HARPS Students present their summer research

On Friday, October 19, the 2017-2018 class of HARPS students (Hopkins Authentic Research Program in Science) presented posters of their summer lab research. The 16 students spent the summer as interns in labs around the country. The open fair format encouraged members of the Hopkins community, including parents, faculty, staff and students, and invited guests to explore all the projects and ask questions of the student presenters. Each student spoke passionately about the project they were involved with, as well as how the experience of taking HARPS last year and spending the summer in a real research environment have effected their plans for college study and their professional careers beyond. The current 2018-2019 class of HARPS students were keen to speak with the veteran students, and gain advice on how to approach the coming year in the course.

These are the labs that students worked last summer:

Katie Broun worked with Dr. David Calderwood at the Yale Med School.
Research project: Purification and crystallization of tousled-like kinase

Sophia Colodner worked with Dr. Thomas Near at Yale-Science Hill.
Research project: CytB sequencing of percina tanasi and percina uranidia to infer a neighbor-joining tree for DNA comparison

Saloni Jain worked with Dr. Karen Hirschi at the Yale Med School.
Research project: Study of the development of the bone marrow hematopoietic niche

Kenny Lu worked with Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov at the Yale Med School.
Research project: Bone marrow-derived macrophages preferentially phagocytose

Adwith Mukherjee worked with Dr. Elias Lolis at the Yale Med School.
Research project: Small molecule inhibition of MDP5 as a treatment for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

Siraj Patwa worked with Dr. Stephen Waxman Yale-VA West Haven.
Research project: Dendritic spines in FMR1 knockout mice

Ellen Ren worked with Dr. Kevin Wang at Stanford.
Research project: Rewiring the POU5F1 structure to enhance stem cell reprogramming

Katrina Schmier worked with Dr. Lindsay Hoyt at Fordham.
Research project: Exercise executive functioning and reasoning in teens

Nick Schoelkopf worked with Dr. Jaime Grutzendler at the Yale Med School.
Research project: A fluorescent dye D1C1C4 enables imaging of endothelial tissue

Ethan Silver worked with Dr. Xianglin Ke at Michigan State.
Research project: Synthesis and properties of terniary sodium oxides

Tim Sullivan worked with Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov at the Yale Med School.
Research project: Mast cell neuronal relationships and their role in allergic response

JR Stauff worked with Dr. Boris Sinkovic at UCONN Storrs.
Research project: Creating a program using LabVIEW to automate temperature control for the purpose of finding transition temperatures in magnetic materials

Liana Tilton worked with Dr. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio at Yale SEAS.
Research project: Morphing and Task-Performing robotic skins

Ben Washburne worked with Dr. Shu Hu at Yale- West Campus.
Research project: Tunable charge transfer energy levels enable electrochemical hydrogen peroxide production

Ryan Viores worked with Dr. Mandar Muzumdar at the Yale Med School.
Research project: Interactions and signaling of reintroduced KRAS in NP10 KRAS knockout cells

Alex Zhang worked with Dr. Xiao-Bing Gaoat the Yale Med School.
Research project: Investigation of how diet induced obesity affects hypocretin synthesizing neurons in mice