In 2020, the largest protest movement in US history happened in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In response, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) conducted oral history interviews with prominent African-American physicists, seeking to understand their perspectives on dismantling systemic racism in the physics community. Oral histories provide an alternate view of history that cannot be quantified and exists outside of the normative view of truth; was this an effective strategy for inciting change in a discipline that pedestals objective truths over subjective truths? Moreover, does limiting interviews to notable, outstanding African-American physicists limit the AIP’s ability to capture the range of truths systemically experienced by African-American physicists? This project will investigate the strengths and drawbacks of these oral histories, using primary sources such as National Science Foundation censuses and secondary sources to analyze whether these physicists’ experiences can be generalized and if this generalization holds power over the scientific doctrine of objective physical truths. The treatment of the African-American experience as a monolith dilutes the intentions of the oral histories by withering away intersectional aspects of the experience. As a result, the interviews lack an intersectional and class analysis that reflects how American physics has interwoven with a racial capitalist political economy. By providing an intersectional historical analysis of 20th-century physics, this paper will aim to rethink how large trends are historicized with individual narratives. The framework used to incorporate and critique oral histories in research simultaneously can serve as a model for future history of science research.

The fallopian tube function is central to several pathophysiological processes from facilitating fertilization to initiating ovarian cancer. However, existing models to study these functions are limited in relevance to the human condition due to the available conventional cell sources and culture systems. Many make use of mouse models that do not naturally develop pathologies such as ovarian cancer and lack the ability to replicate human genetic variation. Others use traditional 2D culture systems that have been shown to be poor in maintaining fallopian tube epithelium (FTE) secretory and ciliated function. Here, we propose to develop a novel in vitro model of FTE that is easy to manipulate and better mimics the in vivo environment through use of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) as a cell source and a scaffold-based microfluidic culture system. We have modified an existing protocol and found that 3D culture allows for generation of organoids expressing FTE markers faster and at a higher rate. Additionally, I have developed a prototype device with a lumen and assessed cell viability and behavior of seeded immortalized FTE to establish the device. Further work can be done to elucidate drivers in FTE maturation through assessing primary FTE function in the device, and incorporation of iPSC-derived FTE cells into the device for studies on functional maturation.

Turkey in Seattle, an ongoing oral history project initiated in 2017 under the auspices of the Turkish & Ottoman Studies Program at MELC, seeks to document the lives and stories of the Pacific Northwest’s vibrant Turkish community. The project's focus is on the immigration stories of people from Turkey—delving into their reasons for immigration, identity, adaptation to American culture, community involvement, and return migration plans. By cataloging their stories into a publicly available database, the project aims to record, archive, and preserve the oral histories of people who immigrated from Turkey to the Pacific Northwest (PNW) Region in the United States, creating a digital library and datasets that can be used for future research. The project has existed in three distinct stages. Phase one began with the lead researcher, Melike Yücel-Koc, as the sole interviewer. Interviews were only conducted with first generation immigrants. Phase two continued the focus yet had additional research interns, and phase three (the project's current phase) has begun interviewing second generation immigrants. I, in partnership with Turkey in Seattle, conducted over 15 of these oral history interviews over the span of 10 months, starting in phase two of the project. This process began in a training stage in Honors 345, Fall quarter 2022. After careful analysis of past oral history projects and review of previous interviews conducted for the project, I began to conduct interviews the following quarter. Interviews were conducted for a period from 1-2.5 hours, and followed oral history best practices. My presentation will discuss the methodology, process, and results gathered throughout my research, with a heavy focus on the practical applications. Beyond this, I will discuss the unique mindset that oral history demands of its practitioners and how it has proved invaluable to discussing the story of the PNW Turkish community.

We live in an age of ever-pressing environmental crises. Scientists have determined that the cumulative impact of human activity on Earth in the last 300 years reaches a scale equal to that of a geological epoch—carving marks in the planet that will last longer than our species has existed. Practices of extraction—mining for coal, drilling for oil—are one collection of activities integral to that impact, prompting scholars to investigate the complex of cultural factors that drive and ultimately constitute these practices. Regarding these practices, scholars in the environmental humanities have raised an important question: how, in the first place, does nature get figured as a resource? How has Western humanity’s relation towards the natural world developed into one predominantly of exploitation? In this paper, I investigate the metaphysical basis of this relationship through Martin Heidegger’s ‘method’ of reflection [Besinnung]. My investigation begins with the thought of Descartes and Bacon, two philosophers who, at the commencement of modernity, interpreted the human as the relational center of being as such. This early-modern, anthropocentric philosophy prefigures an event Heidegger calls gestell—the disclosure of all beings exclusively as resources—which I argue is the underlying metaphysical basis of practices of extraction. I go on to argue that the very proliferation of extractive thinking reveals the crucial importance of poetry and philosophy today, both of which embody a kind of thinking that is antithetical to extraction and instrumentalization, a thinking that—rather than dominating, organizing, utilizing—lets things show themselves as they are. I conclude that art and philosophy both counter the ubiquitous logic of extraction and are therefore invaluable to any attempt at figuring a fuller, healthier mode of humanity’s relating to itself and the natural world.

I investigate the influence of cultural and linguistic backgrounds on visual perception and semantic interpretation within computer vision. This study addresses the question: Are there significant variations in the semantic content described by vision-language datasets and models across different languages? Guided by the hypothesis that cultural and linguistic diversities lead to distinct semantic interpretations, I compare multilingual datasets against monolingual counterparts. I developed metrics such as scene graph complexity, embedding space width, and linguistic diversity to quantify semantic variations across languages in both human-annotated and model-generated image captions. The methodology involves using linguistic tools and translation techniques to ensure semantic consistency across languages. Our findings indicate that multilingual captions contain, on average, 21.8% more objects, 24.5% more relations, and 27.1% more attributes than monolingual ones. Furthermore, models trained on diverse linguistic content demonstrate improved generalizability across different linguistic datasets. This study contributes to the understanding of how language and culture impact visual perception in computer vision and advocates for more inclusive dataset compilation and model training strategies.

Lck is a lymphocyte specific tyrosine kinase involved in T cell activation in response to T cell receptor (TCR) mediated signaling. T cell activation is essential for the adaptive immune response, as it results in the proliferation of T cells after the detection of a peptide presented on a Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) and the production of cytokines necessary for immune response coordination. Lck activity is dependent on its global conformation, which is dynamically regulated via phosphorylation on its activation loop and C-terminus tail. Upon TCR engagement, active Lck phosphorylates the CD3ζ chains of the TCR complex, transducing the intracellular signaling events that activates T cells. Because Lck activity is dependent on its global conformation, we sought to map the conformational changes in Lck upon TCR simulation, as well as identify cysteine-reactive fragments that target and stabilize Lck in its conformational extremes. Lck has few endogenous cysteines, so we performed a yeast-growth-based deep mutational scan (DMS) of Lck–in which we utilized Lck’s toxicity to yeast to calculate the activity scores of ~5,000 Lck mutants–and identified 109 solvent-exposed, wild-type-like cysteine mutants of Lck. Expressing these wild-type-like cysteine mutants in T cells, and utilizing competition-based mass spectrometry, we can quantify changes in electrophilic reactivity of the cysteine side chains in the wild-type-like cysteine mutants upon T cell receptor (TCR) stimulation. Thus far, I have identified six wild-type-like cysteine mutants of Lck that are quantifiable using mass spectrometry and exhibit reactivity to our set of cysteine-reactive fragments, some of which show differential reactivity upon TCR simulation and fragment selectivity. Currently, I am using these mutants to map the dynamics of a hyperactive mutant of Lck. These quantifications provide insight into changes in the conformational flexibility of Lck, accessibility of the mutated residue sites, and intramolecular protein-protein interactions of Lck upon TCR stimulation.
 

This research essay delves into the intriguing and unexpected convergence of elements in the Master of Calamarca's painting, Archangel with Arquebus, Asiel Timor Dei, an artwork that introduces an amalgamation of guns, angels, and 18th-century fashion. Produced around 1728 in the viceroyalty of Peru, the painting challenges conventional artistic representations by depicting androgynous angels adorned in aristocratic attire and carrying harquebuses, a type of gun. The central figures, dandified angels with swan wings, lace ruffles, broad-brimmed hats, and ornate coats with gold and silver linings, are unique to Andean painting. Beyond its aesthetic magnificence, the art form served a dual purpose, it is both a theatrical expression and a persuasive instrument. The underlying motive was to induce the Indigenous population to embrace the authority of God and the king, employing a combination of religion and force to integrate them into colonial society. The research contextualizes these artistic representations within the historical framework of the viceroyalty of Peru, a Spanish colonial administrative region that spanned most of South America. It explores the broader implications of these angelic depictions, highlighting their role in the post-missionizing period when Christian clergy orders aimed to eradicate pre-Hispanic religious practices and establish Catholicism. This exploration culminates in a rich understanding of the multifaceted meanings embedded in these extraordinary depictions, shedding light on the intricate interplay between religious symbols and ideologies, cultural synthesis, and artistic expressions in the viceroyalty of Peru.

In order to design effective countermeasures against HIV, we must first understand the forces that drive it to evolve resistance within hosts. While linkage patterns in genetic data are potentially a powerful tool to quantify the relative contributions of multiple evolutionary forces (mutation, recombination, selection) acting during an HIV infection, the severe viral population bottlenecks accompanying drug therapy complicate these patterns. To interpret genetic linkage in the context of such major changes in population structure (which are themselves driven by specific mutations), we develop a simulation framework for viral evolution in which genetics and population structure influence each other. This framework overcomes limitations from both dynamical modeling, in which patterns of linked variation are ignored, and from population genetic modeling, in which population structure is predetermined. Using few parameters, we are able to reproduce linkage patterns and population bottlenecks that broadly conform to those observed in vivo. As a case study to demonstrate this model’s utility, we consider a recent hypothesis that viral recombination is suppressed during population bottlenecks due to diminished opportunities for coinfection. In simulating populations with and without recombination suppression during population contraction, we show that this effect measurably changes genetic diversity in rebounding populations, but is less visible when examining simulated viral loads or resistance mutations alone. Then, using this model as a null expectation for linkage patterns, we assess if the linkage structure in HIV populations treated with bNAbs is consistent with density-dependent recombination in vivo. Collectively, our work demonstrates that, by generating realistic null expectations of linkage under complex changes in population structure, we can employ linkage patterns as a powerful source of information for evaluating viral evolutionary hypotheses.

About 400 million to one billion years after the Big Bang, radiation from the earliest light sources began to ionize the neutral hydrogen gas that filled much of the universe. Data from this era, which is known as the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), provides constraints on our models of structure formation and evolution of the early universe. One of the instruments currently being commissioned for this purpose is the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA). Located in South Africa, HERA is a radio telescope that uses a large array of antennas to study the large-scale structures of the universe during the EoR. My work has been focused on validating the instrument while it is being built by analyzing systematics present in the data as well as calibration solutions. Most recently, I've been focused on validating the HERA data processing pipeline. One of the major challenges with studying the EoR is that the radiation from this era is extremely faint in comparison to foreground radiation from other sources in the sky. In order to isolate the EoR signal, the radiation from other sources on the sky must be subtracted from the total signal. Calibration solutions, which give solutions to an equation for correcting instrumental effects, are one of the key pieces in this process. HERA is backed by an international collaboration that has built a bespoke data processing pipeline; by comparing the plots of the calibration solutions, I've been able to help validate that the results from the HERA pipeline hold up against results from the Fast Holographic Deconvolution (FHD) pipeline, a well-established, open source pipeline for processing radio interferometric data. This furthers our confidence in our results while ensuring any potential issues are addressed before the telescope is fully completed.