Evolutionary Biology is an extremely diverse field, in which studies of evolution occur both on the anatomical and molecular level. The anatomical level of this incredible field includes research like mine, used to reveal more about Earth’s past and creation, and to detail organism relationships using phylogenetic trees. This type of work reveals so much about the past that it is astounding ... Archosaurs are an incredibly diverse and evolutionary highly successful group of organisms that include birds, crocodilians, and the now-extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs (Brusatte, 2010). Their success as predators is particularly noteworthy. Not only were the long-extinct non-avian theropod dinosaurs the largest and most abundant terrestrial predators of the Mesozoic, but also during and since that period crocodilians have not only persisted but also dominated predatory aquatic and shore-line niches for more than 85 million years (Erickson et al., 2012). Like in many successful groups, feeding performance is a key reason for the evolutionary fitness of these animals (Erickson et al., 2003, 2012; Gignac, 2010). Read more...
The title of my paper was "The Sky’s the Limit- An Investigation of Cloud Cover on Major League Baseball Performance." My research project was inspired by a genuine passion for the game of baseball and my desire to learn more about its subtle nuances. I often wondered how much weather variables such as sun, clouds and shadows affected the outcome of a game or individual player performance. My curiosity prompted me to do some preliminary research to identify whether these questions were previously investigated. This served as the impetus for my project and interestingly the results only led me to formulate more questions ... The focus of my project was to investigate whether different percentages of cloud cover during a baseball game favored batters or pitchers. Additionally, what effect cloud cover percentages had on fielders during a Major League Baseball game? The data collected for this investigation was obtained from the years 2007 to 2010. Baseball data gathered during day conditions were also compared to baseball data gathered during night conditions to see if any significant differences existed. Baseball data was collected from www.baseball-reference.com and weather data was gathered from the National Climatic Data Center. Seven variables were compared across three categories of cloud cover, 0-29%, 30-79% and 80-100% cloud cover during day games and night games, which served as the control for my study. The overall results suggest that clearer conditions tend to favor the pitcher in each day game while cloudier day games tend to favor the batter. Read more...
When I was little, I always wondered why my parents worked late every day. While my friends went home after preschool, I would stay at my parents labs, waiting for them to finish their research. What was so interesting about science? One day, I begged my dad to show me his experiments. Smiling at my enthusiasm, he scraped some of my cheek cells and put them under the microscope. As he pointed out the nucleus and organelles of each cell, I watched in awe at the hidden complexity within my own body. At that moment, I knew that I wanted to be like my dad: to be able to look into the microscope and understand how the world works...After calibrating the basic model according to the videos and constants found in other scientic papers, I could then test the impact of different cellular foot forces on the overall rate of wound healing. I tested the effects of mechanical and chemical forces on the cell and found that mechanical forces alone could close a wound. If mechanical and chemical forces worked together, the wound would close at a much faster rate. Overall, I have created a model that can give a complete picture of cell movement during wound healing. The model is kept accurate by its close ties with reality, based on observation from actual wound healing videos. Agent-based modeling allows me to explicitly write the local causes of this overarching behavior, allowing me and future scientists to focus on specific forces for future biological study. Read more...
Ever since Galactic Cosmic Rays were detected by Victor Hess 100 years ago (Hess 1912), their origin has been a mystery; what stellar object is powerful enough to accelerate particles into TeV energy ranges, and how does it release so much of them? Galactic Cosmic Rays are capable of releasing high energy X-rays and gamma rays, with energies up to GeV, as they travel through the interstellar medium. By studying the spectral patterns of the emitted X-rays and gamma rays, we can gain insight into the nature of the Cosmic rays themselves. To record such patterns, astronomers have used the Chandra telescope and the Very Large Array telescope to create high-resolution X-ray images of some sources of Cosmic rays. However, the low energy band of these preexisting telescopes has limited our ability to detect high-energy X-ray emissions from the sources and to gain further understanding of their particle acceleration mechanisms (Reynolds 2008). But with the recently launched Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), it is now possible to record these high-energy spectrum data with high resolution. Read more...
It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school, however, that I became interested in astronomy. I had heard from other students at my school about the Science Internship Program, which gives research opportunities to high school students and is run by UC Santa Cruz Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor Raja GuhaThakurta. I discussed possible projects with Raja, who became my mentor, and ultimately decided on my project, a search for very distant galaxies, because I thought it would be exciting to look back in time. I continued my research for two years, completing most of it over two summers at UC Santa Cruz. During the first summer, my project focused on manual search, which was exciting because I discovered several new Lyman Alpha Emitters, the type of galaxy I was looking for. However, this process of manual search was quite time-consuming, so when I came back the next summer, I combined the project with my passion for efficiency and computer science and worked on an automated search algorithm ... The goal of this project is to look back in time to observe objects in the early stages of the history of the universe. Astronomers can observe what occurred billions of years ago by looking out into the distant universe. The farther away an object is, the farther back in time we are observing, because the light emitted from objects takes more time to travel to us. Thus observing objects that are very distant is essentially looking back in time. Read more...
I began to appreciate such simplicity, and to redefine my understanding of mathematics. I came to see it as being much more than just its constituent symbols and equations, but a beautiful language capable of describing the logical foundations of all the natural sciences. Over time, that same beauty began to appear everywhere I looked ... Aortic stenosis (AS) is a lethal disease that can lead to severe cardiac complications if left untreated. A new type of non-invasive treatment for AS, transcatheter aortic-valve replacement (TAVR), exhibits comparable success rates in comparison with conventional surgical aortic valve replacement. Nevertheless, it also demonstrates significantly greater rates of paravalvular regurgitation, a serious complication associated with increased rates of later mortality. In this study, we achieve three main objectives. First, we design a computer program for automatic 2-dimensional measurement of the aortic annulus that is statistically non-inferior to radiologists' manual measurements. Secondly, we use these measurements in addition to the Agatston calcium score to identify significant predictor variables of paravalvular regurgitation. At a significance level of 0.05, the predictor variables were identified to be aortic valve calcification and prosthesis mis-sizing. Lastly, we use these predictor variables to construct a multivariate Bayesian model that predicts the incidence of moderate post-TAVR paravalvular aortic regurgitation with 70% accuracy, highlighting its potential for clinical use in recommending patients to the appropriate AS treatment. In light of the fact that 50% of medically treated AS patients die within two years of onset of symptoms and as many as 30% of these patients cannot undergo surgery, TAVR is a life-saving procedure that has the potential to positively impact many patients' lives. Since TAVR cannot be conducted safely without prior assessment of risk, the proposed risk-stratification model reflects a significant advancement in AS patient care. Read more...
To predict the response of estuarine ecosystems to anthropogenic and natural changes, process-based physical computer models serve as an important tool for simulation of estuarine salinity. Among the school of data-driven parametric models as alternative tools for process-based physical models to simulate environmental variables, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have become an increasingly popular modeling technique over the past two decades (Maren et al., 1990; Schalkoff, 1997; Dawson and Wilby, 2001; Maier and Dandy, 2001; Dawson et al., 2005; Pao, 2008). ANNs is a programming logic model using multivariable calculus and an algorithmic “learning” process to simulate various functions related with information processing, including pattern recognition, forecasting, and data compression. The logic of ANNs aims to imitate the workings of individual neurons in the human brain, making it able to dynamically model non-linear functions with very high accuracy. In this way, a modeler using ANNs has no need to explore the intermediate processes that occur in the relationship between an input variable and the final output. Instead, the ANN implicitly takes them into account during its learning process. Transport of salt in estuaries is influenced by multiple factors such as freshwater inflows and tide, and their relationship with salinity is highly complex and non-linear, making it ideal cases for the application of ANNs. The objective of this study is to develop ANNs to predict estuarine salinity using the Loxahatchee River as a case study. The Loxahatchee River is selected because of concerns about saltwater intrusion into the river (SFWMD, 2002; 2006; Kaplan et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2011). The hypothesis is that salinity in the Loxahatchee River can be effectively simulated with ANNs, through properly training and testing, using freshwater inflow, rainfall, and tide as inputs. Read more...
The first respect in which this paper breaks from much of the literature is that it rejects the notion that bullying behavior is carried out by a small, identifiable social group. Rather, bullying is regarded herein as a widespread social phenomenon, characteristic of the social interactions of those who would not be branded as ‘bullies’ in the traditional sense. Bullying behavior is not emblematic of the mentally or emotionally disturbed bully, but rather is an inevitable result of the repeated convergence of motivating and enabling factors of bullying behavior (Zapf, 1999). For bullying to occur, the perpetrator must be willing and able to perform the behavior. The repeated coincidence of these factors is necessary because in order for a behavior to qualify as bullying, it must be repeated over time ... If personality can be thought of as a stable construct, it follows that people can be expected to react to setbacks and difficulties in a manner similar to how they have in the recent past. We all face negative emotions, and many of us are imperfect in coping with them, often resulting in ‘thoughtless’ behaviors or communications directed at others. The result is a set of repeated behaviors which, if directed in a hostile manner at others, might very aptly be called bullying. Therefore, many of us can be evaluated as ‘bullies’ under this criterion, not in the traditional sense, but in a more broad one which does not regard us as antisocial personalities, but as social animals whose behavior toward others is shaped by our varying emotional states. A school is a particularly fertile ground for this kind of research, as students are constantly under societal and peer pressure to succeed academically. In their striving to achieve, students are often met with setbacks and disappointments which evoke the negative emotions focused on in this paper. Read more...
In high school, I endeavored to participate in the Brain Bee competitions – the equivalent of the Scripps National Spelling Bee or National Geography Bee, except on neuroscience trivia. Here, I became exposed to the fascinating aspects of the nervous system, especially its striking adaptive capabilities called plasticity. Having read about extraordinary cases in which patients afflicted with neurological disorders managed to survive with minimum personality change or psychological impact, I wondered how far the brain’s resiliency can extend, and more importantly, if it could be harnessed to treat neurological disorders in the future. I reached out to Dr. Nick Spitzer at the University of California, San Diego, who was investigating the plasticity of the brain’s chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. As the first high school student in his lab, I began to study the plasticity of a gaseous transmitter, nitric oxide, induced by alterations in electrical activity. I faced many challenges as I mastered intricate brain microdissections, sliced fine sections of embryonic brains, and operated complex machinery. Research absorbed my time and energy - there were even times when I dreamed about the embryonic tadpoles that I interacted with in the lab! Read more...
My research work involved analyzing sediments from three coastal lakes in Japan to reconstruct history of past inundations. The sediments were collected from the lake bottom in the form of vertical cylindrical cores from the approximately the center of the lakes. Sediments collected from anywhere else would not be a stable archive of past inundations as they may get washed or shift with further inundations. Then the sediments were analyzed for grain size and content of organic and in organic materials on a layer by layer basis. The deposition dates for layers were obtained from carbon dating, while the layer thickness was obtained from X-radiography. Collectively, the data allows us to construct past history of inundations ... within the errors of resolution, we validated the oral history of typhoons of 1274 and 1281, the years of failed Mongol invasions of Japan, when entire armadas sank due to calamitous storms. Read more...
My work on this project has made me see the connection between science and the social policy and historical issues that are so important to me. I did not understand before how valuable and critical social science analytical tools could be in understanding what I consider to be key moral issues of our time, such as what I studied here -- how to reduce health and poverty in this country and abroad. Now I appreciate that through carefully collected and studied data, we can learn much to improve the quality and effectiveness of the policies implemented to address poverty and health ... In addition to appreciating the worth of scientific research, I found a higher level of independence through the completion of this project than I realized possible in high school. Free of assignments and grades, I took on this project to experiment and learn for my own pleasure and increased knowledge. It surprised me to find myself not only spending hours obsessing over the project itself, but also enjoying learning a data analysis program called STATA in which I coded data, cleaned data, ran regressions, and analyzed results. Before undertaking this project I would have said that I was not “the type” to master statistical thinking or analysis, but I was wrong. Read more...
I am fascinated by problems that require a blend of computational topology, geometry, and number theory. I have also been studying fractals which interesting geometrical objects that have been used in diverse applications such as cryptography, seismology, network optimization, and even weather forecasting. However, despite the wide range of applications and interest in fractals, the general theory of these objects is still in its infancy. My work on this research project has developed some theorems and conjectures in the field of combinatorics and has begun to shed some light on some areas of fractals, one-cell automata and dynamical systems ... This need for optimization has become increasingly more important in today’s society from the perspective of both resource management as well as leveraging new opportunities. In terms of resource allocation, combinatoric optimization is being used to improve the efficiency of scheduling transportation (the traveling salesperson problem) to allocating scarce resources (such as militaryequipment or food distribution), through improving internet network traffic throughput, latency, and infrastructure costs. But the field has broader impact than just efficient resource allocation as it can more help in more efficiently processing large amounts of data. Increasingly, we are producing more information that we can efficiently sort through and understand, whether it is the 100k plus tweets per minute of the Presidential debates, the information gathered about global warming, or the data mining of consumer information. Read more...
My inspiration came at breakfast one day, when CNN switched to a story about the Icelandic volcanic eruption that had grounded air traffic across Europe (due to the abrasive, potentially explosion-causing action that debris has in engines). My immediate thought was, “Someone should fix that.” ... I always am asked whether foreign object damage, FOD, is really that major a problem, because most people have seen a few news reports on jets crash-landing after bird strikes or other major accidents, but they don’t know that thousands of these incidents, albeit more minor, happen yearly. Not only by number, but by cost, it clearly is a major problem in aviation. Boeing estimates a minimum yearly cost, barring any disasters like the 1.7 billion dollar Icelandic volcanic eruption, of at least 4 billion dollars a year from FOD. Read more...
Imagine being plunged perpetually into a silence where the ubiquity of sound is irrelevant. That is the world which many students in my high school experience. My inspiration for this project really came from the students in my high school's Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) program. My school has a department which offers a high school education to DHH students across Orange County. The students in this program take many of the same classes as the other students, using an interpreter to understand the lectures. I befriended several DHH students, but one in particular stood out to me: a boy in Cross Country who was deaf but used a device called the cochlear implant to hear. During the team's annual trip to Yosemite each summer, he picked a song on a friend's MP3 player and played it. He then told the group that the song he chose was his favorite song. This moment inspired me, as it showed me that even deaf individuals could find enjoyment from music. As a pianist for 12 years, I felt an urge to help him and other DHH students fully experience the wonders of music ... So let me give a bit of background information on the cochlear implant. The cochlear implant bypasses the outer, middle, and inner ear by sending electrical stimulation directly up the auditory nerve to the temporal lobes of the brain. This electrical stimulation mimics the natural electrical signals produced by the hair cells in the cochlea, and the implant users are able to interpret this as sound. Because it completely bypasses the ear, this device enables otherwise deaf or critically hard of hearing individuals to hear. Read more...
For a moment, just think about it. Think about waking up in the middle of the night, thirsty, and not being able to access water because it is rationed so that the rest of your community can share the resource. Imagine using the restroom and having no water in the toilet because water is only cleaning out the latrine once a day. Although such scenarios seem quite extreme and impossible to many living in first world countries, this can become a reality at the rate at which water is being consumed and the inefficient manner it is being distributed ... The water source on Earth is rapidly diminishing, and this is not new knowledge nor of new concern. Boating has been concluded to be a significant source of pollution; this focus has been centered around shoreline erosion, turbidity issues caused by uprising nutrient sediments, and chemical pollutants. Physical turbulence is not yet known to solely influence ecosystems, so this research centers on the re-suspension of water. Salt and freshwater ecosystems were created using a glass aquarium, plate glass, silicon seal, PVC pipes, and air and water pumps. Determining the severity and specific impacts of boating on photosynthesis and respiration gives clear and comprehensive views of water quality that is dependent on aquatic life. Read more...
I've lived in the small town of Burnt Hills, New York for all of my life. Starting at a young age I developed a love for science. In my spare time I would polish rocks in my rock tumbler. I spent hours digging around my gravel driveway trying to pick out the quartz among the limestone. I also enjoyed analyzing fingerprints with my toy forensic kit. At one point I actually wanted to become a forensic anthropologist (the show Bones was a favorite of mine). My father had a part in helping to propel my scientific interests. He had an old chemistry set and we would do experiments on the weekends. He also would set up his old telescope so we could gaze at the stars. Perhaps that's where my love of astronomy began. My interest in nature also influenced my passion for science. As a little girl I would catch frogs, butterflies, crickets - really anything I could get my hands on. I loved, and still love, fishing at my grandparent's lake, only a couple hours from where I live. Bloody Pond, despite the gruesome name, is where I have had some of my best memories. I've especially enjoyed my time spent looking up at the sky on those clear nights ... As I got older I watched documentaries and read books on concepts like light speed and parallel universes, which immediately captured my imagination. I was in awe by how the world works and how we can learn about it through equations and experiments. What drew me to astronomy and physics is the idea that it is the basis of study for the entire universe; from the most elementary of particles, such as neutrinos, up to the largest and most distant galaxy structures studied. My passion for science was escalated the summer going into my sophomore year of high school. That summer I attended a career exploration program at Cornell University where I took a workshop on astronomy. Immediately I fell in love with the field and the exciting research it was producing. I was fascinated by dark matter, exoplanets, and all of the mysteries in the farthest depths of our universe. Read more...
Oftentimes, there are "bad guys" such as diseases, wildfires, or thieves that the "good guys" such as the CDC, firemen, or police wish to control or capture. However, the good guys only have a limited quantity of assets such as money, people, and time, so it is important for them to use the least amount of resources. One well-known way of analyzing such problems is known as "Cops and Robbers on a Graph". I analyzed a different version of this model to find out how to minimize the cost (called the Workday Number) to catch the bad guys. I discovered how to compute a way to catch the bad guys in two days while still minimizing the cost ... How did I come up with my research topic? During the proof-based power round of the national American Regions Mathematics League Competition (ARML), there was one problem which introduced and asked questions about the Workday Number. In answering it, I realized that I could combine the idea of flow networks from computer science with monovariants from my math experience to give bounds on the Workday number. Unknown to me at the time, the panel of judges, all mathematicians, had deliberated for over thirty minutes over the correctness of my solution. Although it appeared correct, and they could not find any holes in it, it simply did not match any of the official proofs that they had. Read more...
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an auto-immune disease that attacks the central nervous system. Almost 10,000 people are diagnosed every year, and depending on age, at least 40% of people with MS are unemployed, suggesting the severity of its debilitation within society. Specifically, it occurs when the immune system attacks the myelin sheath, a protective coating around the axons of nerve cells of the brain. The myelin sheath is composed of white matter, functioning to help nerve cells send signals quickly and smoothly throughout the brain. When it is damaged (this occurs in MS), signals cannot be sent throughout the body as quickly or efficiently. The Central Nervous System (CNS) has varied bodily functions; therefore, individuals with MS experience numerous symptoms, such as vision problems, trouble walking, and severe cognitive and physical fatigue. Such a wide range of symptoms calls for very extensive and broad treatment plans; therefore it is important to understand as many of these symptoms as possible in order to treat MS patients efficiently and effectively. One of the more common, and noticeable, symptoms in MS is Impaired Self-Awareness (ISA). Self-Awareness is the ability to understand one’s own disabilities and capabilities. People who have impaired self-awareness are unable to understand all of the problems that MS causes them, such as reduced physical capabilities or cognitive fatigue. Although ISA has been studied extensively in MS and other neurological conditions like Traumatic Brain Injury, very little is known about its neurological underpinnings ... This study seeks to examine the following: 1) Different types of self-awareness, since self-awareness can be impaired cognitively, behaviorally, and physically. 2) Since white matter integrity is related to executive functioning, and self-awareness is a type of executive functioning, this study seeks to examine if reduced white matter volume will be directly correlated with reduced self-awareness Read more...
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has allowed substantial advances in cancer genomics. In fact, large-scale discovery efforts have propelled the identification of hundreds of cancer-related genes in recent years. To be truly transforming, however, key cancer-associated mutations must be profiled systematically in the clinical and translational arena to guide rational cancer therapeutics. This aim has yet to be achieved on a larges-cale, mainly because many methodologies cannot be applied efficiently and reliably on formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tumor samples that are routinely encountered in the clinic and in archived tumor banks. This project is a part of the computational effort to develop and apply a robust and cost-effective methodology, empowered by solution-phase exon capture and massively parallel next-generation sequencing, by which any FFPE tumor may be characterized for somatic base mutations and copy number changes in all known cancer genes. With the programming language“R,”thecomputational analysis of NGS data for assays running clinical samples has been redeveloped, automated, and graphically represented. Moreover, such analysis, such as copy-number graphs orQC metrics, can be computed at a speed that is 568 times as fast as the traditional, and manual, computational techniques of alternative methodologies. Read more...
University of Chicago
Professor David Mazziotti
Editor