2012 Team Members
Deborah Opeyemi Ayeni
College: The City College of New York
A Personal Quest To Quell Cancer
From the time her grandmother died of breast cancer in Nigeria, Deborah Opeyemi Ayeni has been “very curious about cancer,’ hoping “to understand how it develops, progresses and moves in the body.”
Now, with a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Ayeni (City College, 2011) will continue probing cancer-causing genes in her doctoral program in experimental pathology at the Yale School of Medicine. Ultimately, she says, she will look for “ways of interfering with cancer...>>
Vivienne Francesca Baldassare
College: Hunter College
Exploring the Universe
Every so often, one galaxy collides with another. In any billion years, about 10 percent of fairly bright galaxies are involved in mergers of, well, cosmic proportions. For example, for hundreds of millions of years, our own Milky Way Galaxy has been nibbling at the smaller Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, which intersects the plane of the Milky Way at an angle.
Vivienne Baldassare (Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, 2012) wonders whether there's a relationship between collisions...>>
Theresa Lynn Carranza-Fulmer
College: The City College of New York
Feeling the Pull of the Earth
Technology has put smartphones in our pockets, GPS in our cars and worldwide video conferencing in our computers. Most of us never think how these modern miracles work – or how fragile is the satellite infrastructure that they rely upon. A blast of solar wind – a stream of charged particles routinely ejected by the sun – could wreak havoc with Earth’s magnetosphere and fry the satellites that orbit within it.
That’s a real-world implication of the basic research that Theresa Lynn Carranza-Ful...>>
Charlie Corredor
College: The City College of New York
Big Ideas at the Nano Level
Nanotechnology is revolutionizing products, from self-cleaning windows to dazzling computer displays, from wrinkle creams to wrinkle-free shirts.
Yet as these products come on the market – some 1,300 in 2008 and far more now – there has been comparatively little attention paid to the potential hazards posed by nanomaterials, which are about the size of proteins and far smaller than the cells in your body.
Discovering how they behave when they’re released in the environment (intentionally or ...>>
Zvi Hershel Fishman
College: The City College of New York
Opening a Window to the Brain
“Consciousness is perhaps the most important unanswered question in science,” says Zvi Hershel Fishman – Hershy to his friends – “and that’s the reason I got into neuroscience. What is it in the brain that makes us able to be aware of things, to see colors, to experience sensations?”
Fishman (City College biology BS, 2010) seeks a path to that unanswered question in his doctoral research at Columbia University. He’ll be supported with a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fell...>>
Andrew Goldklank Fulmer
College: CUNY Graduate Center
Counting All His Chickadees
Lots of animals hide food to eat later, but many won’t do so if another animal is watching. After all, that other animal might try to steal the food. A chickadee, however, may cache food in the presence of another chickadee.
“Do chickadees develop trusting relationships that supersede normal anti-theft behavior?” asks Andrew Goldklank Fulmer, a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center. “And, if so, at what stages of development do they have to meet the other birds for that to happen? Doe...>>
Belen Carolina Guerra-Carrillo
College: Baruch College
Brain Changer
What physically happens in the brain when people learn and how do those changes affect academic performance?
Those are among the questions that Belén Carolina Guerra-Carrillo (Baruch, BA in psychology, 2010) intends to explore in a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley that she will start in the fall.
She’s undertaking this research with the support of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the most prestigious award that a graduate student in the S...>>
Jaeseung Hahn
College: The City College of New York
Big Ideas on the Nano Level
As an undergraduate, Jaeseung Hahn (Macaulay Honors College at City College, BE in biomedical engineering, 2012) fabricated smart nanoparticles that could bind to cancer cells, enabling them to be seen via an imaging technique called immuno-surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy. In Raman spectroscopy, a laser shined on a substance generates a unique spectrum of photons, sort of the way a prism turns sunlight into a rainbow.
Heading to Harvard-MIT’s joint doctoral program in medical engineering ...>>
Kirk Donald Haltaufderhyde
College: York College
Skin-Deep Research
After rotating through several labs, looking for the best fit as he began his predoctoral research at Brown University, Kirk Haltaufderhyde (York College, BS in biotechnology, 2011) became intrigued with research that is probing the role of photoreceptors in the skin.
Now, he’ll get to explore the implications of light sensitivity in skin cells with the support of a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM...>>
Christopher Donald Hue
College: The City College of New York
Breaking the Brain Barrier
Since the wars began in Iraq and Afghanistan, the news has been filled with stories about soldiers suffering traumatic brain injuries, which often are caused by improvised explosive devices. The Department of Defense last year estimated 50,000 cases, the Pentagon estimated 115,000 and the RAND Corp. reported that the count could be as high as 400,000.
Christopher Donald Hue (Macaulay Honors College at City College, BE in biomedical engineering, 2008) is conducting research that may lead to a f...>>
Jemila Caplan Kester
College: The City College of New York
Unraveling the Mysteries of TB
Jemila Caplan Kester (City College, BS in biology, summa cum laude 2010) enrolled at Harvard University’s School of Public Health hoping to accomplish two things: “First, to work on a globally relevant pathogen and, second, to do really cool biology.”
Reaching those twin goals – with tuberculosis in her sights – has become easier, thanks to a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in the STEM disciplines (science, t...>>
Stephen Ma
College: The City College of New York
Looking for an Unbreakable Breakthrough
Plastics. Strong and versatile, these products are the backbone, heart and lungs of countless devices that make our modern world function. But when these marvels of covalently bonded polymers break, for the most part they’re finished. Wouldn’t it be great if they could be made self-healing? And wouldn’t it be better still if you could repair breaks – even stress fractures too small to be seen with the naked eye – just by shining a light on them?
“That’s the eventual project I’m heading towar...>>
Carolina Salguero
College: Hunter College
Taking the H (Harm) Out of HIV
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a single strand of trouble. A bundle of viral RNA invades host cells, hijacks the cells’ machinery to copy itself and assembles new viral particles to invade other cells. Left unchecked, HIV is a death sentence. Drugs can prevent it from developing into full-blown AIDS, but the virus survives, ever waiting for the chance to emerge and wreak havoc.
Carolina Salguero (Hunter College, BA in biochemistry, minor in economics, 2011), now a doctoral student...>>
Jimena Santillan
College: Hunter College
Paying Attention
Next time you’re in a crowded restaurant, notice how you are able to choose to focus only on your dinner companion’s banter and ignore the chatter of the couple to your left or the waiter taking an order to your right. Blotting out everything that’s irrelevant is called selective attention, and most of us can do it without having to think about it.
What happens in the brain’s neurons that allow this to happen? And can anything – such as bilingualism – enhance this ability?
Jimena Santillan ...>>
Christie Anne Sukhdeo
College: The City College of New York
On the Wings of Butterflies
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough,” the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote some 90 years ago. The butterfly may still have time enough, but do humanity and the ecosystem that people have so disrupted?
Christie Anne Sukhdeo (City College, B.S. in biology 2011) won a 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship by proposing to look at how the butterflies and birds, which pollinate Colombian coffee and cocoa crops, reveal the impact on biodive...>>
Vincent Xue
College: Hunter College
Making Sure Research Computes
Suppose you were trying to determine the genes that code for the proteins that regulate the body’s response to hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, in solid tumors. (You’d be doing that because cancer can create oxygen-starved areas in tumors, and most solid tumors are more resilient to oxygen deprivation than healthy organs. The body’s response to hypoxia thus can contribute to malignancy and offer a pathway to treatment; turn off the tumor cells’ ability to adapt to hypoxia and you could kill th...>>
Limited Edition!
2012 All-Star Team
"CUNY students continue to win the nation's most prestigious awards, 'coached' by our world-class faculty."
— Matthew Goldstein, Chancellor