Session Descriptions!

Sarah London

Our lab is interested in how the brain develops, especially how early experience can alter neural function and behavior. We use the zebra finch songbird as our model system because males can learn their song during only one period in development (females cannot sing). We apply molecular and genomic tools in combination with behavioral manipulations to uncover neural processes that promote and limit the ability of young zebra finches to acquire song. This strategy allows one to discover mechanisms that may also be involved in human speech acquisition and other developmentally learned behaviors.

During the tour, we will see a naturalistic animal colony and how we assess behavior, as well as the wet lab where we process brains, and the epigenome, genome, RNAs and proteins within it. If you have ever been curious about how animals are used within research, this is the tour for you!

Kenneth Bader

The focus of the Biomedical Acoustics Development and Engineering Research Laboratory (BADER Lab) is the translation of therapeutic ultrasound for non- or minimally invasive treatment of cardiovascular and cancerous disease. Specifically, we utilize acoustic cavitation for combinatorial ablation and enhanced drug delivery treatment strategies of pathologies resistant to standard interventional techniques. To assess bubble activity and the resultant changes in tissue structure, we are developing multi-modal imaging approaches via diagnostic ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging. Analytic and numerical bubble dynamics models are also utilized to gain insight into the mechanism of action of our therapeutic approaches.

Julie Korsmeyer

What do Albert Einstein, ice cream, and asteroids have in common? They are all made of stardust, which is what we analyze! In the last ten years, we have built a unique instrument at the University of Chicago, CHILI, which allows isotopic and chemical analysis with much higher sensitivity and lateral resolution than the previous techniques, as well as freedom from isobaric interferences. With CHILI, we have begun analyzing stardust, CAIs, and interstellar dust returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft and solar wind sampled and returned to Earth by the Genesis spacecraft. We are also interested in broader applications of CHILI in the earth and planetary sciences, where its strengths are in any problem requiring measurement of isotope or element ratios with high sensitivity and fine lateral resolution. In this tour, you will see how and where we perform our research.

Harriet de Wit and Hanna Molla

Our research focuses on the physiological, subjective (i.e., mood-altering) and behavioral effects of drugs in healthy human volunteers. Current projects in our laboratory include: i) investigating individual differences in responses to psychoactive drugs, ii) effects of drugs at different phases of the menstrual cycle, and iii) effects of psychedelic-type drugs such as MDMA and LSD on mood and neural function. The studies are designed to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying motivated behavior and of the processes underlying drug and alcohol use. Ultimately, we hope that studies such as these will help to identify risk factors for excessive drug use, and to predict and prevent adverse responses to drugs.

Participants for this selection will tour subject testing rooms and learn about measuring behavioral effects of drugs in human volunteers. While you won't be asked to participate in the research, we think you might be inspired to enter the field after!

Sunanda Prabhu Gaunkar and Matthew Hebron

STAGE — Scientists, Technologists and Artists Generating Exploration — is a full-scale laboratory embedded within a science and engineering school devoted to collaborations among scientists and artists. Specifically, it is at the helm of one of four core research themes, that of "Arts, Sciences and Technology," at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

The STAGE Lab's distinct research focuses on creating and developing new theatre and film work inspired by science and technology. Technology is integrated into the staging of our plays as a vital part of telling the story, not just for special effect. Rather than science lectures disguised as plays, these are emotionally engaging, entertaining stories. It's these visceral experiences that have an enduring impact, capturing the public's attention and stimulating interest in science and technology.

Participants will see the our lab space (i.e., a Black Box theatre), learn about the various projects at STAGE Lab in theatre, film, and games, and do some hands-on activities related to science, art and technology!

Spela Kunstelj, Ben Masters, Madison Huynh, and Sarah Kress

The mission of the Wuttig group is to integrate renewable energy input into the synthesis of products across the chemical value chain by advancing the science underlying chemical reactivity at electrified interfaces.

Synthesis driven by renewable sources of electricity offers a sustainable, scalable, decentralized, and energy-efficient route to furnish value-added products – from fuels to complex molecules. The predictive design of efficient and selective electrosynthetic sequences, however, remains challenging due to the structural complexity of the unique added dimension inherent to all electrochemical systems: the electrified interface. Research in the Wuttig group focuses on strategies to address this challenge by leveraging interfacial self-assembly and electrode materials design to elucidate the impact of the interface on electron transfer events central to catalytic small and complex molecule activation.

The tour will include a brief description of the research we are doing, and then exploring the various instruments we use, including the potentiostats, glovebox, gas chromatography instruments we use daily to progress our work.

Mayuri Viswanathan and Megan Aguiar

Our lab studies the human immune system. Specifically, we are interested in understanding how different signals regulate the activity of certain human immune system cells. In this tour, students will see where we do our work, learn about the process of protein production, and run their first polyacrylamide gel to visualize purified immune proteins. If you love your biology and chemistry classes and are eager to get (your gloved hands) in on the action, this is the tour for you!

Marina Kabirova

Dr. Eatock's lab studies how the vestibular inner ear encodes head motion and position in signals initiated and shaped by mechanosensitive and voltage-gated ion channels of sensory receptor cells (hair cells), transmitted by extraordinary mechanisms to afferent neurons, and translated into spike trains by voltage-gated ion channels at spike initiation zones adjacent to the afferent terminals. Signals from central and peripheral zones on the sensory epithelium are shaped differentially by distinct complements of ion channels in both hair cells and afferent neurons.

Participants in this tour will see how researcher study tiny structures like the inner ear, including a demonstration of the electrophysiological rig and 2-photon microscope!

Diangen (Dana) Lin

Imagine seeing biomolecules like proteins and DNA one molecule at a time! They must be really, really small; in fact, we often work with images at the nanoscale (10^-9 meters)! Come to observe how we perform single-molecule fluorescence imaging experiments at Squires Lab. We will show you our wet lab space used to prepare samples for imaging as well as our optical setups that enable imaging. There will be lots of lasers and fun!

Scott Snyder

Whether you call it "orgo" or "o-chem", organic chemistry deals with the chemistry ot carbon-containing compounds. The Snyder Lab is focused on creating tools to generate specific compounds, drawing their inspiration from nature. So, if you're interested in the chemistry of nature (or just really love nomenclature), run don't walk to this tour!

Isabella Hansen and Kevin Chang

Molecular engineering requires input from chemistry, biology, engineering, and even physics. This tour will give an overview of a highly interdisciplinary wet lab where students and researchers with backgrounds in chemistry, biology, engineering, and more work together to develop novel therapeutics for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases. If you love problem solving and don't have a favorite science discipline, this is the tour for you!

Elizabeth Jerison

We are a biological physics lab in the physics department. We study the dynamics of immunity, and how the collective behavior of cells in organisms gives rise to immune responses. On the tour, we will talk about microscopy, computation, and our favorite model organism, the zebrafish. If you enjoy physics and are interested to hear and see how it interfaces with biology, this is the opportunity for you!

Siqi Zou

Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are of paramount importance for the manufacturing of devices that are critical for the renewable future. Although effective, industrial solvent extraction process has main drawback of energy and chemical intensiveness. Separation methods combining both size effect and binding affinity can promote selectivity among REEs. Here we report a new method to achieve separation among REEs in aqueous systems without ligands via the utilization of extremely confined MnO2 solid ionic channels. 92% purity of Dy from 1:1 Nd-Dy pair and 97% purity Nd from 1:1 La-Nd pair can be obtained with two-time separation. Our work reveals the power of confinement design and its promise towards sustainable REE separation.

Xuan Ji

Imagine a planet with a varying orbit that dances around two stars, due to celestial mechanics. We want to figure out how this orbital dance affects the planetary climate. As the planet whirls around, it experiences extreme climate changes, swinging between ice-covered and ice-free states and it doesn't warm up and cool down in the same way each time. To solve this celestial puzzle, we're using a simple model to capture the most important physics and explore how factors like how shiny the ice is, how deep the ocean goes, and how quickly the climate changes, can change the story.

Maanasa Raghavan

Humans inhabit nearly every continent today. We live in extreme environments like the Arctic, we eat a range of diets, we have varying disease susceptibilities, we display different physical features. How, where, and when did this biological diversity originate? Who were our ancestors? How did they to move around and make the planet our home? Explore fascinating questions in human evolution with a human geneticist who uses DNA from living and ancient humans to piece together the story of our species. 

Phoebe Rice

Antibiotic resistance genes are often found on "mobile" segments of DNA that can be transferred from one bacterium to another.   I will discuss how this occurs .

Aria Coraor

The structure of DNA and its bound proteins, termed chromatin, influences much of gene expression and regulation in human cells. I use molecular dynamics simulations and Enhanced Sampling methods, combined with Machine Learning, to understand how chromatin is structured across multiple lengthscales.

Nick Feamster

In this talk, I will discuss various challenges faced for the next generation of the Internet, including digital equity, security, censorship, and applications of machine learning to network operations.

Hannah Riley Knight

In Finding Nemo, Dory is portrayed as a ditzy fish with no memory. Later in the movie, we find out that with the right stimulus, Dory can remember things and is an essential part of finding the lost Nemo.

Scientists used to think about certain white blood cells, known as macrophages, as we thought about Dory. We believed they were incapable of remembering previous exposure to pathogens. Just as our understanding of Dory’s capability has changed over time, recent studies revealed that certain molecules can trigger changes in a macrophage that allow it to remember previous exposures.

Only a few molecules are known to trigger this memory, called Trained Immunity, so my project aims to screen thousands of drugs for their role in Trained Immunity. We hope to use these new drugs to improve immune responses to vaccines, cancer, and infections.

Madhu Prakash

Around 1000 different species(bacteria, fungi, protists, and viruses) live in the human gut and makeup what is known as the gut microbiome. What are these organisms? How do they interact with one another? how do they regulate human health and disease? and how can we engineer them to treat gut-related diseases? All of these are important questions that microbiologists are working to answer. Traditional microbiology experiments have been used to answer these questions but are time-consuming, costly, and very limited in the number of parameters that can be tested at a time. But what if we could miniaturize these large-scale experiments to test more parameters at a fraction of the time and cost? One way to do this is to use microfluidics. Microfluidics is a field of engineering that focuses on studying the behavior of fluids and gasses at micro scales to build miniaturized devices. In this talk, we will learn about the human microbiome, and the field of microfluidics and explore how we can use microfluidics to study and engineer the human gut microbiome.

Molly Tallberg

Women are generally underrepresented in the STEM domain, yet the gender gap is more dramatic in some STEM fields (e.g., computer science) than in others (e.g., biology). A similar variation appears in the non-STEM domain: women are well represented in psychology, but not in music composition. A potentially powerful contributor to this variation is the extent to which the field emphasizes the importance of brilliance for success (Leslie, Cimpian et al., 2015). Because women are stereotyped as lacking intellectual ability (Bian et al., 2017), fields that are associated with high intellectual talents may discourage women’s participation (Bian et al., 2018). This presentation will talk about the roots of stereotypes about brilliance in early childhood.

Sonia Hernandez

How do you get to study cancer research? Short answer, there are many paths. I'll share how I got to this step, and some of the progress we've made improving cancer treatments.

Nayana Tiwari

Quantum computing can sound magical and mysterious. This session aims to demystify the topic by providing some insight to practical applications of quantum computing. Time will be included for a student-led discussion - get your questions about quantum computing answered!