Aimee Bailey
I am studying protein adsorption on surfaces modified by various self-assembled monolayers, which are ideal thin films. The focus of my work is the investigation of the relationship between surfaces of different functionality and fibronectin, a protein integral to cellular adhesion. The surface properties will determine the favorability of fibronectin adsorption, and in effect, cellular attachment.

Jason Beiger
The purpose of my research is to design and synthesize more potent, structurally diverse, and orally bioavailable pyrrolinone-based inhibitors of HIV-1 protease that preserve the intra- and intermolecular hydrogen-bonding capabilities, conformational flexibility, and side-chain orientations of their peptidal counterparts. Since pyrrolinones have been reported to exhibit both improved membrane transport properties and strong activity against HIV-1 protease, the pyrrolinones may even provide an exceptional alternative to other peptide-based inhibitors beyond those of HIV-1 protease.

Bradley Feingerts
I am interested in the relationship between governments and economic markets, especially concerning US-China trade relations. China's huge economic boom in the last twenty years hs produced an emerging middle class with greatly increasing purchasing power. With its enterance into the World Trade Organization, China has agreed to lower its tariff and raise its quota on motor vehicles. I am looking at the impact of these changes on motor vehicle sales by American car manufacturers in order to analyze how a government policy change affects sales in a certain market.

Mindy Figures
My research deals with the study of the infectious bacteria Mycobacterium Avium (M. Avium). There are several strains of M. Avium, however only a few cause disease, particularly in immunosuppressed patients. One of the main differences between the virulent and avirulent strains of M. Avium is the specific sugar attached to the glycopeptidolipid of the bacteria's plasma membrane. It is the purpose of my study to isolate the gene cluster responsible for the production of these sugars and test to see whether or not they are a responsible factor in determining virulence.

Max Fraser
I have been looking at issues pertaining to international labor and trade unions. My research focused particularly on how international labor organizations like the ICFTU and the ILO have approached corporate social responsibility in the globalized economy, as well as what corporate social responsiblility has come to mean for American trade unions. At the moment I am concentrating more on issues pertaining to immigrant labor and radicalism in the United States. Ultimately I'll be writing a comparative study between two industry-specific immigrant groups, one from the late-19th or early-20th century (e.g. Irish railroad workers in the American Midwest or Mexican miners in the American Southwest) and one from the late-20th century (e.g. Asian needle-trade workers or Caribbean transportation workers in New York City).

Elan Fuld
This statistical project consists of two parts. The first part examines whether there is "clutch" hitting in baseball (i.e. whether some players actually perform better in key situations) or "choke" hitting (i.e. hitters who perform worse in key situations). The second part deals with attempting to model how a player's performance is affected by who is batting before and/or after him in a lineup. There are many questions of this class that can be asked, including: how is the walk probability of a hitter affected by the following batter?

Richard Gaster
Hospitals perform hundreds of thousands of percutanecous transluminal coronary angioplasties (PTCAs) each year, most often using expandable stents to reopen narrowed arteries. However, instent restenosis is very common and can cause many problems. The commonly used chemical coated stents can prevent this restenosis, but are much less flexible and cannot be inserted into the more tortuous arteries. Our hypothesis is that if the stents are coated with a polymer that attaches adenoviruses to the metal surface of the stent then instent restenosis will be significantly reduced while not reducing the flexiblity of the stent. The polymer layer we propose to use is so thin that it adds virtually nothing to the thickness of the stent, thereby leaving the stent with virtually the same physical dimensions. The adenovirus would be used to facilitate the controlled release of a specific plasmid to the intimal cells of the coronary areteries. This ;lasmid will code for genes that will hopefully be transfected intothe intimal cells and therefore allow for the expression of the inserted gene.

Isreth Hassan
I am working on mathematical models, analysis tools and algorithms for networks of mobile sensors. The interesting scientific challenges have to do with making sensors active: enabling them to use limited resources in terms of power and mobility and move to acquire relevant information. My research project attempted to address these basic issues in a scaled-down laboratory test bed consisting of mobile platforms powered by pull actuators with cameras to acquire information. Initially my advisors and I worked with modelling and building two prototypes to simulate positioning and orienting a sensor in an affixed two dimensional space. These models would be able to deploy an array of sensors attached to cables and push-pull actuators or actuators acting as an agonist and antagonist. We first built a system with two Degrees of Freedom (DoF) that only translates a sensor in limited coordinates of an xy-plane. We are now proceeding with a more complicated system with three DoF, which includes the orientation of the sensor (movement in its vertical axis) in the same plane. The models we built were over-constrained systems, thus enabling the use of only pull actuators (agonist actuators) unlike the usual push-pull actuator systems.

Alex Janofsky
My project is launching the Busguard product/ business with (fellow UScholar) Bari Spielfogel. The Busguard counts students as they exit and enter a bus using LEDs. The goal is to prevent accidents involving children being left on buses. I am specifically working on patenting and incorporation, market and pricing research, finance, and strategic analysis. I hope to use this project as a case study in entrepreneurship as well as an opportunity to research ithe ins and outs of a particular school bus safety issue.

Audrey Lustig
Currently I'm doing a behavioral study on selective attention. The goal is to see how making visual stimuli more difficult to perceive affects the amount of attention that gets allocated to the stimulus. My hypothesis is that subjects will show more pronounced attentional effects when stimuli have low discriminability, or low saliency. In order to test this, I created a behavioral task in which a letter cue (F for "face", S for "shoe" and N for "neutral") orients the subject to a specific stimulus (face or shoe); subjects must then determine whether the face/shoe is male or female. However, some of the stimuli are very difficult to perceive, while others are easy to see. Since it is predicted that attention will only be necessary for the stimuli which have lower saliency, it is expected that the difference between performance on valid (the cue correctly predicts the type of stimulus) versis invalid (the cue is incorrect) trials will be significantly greaterfor these types of stimuli, compared to stimuli of high saliency.

Sammy Mack
I am researching the development of hip-hop music as a political art form in Cuba. Specifically, I will try to identify its influences and incorporation into popular culture. I would also like to guage the extent to which it has become a youth movement under the Castro government. Right now, I am reading texts on the history of hip-hop to garner an understanding of its roots and audiences. I plan on going to Cuba next year to track down artists and interview them firsthand.

Yael Miller
I'm enrolled in beginning writing for the one-hour drama at UCLA Extension in which writing a current tv show episode is required.  I plan to write a Stargate SG-1 episode for this course.  I am also researching Moroccan culture and will write a tv pilot based on my idea for a police show featuring a Jewish Moroccan detective and a Muslim Moroccan detective who are partners on the Beverly Hills police force.

Beth Pollack
I have been investigating transportation and identification with fictional characters (in layman's terms, why is it that people feel real emotions towards, and care about fictional characters?) We wanted to find out if there is some kind of formula or equation for making a successful fictional character. After analyzing 63 famous novels by coding for events, structure and transportation, I chose one to manipulate for the project (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) We created and analyzed different versions of the story to isolate which elements made it less transporting when changed.

Andrew Rosenthal
The purpose of my research is to create a mathematical model for the early prediction of success in the field of psychology. Our hypothesis is that it is possible to determine future eminence in psychology based on particular factors found early in one's career. Using a published list of eminent psychologists, we built a comparison study of eminent and non-eminent psychologists based on data collected from early in their careers. We investigated factors such as citation counts, publication patterns, abstract attributes, and biographical information. We also developed and distributed (to the living subjects) questionnaires collecting information on personal characteristics, work and employment patterns, and biographical background.

Evan Shore
I am interested in the topic of violence. My current goal is to analyze the archaeological record for traces of the first signs of violence among human beings. Further analysis would attempt to reconcile whether these first signs of violence occured "naturally", or if social and cultural factors had an impact on individual behavior. Ultimately, I would like my research to tie into aggresive tendencies within the financial services industry (e.g. the actions of Enron executives).

Megan Schwamb
I am currently working with Dr. Charles Alcock and his colleague Dr. Matthew Lehner for the Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS). TAOS consists of four telescopes that will simultaneously search for Kuiper Belt objects (asteroid-like bodies past the orbit of Neptune) that have radii less than 10km. This past year I have been working on completing a list of target fields for the TAOS telescopes. Over the summer I was able to create this software pipeline and begin the initial field selection process by comparing my generated images based on start catalogs with real images taken by the Digital Sky Survey (DSS). My attention is now turning to narrowing the list of primary candidate fields through analysis of the raw images taken directly for the TAOS telescopes situated in Lu-lin Taiwan. These images contain distortion which comes from the setup of our system. My goal is to match the stars from the image to the USNO catalog and determine the offset. Generating an 18-term polynomial to match the distortion using least squares fit is my task in the upcoming months.