND ARTS EXPO

The mapping of the human brain is one of the most challenging but important topics among the fields of research. The delicate, intertwined networks of neurons obstruct us from taking invasive measures to explore the wonders of the brain. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a possible non-invasive technique for studying neural activity. When neurons are activated, without an internal reserve of energy, they rely on the increased regional cerebral blood flow for increased oxygen... View the poster.

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are heavily studied because they share a similar genetic structure to humans. The skin patterns of zebrafish are comprised of horizontal stripes of different colored pigment cells. Accurately quantifying the cell size of various pigment cells in relation to their location on the skin is a crucial step towards better understanding cell behavior. The first step to measuring pigment cells is extracting cells from in vivo images of fish. In my research,... View the poster.

Forecasting the outcomes of U.S. elections is a relevant and complex task that has been approached in many ways, most commonly incorporating statistics or proprietary methods that include some degree of subjectivity. Our approach differs from this convention in that we use multidisciplinary methods from applied mathematics. Specifically, we use a system of differential equations commonly employed for the study of disease transmission, to model the spread of political affiliation (Democrat or Republican) across states.... View the poster.

The goal of our research has been to create software that extends the benefits of virtual reality (VR) to mathematics education. We report on the design and evaluation of a VR application meant to support students’ reasoning about objects in three-dimensional (3D) coordinate systems and to explore the possibilities of the application for mathematics education in high school classrooms. View the poster.

This project is comprised of primary source research on the field of semiconductor microscopy. We were interested in determining a more interdisciplinary application of this technology, as the most frequently cited applications are for defense purposes such as drug screening or infrared imaging. When we researched, we found that these technologies have been used in detecting art forgery and were intrigued to find that laser imaging boasts remarkable benefits over prior methods, as they are... View the poster.

Free space optical communication (FSO) offers a promising solution to the “last mile” bottleneck of high-speed telecommunications. Data is encoded using a modulated laser and optically sent through the air to a receiving photodetector. Although this requires FSO systems to have direct line-of-sight between the emitter and receiver, this is often much easier and more cost-effective than ripping up the streets to lay traditional copper wires or fiber optic cables. Today's cities are full of... View the poster.

Harbor seal whiskers exhibit a tapering elliptical geometry uniquely suited to detect wakes (trails of water produced by upstream bodies) in ways a regular, tapering, or elliptical cylinder cannot. Previous studies into the matter have relied on idealized representations of the geometry the whiskers seem to take on and have tried to use these poor models to extrapolate information about the effects this geometry has on their fluid mechanics, including velocity sensing, optimizing the signal-to-noise... View the poster.

In indoor environments, bacteria face selective pressure to carry antibiotic resistant genes (ARGs) from antimicrobial substances used in furniture, building materials, and personal care products. Humans rely on antibiotics to clear bacterial infections, so understanding the way in which these genes are transferred, i.e., on mobile genetic elements, is critical. To investigate this phenomenon, dust samples were collected from over 100 collection sites in over 40 different athletic facilities. DNA from these samples was sequenced... View the poster.

With a large sphere of activity and ability to transfer data through wireless communication system, drones have proven to be more and more useful in both research and manufacturing. Whether by allowing researchers to collect measurements or filmmakers to attain aerial shots, the use of drone has allowed collection of real time data with minimum human intervention. In the field of agriculture, steady water levels and optimal crop conditions have been hard to maintain due... View the poster.

Previous research has shown that bodily gesture aids in learning words and is useful for musical expression. However, no studies to date have examined the use of gesture in learning words and music together. The original impetus for the present study was observing students with cognitive disabilities learn musical songs, using gestures to reinforce the words and melody. This study aims to investigate if iconic gestures used by a conductor while songs are being learned,... View the poster.

An action potential (AP) is a shift in the membrane voltage of a neuron generally caused by a sudden ion influx, resulting in excitation, allowing for the cell to send signals across its neural network. Spontaneous excitation can be crucial for organizing neural circuits, especially in sensory modalities. For hearing specifically, the auditory brainstem area contains a low-frequency subset of neurons best studied in the avian cochlear nucleus magnocellularis (NM) area termed NMc. Nearly 40%... View the poster.

During pregnancy, mothers undergo a range of physiological changes including shifting hormone levels, modified immune function, and reduced gut motility. These changes are necessary to meet the pregnant mother’s increased energy needs and inhibit rejection of the fetus. The gut microbiota (GM) – the community of microor­ganisms that live in the digestive tract – is theorized to play a role in the produc­tion and regulation of the immune system. As a result, the GM is... View the poster.

Light regulates the mammalian vertebrate visual system to affect a wide array of visual behaviors. Light is detected by the canonical rods and cone photoreceptors, but also by a novel, third class of photoreceptor, termed intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs). ipRGCs express the photopigment melanopsin (gene: Opn4) and are a diverse population, consisting of six types (M1-M6), which differ in morphology, electrophysiological properties, central brain projections, and their influences on visual behavior. However, the... View the poster.

By assessing infants’ movements, our research goal was to determine if particular movement characteristics are indicators for cerebral palsy (CP), a disorder caused by a brain injury to the fetus/infant that leads to impaired development of movement. Our research may contribute to developing an earlier diagnosis for CP, and therefore earlier intervention. This would benefit children since the early promotion of motor skill development may correlate with better outcomes later in life. My specific focus... View the poster.

Much insight into infants’ neuromotor development can be gleaned from their spontaneous movements. Specifically, a greater understanding of neuromotor development is valuable for the early diagnosis of cerebral palsy (CP), a neurological disorder resulting from brain injury or atypical development at an early age and is characterized by impaired movement and balance. This study utilized a smartphone application to collect video data of premature infants’ movements. Focusing on the upper extremities, this study sought to... View the poster.

The goal of this project was to better understand the pathogenesis behind rheumatoid arthritis(RA), an autoimmune disorder that primarily affects the joints. Despite affecting around 1.3 million people in the United States, its causes are not well­-understood. Previous research at Pope Lab indicated that when compared to the healthy controls, the knock­out HUPO mouse model displayed significantly decreased regulatory T cells (Tregs). This deficiency, however, could be restored in­-vitro via administration of recombinant IL­-2. When... View the poster.

The basal layer of human epidermis is composed of progenitor cells that both self-renew and differentiate to form stratified epidermal tissue; this process requires strict, dynamic regulation of gene expression. The Super Elongation Complex (SEC) regulates gene expression at the level of transcription elongation by releasing RNA Polymerase II from its paused state. Dysregulation of the SEC has been identified in leukemia and fragile X syndrome, but how the SEC functions in somatic tissue homeostasis... View the poster.

In humans, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is co-morbid with major depressive disorder. Individuals who are exposed to stress prior to a traumatic event have an increased likelihood of developing PTSD. To study this increased vulnerability, a rat model was developed using the Stress Enhanced Fear Learning (SEFL) paradigm. This study aims to show how SEFL’s consequences can differ depending on the sex, stress-reactivity of the animal, and intensity of fear conditioning. Wistar Kyoto (WKY) rats... View the poster.

According to the principle of free fall, only gravity acts upon an object in midair. However, as with all scientific principles, free fall plays out differently in practice. In my experiment, I first tested to see the effect of changing the glycerol weight-percentage of a drop of glycerol-water on its maximum spread when dropped onto smooth glass at each given height, greater spread indicating greater kinetic energy present within the drop. Turns out, glycerol weight-percentage... View the poster.

Skeletal sexual dimorphism presents itself in humans primarily through the anatomical shape of the cranium and pelvis. However, some physical anthropologists maintain that climate could have an effect on human sexual dimorphism. Despite ongoing research pertaining to climatic effects on soft tissue or size dimorphism, little to no research has looked how climate affects nonmetric skeletal indicators of sex. To further understand the plasticity of the human skeleton, standard sex indicators of the cranium and... View the poster.

Anxiety disorders are the most common group of mental illnesses in the United States and affect over 15% of the population. Prior work utilizing electroencephalogram (EEG) to investigate event-related potentials (ERPs) from the scalp has shown success in isolating certain neural correlates related to increased risk for developing anxiety disorders. However, most of these studies investigate error- and threat-related processing. Far fewer have explored potential relationships between anxiety and abnormal reward-related ERPs. The relationship between... View the poster.

Due to their ability to be engineered for specific cellular targeting, nanoparticles (NPs) have emerged as promising drug delivery vessels for immunotherapeutic and vaccination treatments. However, a major unsolved obstacle for cell-specific nanoparticle delivery is non-specific circulatory clearance by the mononuclear-phagocytic system(MPS). Comprised of various phagocytic cells, the MPS removes NPs from circulation shortly after recognition, preventing NPs from efficiently reaching their target cells and reducing the intended therapeutic effect. Although some MPS cells can... View the poster.

This study aims to advance our basic understanding of how we perceive objects in our environment. It’s unclear whether we understand object structure based on only how we perceive or on how it truly exists in the world. Examining eye-movements provides insight into how our visual system represents and understands objects. A perceived-space hypothesis predicts that we look at two different-looking objects in different ways, even if they are the same size from one’s perspective.... View the poster.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by flashbacks of the traumatic event and high comorbidity with major depressive disorder (MDD). Prior stress is known to increase the likelihood of developing PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event. Currently, PTSD is diagnosed clinically, its biological etiology is not known and there are few effective treatments. This study aimed to identify if a genetic animal model of depression shows PTSD-like behavior using the Stress-Enhanced Fear... View the poster.

The bacterial CRISPR/Cas9 system shows promise as a genome-editing tool to treat human disease. It is integral to understand the binding and unbinding kinetics of Cas9 to its target DNA to study specificity of the Cas9 protein. Standard practices involve the use of negatively charged polymer Heparin to reduce unspecific binding of Cas9 to non-target DNA. This study proposes a novel method for study of Cas9, while also demonstrating the negative impact Heparin has on... View the poster.

Physiological linkage (i.e., the covariation of moment-to-moment physiology between individuals) is thought to play an important role in relationship functioning. The present study examined physiological linkage across interbeat interval (IBI) and skin conductance levels (SCL) in a sample of married spouses (N=106) during both a pleasant and a conflict conversation and looked for associations with spouses’ marital satisfaction and subjective emotional experience. When physiological linkage was operationalized with anti-phase and in-phase linkage constituting opposite ends... View the poster.

Approximately 1 in 3 deaths in the US is caused by cardiovascular diseases, among them atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis occurs through excessive cholesterol deposition (hyperlipidemia) along the inner layer of the artery called the intima, resulting in plaque formation that blocks arterial blood flow and could lead to heart attacks and strokes. It has recently been recognized that inflammation plays an important role in plaque formation. Specifically, T cell activation can affect the progression of atherosclerosis through... View the poster.

A famous topic in mathematics involves the theoretically infinite nature of geographic coastlines. If one were to measure the perimeter of Great Britain, for example, the smaller the measuring tool, the larger and more accurate the measured perimeter would be. This phenomenon contains similar properties to the mathematical objects known as fractals: shapes with infinitely many self-similar segments. In our research project, we set out to visualize what a fractal coastline would look like and... View the poster.

Image colorization is the process of artificially coloring a black and white image such that this fabrication appears realistic and authentic to the viewer. There are many nontrivial applications of this process, such as the colorization and augmentation of historical photos as well as the removal of color tone filters from images. This research employs a unique architecture of a convolutional neural network, a type of artificial neural network, to train a machine to identify... View the poster.

Given any polyhedron in R3, we can cut it open along its edges, flatten it out, and obtain a polygon in the plane R2. In this project, we explored the opposite process, an open question that was first posed about 70 years ago: given a polygon in R2, what is the folding procedure to reconstruct the polyhedron in R3? We focused on a special case, where we are given a polygon with n vertices and... View the poster.

The High Energy Density Sciences group at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory studies materials in extreme conditions such as very high temperatures and pressures. We use shock waves produced by the Linac Coherent Light Source to compress polycrystalline diamond samples. Compressing these samples allows us to use x-ray diffraction to study the changes to the material’s structure as it experiences high pressure conditions. As a result of the shock wave, the polycrystalline diamond samples undergo dynamic... View the poster.

Race is a socially constructed category firmly embedded within a system of privilege and oppression that places White people at the top and Black people at the bottom. Though this system has tangible implications in the lives of individuals, much existing literature explores race on an arguably superficial level, without situating the individual’s understanding of race within societal structures. As race is embedded within a system, an individual’s understanding of occupying a different position in... View the poster.

When asked to imagine a computer scientist, males and females tend to report that they imagine a male. This perception can be detrimental for females’ computer science self-efficacy and may contribute to findings that as early as elementary school females are less interested in and less confident in their computing abilities in comparison to their male peers. However, not all females imagine computer scientists to be males. Here we examine the association between females’ perceptions... View the poster.

For over a hundred years, psychologists have sought to understand the role of spirituality in human behavior and experience, and how it might relate to features of personality. This study considered personal narration of spiritual experience and how it relates to the personality traits of Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Over 400 narrative accounts of spiritual experiences given by mid-life adults (approximately half of whom were white and half African American) were... View the poster.

The purpose of this research project was to highlight that there are different perspectives on mental health that stem from various experiences. All of these views should be valued and not discriminated against for any reason other than that they are different. As a child of Soviet Immigrants, I quickly observed that my parents and extended family perceived mental health differently than other Americans. I never understood why they did so when I had the... View the poster.

The global coronavirus pandemic has dramatically changed the way people and institutions interact with one another. In the United States, there has been an observable and documented increase in xenophobia and a breakdown of social and institutional trust. Consistent with a US history of scapegoating other populations for major crises, the US government primarily blamed China for the origin and spread of the virus. These actions have been discussed in a variety of forums with... View the poster.

The revitalization of endangered languages is both deeply personal and political, as language subjugation is directly linked to intentional efforts by colonizing powers to suppress and eradicate indigenous culture and dismantle local collective identity. Many studies have been conducted on how to promote endangered languages, but few evaluate the effectiveness of the movements and explore the underlying determinants of success, particularly how the relationship between minority language speakers and the colonizing powers may affect these... View the poster.

Experts have recognized the potential for religion to shape environmental attitudes. In recent decades, the world has seen the rise of faith-based organizations in tackling issues of sustainability, particularly those following Islamic ecotheology. Embedded in Islamic scripture is an emphasis on responsibility and accountability towards the Earth; Islamic environmental organizations have capitalized on such teachings to inspire action in Muslim communities. In my research paper, I explored the following question: how are environmental organizations, operating... View the poster.

Homelessness and menstruation are constructs and processes that are plagued with stigma. For decades, academics have researched menstruation and homelessness as separately stigmatized experiences. However, in the process, scholars have overlooked the converging and intersectional nature of the stigma surrounding homeless menstruation. Through library research and records, this paper analyzes in what ways menstrual stigma and homeless stigma coincide to exacerbate detrimental psychosocial issues faced by homeless menstruators. The result was the identification of seven... View the poster.

Through framing, identical information can be portrayed in different ways. Existing literature finds that receiving positively framed information makes people more risk-averse than receiving negatively framed information, but disagreement remains on the strength of this effect and the conditions under which it occurs. In this study, 503 participants were surveyed about their willingness to go out to dinner during the COVID-19 pandemic given three infection probabilities: 2.75%, 5.50%, and 8.25%. Responses were collected in February... View the poster.

Research finds people reproduce incorrect information provided by their collaborative partners. These “social contagion” effects largely studied memory for information introduced during experiments (e.g., word lists), rather than preexisting knowledge. This study extends the effects of social contagion of memory to social contagion of knowledge: Does what people know to be true change when they hear inaccurate answers from collaborative partners? After reading inaccurate facts (e.g., The capital of France is Marseille), people are more... View the poster.

Codable robots, small electronic devices programmed with software or apps, have become popular toys for children to play with at home. During play, children learn about coding by programming their robot to move and behave however they choose. But given the novelty of coding, children may face impasses when coding their robot to behave in these desired ways. In these moments, they turn to social partners for assistance - and in the home that’s often... View the poster.

Media accounts report that the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement disproportionately affected Black communities and businesses, amplifying already- existing racial health and economic disparities. Black-owned small businesses experienced significant indirect and direct economic damages in Chicago, Illinois, and research literature is now striving to provide analyses of Black business owners’ experiences in 2020. The present study uses quantitative and qualitative data analyses to discern the impact of 2020 crises on small... View the poster.

In everyday conversation, individuals actively process speech in order to comprehend and respond in real-time. As a word unfolds, listeners activate possible lexical candidates and actively determine the target word as they receive more information, a process referred to as incremental processing. This process requires knowledge of one’s native spoken language and the ability to recognize individual phonemes. While this process allows for rapid word recognition, it can also result in phonological competition among multiple... View the poster.

We think data is definitive, but our perception of it contains bias from expectations and motivations. For example, when Democrats and Republicans view the same depiction of global temperature trends, Democrats see an increasing trend, while Republicans see overall flatness. Could prior beliefs bias our perception of relations depicted in visualized data? We empirically examine how prior beliefs influence correlation estimations in scatterplots. We recruited 295 adults from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and trained them to... View the poster.

Listeners have difficulty understanding speech in environments containing background noise. This difficulty is exacerbated for listeners with hearing loss, which is often attributed to the degradation of the speech signal caused by interfering noise, impaired hearing, hearing device processing, or a combination of these factors. To resolve and understand speech despite this degradation, listeners must allocate attention to the speech signal and inhibit their attention to competing background noise. Thus, the inability to selectively attend... View the poster.

Negative body image in women has been a prevalent issue throughout history. Societal expectations have left many women feeling insecure and dissatisfied. Current research has indicated that oftentimes negative body image is passed down from mother to daughter. While there is a variety of research on mother-daughter interactions with body image, there is not a lot of research that specifically studies the connotation of words used. This research explored the correlation between body satisfaction among... View the poster.

In the past few years, educators have been pushing for an integration of the arts into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning in order to promote innovation and creativity in these fields. The present study explores the relation between creativity and STEM learning among young children in digital and non-digital contexts, and how creativity affects STEM engagement. Parent-child dyads (n = 31) consisting of one parent and one child aged four-and-a-half- to five-years old... View the poster.

The Modern Orthodox Jewish (MO) community currently functions on the fantasy that MO teens are receiving all their messaging around sex from their Jewish schools and communities. The messaging these students receive tells them to refrain from sex and touching people of the opposite sex until marriage. This messaging can be confusing for young people who live in both the secular and religious worlds and don’t know which religious laws or cultural norms to conform... View the poster.

Children come to understand race within a historically-established racial hierarchy, but they have the agency to accommodate or resist this establishment as they form their own racial identities. Previous research identified distinct narrative types that either reinforce existing societal structures (Master Narratives) or disrupt them (Alternative Narratives). The Counternarrative (CN) is the most assertive Alternative Narrative where children reference the structural consequences of race, and explicitly name and challenge racism in their own lives. This... View the poster.

Nearly half of all women in corporate America will experience sexual harassment at work at some point during their career, and yet limited progress has been made to mitigate these occurrences of sexual harassment. Gender inequalities (i.e. the male dominated workforce, lack of female leadership, and large power differentials between men and women) have been regarded as the key factors that lead to sexual harassment and sexual misconduct in the workplace. This study adds to... View the poster.

Past research suggests that stereotypes about collective identities (i.e. race, ethnicity, and gender) shape aspirations. However, less is known about how actual representation of collective identity relates to aspirations. The proportion of an identity in a given career will be used as an indicator of numeric representation and I hypothesize that it relates to aspirations of middle school students. In the present thesis, I investigate how the pattern of representation in middle school students’ aspirational... View the poster.

Does the political context influence how children think about who they are and will become? This study analyzed longitudinal data to explore children’s references to sociopolitical events, such as presidential elections, when they described their own social identities and future aspirations. Children (7-14 years old; N = 245) were individually interviewed on two separate occasions: Time 1 interviews coincided with Barack Obama’s seventh year of presidency (May, 2014); Time 2 interviews happened after Donald Trump... View the poster.

Women in developing countries occupy a unique role in the economy that is often underappreciated, informal and highly vital to the country’s economic stability. Despite their high productivity and output, women in countries such as Morocco lack support from their government and communities as well as the infrastructure necessary to develop and grow their businesses. Project Thea: Morocco addresses a current gap in the literature on the specific environment women in Morocco face. To answer... View the poster.

Expanding on research done on the mental health and happiness benefits associated with romantic relationships, this study investigates whether identity denial, the experience of being socially denied one’s chosen identity by having others refuse to acknowledge that identity, presents a challenge for bisexual people within committed romantic relationships. For straight, gay, and lesbian individuals, one’s choice of partner makes one’s own sexual identity more visible to others. For bisexuals, committing to a partner may obscure... View the poster.

A survey of adults (n = 706) found low levels of awareness of two social movements aimed at decreasing weight stigma: the Fat Acceptance Movement and Health at Every Size movement. For HAES, providing a brief story of an overweight person who endorses HAES improved perceptions of the movement. View the poster.

According to Lisjak, Lee, and Gardner (2012), a threat to a brand can elicit the same response as a threat to the self. The current research examined whether people react differently to brand threats as a function of East Asian versus North American culture and as a function of whether the source of the threat was a stranger or a close friend. In Study 1, 616 U.S. and East Asian participants were recruited to complete... View the poster.

The purpose of this project is to investigate the lack of significant reform regarding women’s issues during the perestroika period. Part one establishes the foundational ideology by analyzing Marxist and Leninist ideas on women and comparing them to official Soviet doctrine as established by government officials and leading scholars. Also in this section is an overview of feminist theory in regards to both social policy and communism. These form the set of beliefs regarding the... View the poster.

Marital emotional functioning is one of the most important predictors of marital outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction), which in turn has important consequences for well­being and health factors for both spouses and their children. Thus far, negative emotions (e.g., anger) have been the central focus in distinguishing dissatisfied from satisfied couples (i.e., low and high marital satisfaction). In sharp contrast, positive emotions have rarely been the target of empirical marital research, notwithstanding the sizeable body of... View the poster.

This project was originally motivated by a life­long love of the Harry Potter series and a teenage love for fan fiction and other fan­created works. I was motivated to do research when I stumbled upon the lack of inclusivity in many fan communities, which I found to be shocking. In attempting to learn more about the harmful homonormativity, gender roles, and sexism that I had come across within works of queer fan fiction, I analyzed... View the poster.