2016 Clare Boothe Luce Awardees

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  Elena Flynn, a Mechanical Engineering major, is conducting research with Dr. James Bird (ENG Mechanical Engineering) to study the dynamics of the jetting phenomenon which occurs when a bubble pops.

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  Alecia Griffin, an Electrical Engineering major, is working with Dr. Malay Mazumder (ENG Electrical & Computer Engineering) to study the impact of dust size distribution on electrodynamic screens to help improve self-cleaning solar panels.

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  Alison Knasin, a Chemistry major, worked with with Dr. John Caradonna (CAS Chemistry) is targeting particular missense mutations that are known to cause phenylketonuria (PKU). She will be generating mutants proposed to influence the positioning of the cofactor in the enzyme’s active site by site-directed polymerase-chain reaction (PCR) methods and then will continue to characterize their properties.

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  Jordann Marinelli, a Biomedical Engineering major, is conducting research with Dr. Joe Tien (ENG Biomedical Engineering), investigating the potential use of engineered collagen tubes for microsurgical applications. The project’s overall goal is to eventually be able to implant engineered tubes into the rat once we have proven that they withstand microsurgical anastomosis and distend comparably under the same blood pressures as found in the living rat.

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  Emily Norwine, a Chemistry major, is working with Dr. Linda Doerrer (CAS Chemistry), focusing on exploratory chemistry using transition metals. The first project explores chemistry of the {PhB(fur)3}- ligand with 3d transition metals. The second explores the H2pinF ligand with the 4d transition metal rhodium.

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  Marlee Quinn, a Chemistry major, is conducting her summer research with Dr. Arturo Vegas (CAS Chemistry). The project will focus on the development of a library of peptidomimetic molecules which have the potential to prevent the onset of Type 1 Diabetes.

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  Rebecca Wolf, a Computer Engineering major, is working under the mentorship of Dr. Douglas Densmore (ENG Electrical & Computer Engineering) to develop an intuitive, economical, and accessible toolchain, which any lab could use to easily design and build microfluidic devices. She will be implementing an interface where the user can interact with the hardware of the microfluidic device in real time.

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  Tiffany Wu, a Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering major, is working with Dr. Swapnil Bhatia (ENG Electrical & Computer Engineering) as an NSF Living Computing Project UROP Fellow (http://programmingbiology.org). Her work is at the confluence of computer science and synthetic biology and involves building software tools and systems to enable better biological design. Specifically, she is developing a biological design repository and a domain specific language for programming organisms.