The BUGS class of 2019 came from an array of disciplines ranging from biomedical engineering, chemistry, human health, all the way to film production and cinematic animation. Below are the topics of their individual research projects as presented at the 2019 BUGS Finale Symposium.
Arjun Aron
’22 USC Viterbi
Biomedical Engineering
PI: Cristina Zavaleta
“Optimizing the Stöber Process for the
Creation of a Multimodal Silica Nanoparticle”
Samuel (Alex) Atcheson
’21 USC Dornsife
Neuroscience
PI: Heather Culbertson
“Development of A Haptics-Based Programming
Environment for The Visually Impaired”
Katie Barajas
’21 Cornell University
Applied Engineering Physics
PI: Andrea Armani
“Optical Polarimetric Elastography
for Biomechanical Analysis”
Vivianna Camarillo
’21 USC Dornsife
Neuroscience
PI: Anat Epstein
“The effect of PID1 in
Neuroblastoma Cell Lines”
Zhelan (Elaine) Chen
’20 USC Viterbi
Biomedical Engineering
PI: Megan McCain
“Engineering a Functional Renal Microphysiological System
for Modeling Disease and Repair (Proximal-Tubule-on-a-Chip)”
Claire Conway
’20 USC Viterbi
Biomedical Engineering
PI: Eunji Chung
“Development of Renal-Targeted Nanotherapeutic
Transdermal Patch for ADPKD”
Yilei Dong
’22 USC Dornsife
Cognitive Science
PI: Scott Fraser
“Introduction to the Organization of
Dopaminergic Neurons in the Zebrafish Brain”
Garrett Flynn
’21 USC Dornsife
Computational Neuroscience
PI: Dong Song
“Decoding Memory Content from Human Hippocampal Recordings”
Olivia Hart
’21 USC Dornsife
Health and Human Sciences
PI: Peter Kuhn
“Morphological Analysis of CTCs in
Early vs. Late Stage Breast Cancer”
Giselle Kim
’20 USC Dornsife
Neuroscience
PI: Meredith Braskie
“Quality Control in Alzheimer’s Disease”
Jonathan Le
’22 USC Dornsife
Quantitative Biology
PI: Ray Stevens
“Mapping Morphological and Migration
Behavior of Cancer Cell Lines in Response
to Different Mechano-Physical Properties”
Christopher Liu
’22 USC Viterbi
Biomedical Engineering
PI: Nicholas Graham
“Testing methyltransferase inhibitors
to therapeutically target glioblastoma”
Shreya Mathur
’20 USC Keck
Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
PI: Iris Perez
“Screening for Sleep Disturbances in Patients with
Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome”
Matthew Matsumoto
’21 USC Dornsife
Biochemistry
PI: Valery Fokin
“PEGylation of Exendin-4 Derivatives with Fluorescent
Tags for Analysis of Pancreatic β-Cells”
Emily Miltenberger
’21 USC Dornsife
Biochemistry
PI: Charles McKenna
“Fluorescent Bisphosphonates as a visualization tool for Charcot Neuroarthropathy”
Nina Nguyen
’21 USC Dornsife
Biochemistry
PI: Eunji Chung
“A Study of the Circadian Clock’s
Involvement in Nitrate Uptake”
Samantha Noor
’20 USC Dornsife
Neuroscience
PI: Lisa Aziz-Zadeh
“Virtual Reality Cyberball: Developing a Framework for Integrating Virtual Reality with fMRI for Social Neuroscience”
Mara Pleasure
’19 USC Dornsife
Media Arts + Practice &Human Biology
PI: Peter Kuhn
“Diabeat-It: A CHLA iPhone application”
Goldie Roth
’21 USC Viterbi & USC Dornsife
Biochemical Engineering & Biochemistry
PI: Andrea Armani
“Synthesis of Bio-Imaging Probe”
Helen Salinas
’21 USC Viterbi
Biomedical Engineering
PI: Cristina Zavaleta
“An Investigation of the
Enhanced Permeability and Retention Effect
Using Fluorescent Liposomal Nanoparticles”
Alan Shi
’21 USC Dornsife
Human Biology
PI: Xiaojiang Chen
“RNA Editing Ability of APOBEC Family Deaminases”
Simran Singh
’20 USC Viterbi
Biomedical Engineering
PI: Raymond Goldsworthy
“Designing Training to Improve Spatial Hearing in Bilateral Cochlear Implant Users”
Mark Veksler
’22 USC Iovine and Young Academy
Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation
PI: Andrea Armani
“Summer at Armani Lab”
Jackson Walker
’20 USC Dornsife
Neuroscience
PI: Le Trinh
“Knocking Down Enhancer RNAs Using CRISPR-Cas”
Yiqun (Neil) Wang
’21 USC Dornsife
Biological Sciences
PI: Pinghui Fei
“The Role of HSV-1 Viral Proteins
in Neurodegenerative Diseases”
Eric Yang
’22 USC Dornsife
Quantitative Biology
PI: Peter Kuhn
“Developing a Recommendation System for Therapy Response Prediction in Multiple Myeloma”
Nicole Zhang
’22 USC Dornsife
Neuroscience
PI: Hongwei Dong
“Comparing Axonal Density of Upper-limb, Inner-mouth, and Outer-mouth Regions in the Striatum of Wild-type and Huntington’s Disease Mouse Models”