Inclusion of Women in Computer Science

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Naomi Johnson, Dr. Kevin Seppi, Computer Science Department Introduction Since the 1980’s, the percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women in the United States has fallen dramatically. There are growing numbers of men earning bachelor’s degrees in CS, and the numbers of women are increasing very slowly. For decades, researchers have been studying recruitment and […]

Detecting Microcracks in Structures by Electromagnetic Excitation of Acoustic Resonances

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Joshua Gregg and Brian Anderson, Physics & Astronomy Introduction Stainless steel structures are often affected by stress corrosion cracking, which makes microscopic cracks that can go unnoticed and eventually cause the structure to fail. A useful method for detecting stress corrosion cracking is nonlinear resonant ultrasound spectroscopy (NRUS). NRUS involves vibrating a sample and looking […]

Making MRI Scans Quieter through Time-Reversal Acoustics and Active Noise Control

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Trent Furlong and Brian Anderson, Physics Noise from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment puts patients at risk for hearing damage.i Active noise control (ANC) systems have been implemented inside the MRI’s bore to reduce perceived noise, but the equipment used cannot have magnetic material or the ANC system will interfere with the MRI machine’s imaging […]

Finding Planets Around Massive Stars

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Elisabeth Frischnecht and Denise Stephens, Physics & Astronomy Introduction During the formation stages of a solar system, huge clouds of gas and dust contract into a disk around the growing star. These disks are the birthplace of planets, and are essential to our understanding of solar system formation. Historically, the search for planets outside of […]

Cancerous Male and Female Gene Expression

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Clarissa Farmer and E. Shannon Tass, Statistics Genetic diagnosing is becoming more popular, as well as more and more accurate. However, many genetic diseases have complex genetic effects and are still not fully understood. Transthyretin Amyloidosis (ATTR; also known as familial or hereditary amyloidosis) is a terminal genetic disease. It is caused by unstable transthyretin […]

Modeling Main Group Metal Alkane Functionalization Reactions in Highly Acidic Carboxylic and Sulfuric Acid Solvents

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Lily H. Carlson, Prof. Daniel H. Ess, Chemistry Department Our group is interested in identifying the unknown mechanisms of main-group C-H functionalization reactions. In the long term, our goal is to use computational chemistry tools to develop general principles on mechanisms, intermediates, reactivity, and selectivity for hydrocarbon C-H functionalization reactions by p-block main-group compounds as well […]

Cluster Analysis via Random Partition Distributions

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Brandon Carter, Dr. David B. Dahl, Department of Statistics Introduction Cluster analysis is an important exploratory data analysis technique used in a wide variety of fields. Cluster analysis seeks to discover a natural grouping of the data, where items in the same cluster or group are more similar than items from different clusters. Through our research, […]

Cyclic Peptide Catalyst design

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Millicent Campbell, David Michaelis, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Enzymes found in nature are more efficient catalysts than those used in organic chemistry labs. However, natural enzymes are not ideal for organic synthesis because they only make one product and only work in specific conditions. The Michaelis lab designed a catalyst capable of mimicking enzyme-like reactivity […]

Heterodinuclear Co-Zr Compound Shows Increased Reactivity in Kumada Coupling

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James Coombs, Daniel Ess, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Introduction Heterodinuclear compounds containing a metal–metal bond represent a potentially useful subclass of catalyst in organic synthesis. Heterodinuclear compounds offer the possibility of increased reactivity due to interactions between metal centers (Scheme 1A). These so-called cooperative effects can enhance reactivity by changing the electronic density, increasing […]

Primordial Origins of Supermassive Black Holes

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William Black and David Neilsen, Physics and Astronomy My research searched out the origins of supermassive black holes. Figure 1 – Allowed black hole sizes, in units of solar masses M⊙. Neutron stars larger than the TOV limit collapse into black holes. Supermassive black holes were the first discovered, followed by stellar, then intermediate. No […]