Mariah Chambers and Dr. Brooks Britt, Department of Geology The purpose of my ORCA project is to determine the nature of the stream systems represented by the Morrison Formation, a unit of sediments deposited 150-million-years-ago (Jurassic-age) that is famed for its dinosaurs, such as Stegosaurus and Allosaurus. Despite the unit’s importance to paleontology, oil and […]
The TAT Two Hybrid System
Joshua Browning and Dr. Allen Buskirk, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry The TAT two hybrid system for discovering novel stalling peptides met with some immediate challenges that ultimately resulted in the abandonment of this project. The feasibility for using this method to discover new peptide sequences that would cause the stalling of translation within an elongating ribosome became […]
Transmission Electron Microscope Imaging of Lipid-body COX Localization
Andrew Broadbent and Dr. Daniel Simmons, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry The laboratory of Dr. Daniel L. Simmons, my mentor, studies the cyclooxygenase (COX) enzyme. Dr. Simmons is one of the world’s foremost authorities on COX, he having discovered one of its two known types, COX-2. The COX enzyme, which exists in many organisms, including humans, is responsible […]
Moral Hazard in Hedge Funds: An Approach Using Stochastic Differential Games
Jeremiah Bejarano and Dr. Jeffrey Humpherys, Department of Mathematics This project is a continuation of a line of research that I have been working on over the last two years, with the object of analyzing the relationship incentive structure present in the hedge fund industry and identifying any potential for moral hazard. In economics theory, […]
Development of Low-Cost Point-of-Care Channel Flow Constriction Immunoassays for the Developing World
Neil Anderson and Dr. Adam Woolley, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Biomarkers have a tremendous capacity for use in screening for various diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and bacterial infections. Existing immunoassay methods can detect a broad spectrum of biomarkers. However, they are costly to perform for small numbers of samples and require bulky, expensive instrumentation, making these methods unfit […]
Englerin-A
Curtis Allred and Dr. Merritt Andrus, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry My project has been to synthesize smaller, simpler analogs of a molecule that is effective against renal cancer, called englerin-A. This is accomplished by computer aided modeling of simple analogs, synthesis of those models, and assays to determine activity. I am participating in this project in Dr. […]
Dynamical Structure Function Identifiability Conditions Enabling Signal Structure Reconstruction
Julius Adebayo and Dr. Sean Warnick, Department of Computer Science Networks of controlled dynamical systems exhibit a variety of interconnection patterns that can be interpreted as the structure of a system. One such interpretation of system structure is a system’s signal structure, characterized as the open-loop causal dependencies among manifest variables and represented by its dynamical structure function […]
Thermal and Mechanical Structure of Alpine Glaciers Using Radar and Drilling
Dr. John McBride, Department of Geology Evaluation of how well the academic objectives of the proposal were met The academic objectives of the proposal were to: travel to the Gorner Glacier system in southern Switzerland; set up a base camp on the glacier, operating out of the village of Zermatt, Switzerland; acquire 2D and 3D […]
BYU Computational Number Theory Research Group
Dr. Paul Jenkins, Department of Mathematics The computational number theory group has clearly been a success, with students writing papers, giving conference presentations, winning prestigious national fellowships, and going off to strong PhD programs in mathematics. The weekly seminar has helped students learn presentation skills and learn more mathematics, and has provided a convenient entry […]
PHARM: An Environment for Physical Acoustics Research and Mentoring
Dr. Kent Gee, Department of Physics and Astronomy Mentoring Environment Overview PHARM (PHysical Acoustics Research and Mentoring) has been operating partially with support from a MEG grant since 2009. The primary purpose of this mentoring environment is to provide undergraduates in physics and applied physics opportunities to gain experience in fundamental areas of physical acoustics. […]