2013 Team Members
Ru Chen
College: The City College of New York
Looking for a Cancer Cure
Long before Ru Chen was born in a rural Fujian province in China, her grandfather was the area's only physician, although ignorance and tradition often led his patients to distrust his medical advice.
Every night before bed, "grandfather would always light a candle, put on his glasses and read me one page of his herbal handbook" with its beautiful illustrations of plants, Chen wrote in her application for a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Scholarship.
At age 4, Chen learned t...>>
Dane Christie
College: The City College of New York
Looking at the Light
There's a long way between a pitcher's mound in the Dominican Republic and a research lab at Princeton University, but Dane Christie is traveling it as smoothly as the balls he once hurled for a Toronto Bluejays minor league team.
And, thanks to a $126,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded in 2013, Christie is ahead in the count toward a doctorate in chemical engineering. The scholarship is the most prestigious award for graduate students in the science, techno...>>
Nikoleta Despodova
College: John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Putting Rape Cases on Trial
Nearly 25 percent of women and 7.6 percent of men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner or acquaintance, according to an often-cited national study in 2000. Women account for 85 percent of the victims of intimate-partner violence, men only 15 percent. Among same-sex couples, 11 percent of lesbians and 15 percent of gay men reported violence by a partner, a 2003 study found, but other researchers contend that the rate is far higher.
So what happens when these cases arri...>>
Aaron Dolor
College: Hunter College
Using Cell Fats As a Learning Tool
There's a layer of fat that separates the interior of the cell from its environment. Its specialized zwitterionic fats, which have positive and negative electrical charges at different locations, play a critical role in determining whether molecules can get in or out of the cell, but it's not clear precisely what mechanism they use.
Aaron Dolor (Hunter College, B.A. magna cum laude in biochemistry, minor in linguistics, 2012) won a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowshi...>>
Meryl Horn
College: Hunter College
Putting Things in Context
Context alone can bring back memories. Walking through a sunny park might make you think of a joyous summertime picnic. On the other hand, a movie with a happy scene of companionable drinking in a bar might trigger a recovering alcoholic to crave a drink.
"One of the last frontiers in all of biology is uncovering which neural components make up a memory," says Meryl Horn (Hunter College, B.A. in biology, 2012). Now in a doctoral program at the University of California-San Francisco, she int...>>
Julius Edson
College: The City College of New York
Fighting Deadly Bacteria
The news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March 2013 was chilling: Deadly infections by bacteria that are immune to even the strongest antibiotics are rising, and there is only a "limited window of opportunity" to stop them.
CDC director Thomas R. Frieden called these "nightmare bacteria" that might transfer their drug resistance to other bacteria.
The case in point was carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, benign in the human gut, but potentially deadly if it ente...>>
Vadricka Etienne
College: CUNY Graduate Center
A New Take on Immigration
America, it is famously said, is a land of immigrants. The Pew Hispanic Center reported recently that the nation's immigrant population reached a record 40.4 million in 2011, legal and illegal. Their share of the population is less than the peak of just under 15 percent during the flood of immigration between 1890 and 1920.
Vadricka Etienne, a second-year doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, intends to explore whether a small slice of these immigrants - the approximately 776,000 U.S...>>
Jasmine Hatcher
College: Queens College
The Elements of Research
The radioactive element technetium-99 is, proverbially, a blessing and a curse. It exists in two forms. One, 99mTc , is the radionuclide most commonly used to image the body in nuclear medicine scans.
The other, 99Tc, sits in old waste tanks as a byproduct of uranium and plutonium fission from nuclear weapons manufacturing in the 1940s and1950s. Those potentially leaky storage tanks threaten to contaminate water and the food chain. With a radioactive half-life of 212,000 years, 99Tc poses a ...>>
Ben Hixon
College: Hunter College
Just the Facts, Ma'am
Suppose you're walking down the street, experience a pang of hunger and decide that only vegetarian sushi will satisfy you. Your smartphone pulls up 1,000 reviews. How can you find the nearest one with good service, affordable prices and, above all, great vegetarian sushi?
"Open IE, or open information extraction," says Ben Hixon (Hunter College, B.A. in computer science, 2012). Now in a University of Washington doctoral program, Hixon won a $126,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Res...>>
Ekaterina Larina
College: Brooklyn College
Going Sea Deep
Back in the Maastrichtian Age - before Earth's last mass extinction some 65.5 million years ago - ammonites were as dominant in the sea as dinosaurs were on land. These long-extinct creatures (think of an octopus with a shell) still hold secrets, and Ekaterina Larina intends to reveal them.
Larina (Brooklyn College, B.S. in geology, 2012), now in the geology master's program at Brooklyn College, won a 2013 three-year National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to seek proof abou...>>
Sarah Ita Levitan
College: Brooklyn College
Making Autism Compute
With an estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Americans having an autism spectrum disorder and the prevalence of autism believed to have risen to 1 in 88 births, there needs to be a reliable method of diagnosis so that young children can get the early intervention that will help them to live full lives.
Sarah Ita Levitan (Brooklyn College, B.S. in computer science, 2013) hopes to develop an objective, computer-based system that would analyze children's speech, looking for patterns that would id...>>
Philip Liu
College: Macaulay Honors College | The City College of New York
A Large 'Small' Project
Moore's Law predicts that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits will double every year (later revised to 18 months), and it has held true ever since Intel cofounder Gordon Moore announced it in 1965.
But as microelectronics researchers try to pack more and more circuits into increasingly tiny packages, they're colliding with the peculiar physics that take place on the nanoscale. When things get exceedingly small, the risk of sho...>>
Christopher J. Parisano
College: Macaulay Honors College | Queens College
Digging Into Things
As a child, Christopher Parisano thought of Willets Point, Queens - that warren of rutted streets packed with auto-repair and -salvage shops near where the Mets play ball - as the place where his father and grandfather worked magic on cars, back when cars were the center of a boy's vision of industrial modernity.
However, he says, "when I grew large enough to peer inside a car's engine compartment, my father sharply announced that I would find no future there, as he once did."
And yet, in a r...>>
Aleksey Ruditskiy
College: Macaulay Honors College | The City College of New York
Putting the Sci-Fi in Science
It sounds like science fiction: The U.S. Army charging across the battlefield, wearing body armor that makes it invisible to the enemy. Yet Aleksey Ruditskiy says that might be possible with the right assembly of nanocrystals and the presence of an electrical field.
"We all like science fiction around here," says Ruditskiy (Macaulay Honors College at City College of New York, B.E. in chemical engineering, 2012), who is working toward a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Georgia Institute of T...>>
Lukman Solola
College: Brooklyn College
Elementary Exploration
Dysprosium, europium, neodymium, terbium, yttrium: The names of these rare-earth elements may not be familiar, but they are in critically short supply when they are needed to produce cellphones, electronic equipment and clean energy products like wind turbines, electric vehicles, photovoltaic thin-film solar cells and fluorescent lights.
Despite the term "rare earths," these and a dozen similar metallic elements actually are not rare. Some are as common as copper. But typically they are disp...>>
Jan Dominik Stepinski
College: Macaulay Honors College | The City College of New York
Conducting Air-Tight Research
Suppose you serve a great stew at a dinner party. Will your guests be able to tease out every ingredient that made it so tasty? That's the problem that scientists face in studying the thousands of ingredients in the atmosphere.
In his application for a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Jan Stepinski (Macaulay Honors College at City College, B.E. in environmental engineering, 2013) proposed using the data-crunching, mathematical process of inversion to identify co...>>
Maria Louisa Strangas
College: CUNY Graduate Center
Lizard Lessons
When she graduated from East Lansing High School, Maria Louisa Strangas gave this as her senior quote, drawn from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip: "If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life."
Eight years later, as a CUNY Graduate Center doctoral student, she is heading into the Brazilian forests to study how temperature patterns have affected the evolution of some rare lizards.
Armed with a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Res...>>
Tayyaba Toseef
College: Hunter College
Seeking a Cure for MS
Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the protective myelin sheath surrounding nerves is destroyed, which severely limits normal nerve function and causes cognitive and motor defects. Myelin is like the insulation surrounding electric wires; if it's destroyed, the wires can't function properly.
Tayyaba Toseef, a master's student at Hunter College, is pursuing basic science research that could point the way toward therapies that may reverse the degenerative process in MS patients and regro...>>
Jake V. Vaynshteyn
College: The City College of New York
Taking on the Brain
The cerebral cortex - the outermost layer of neural tissue on the brain that plays a modulatory role in memory, perception, attention, thought, language and consciousness - may represent the pinnacle of engineering. It's also the launching pad for a million questions.
"How does the cingulate cortex - a portion of the cerebral cortex that is involved with forming and processing emotion, as well as learning and memory - affect the reward circuit, for example," asks Jake V. Vaynshteyn (City Co...>>
Jamar Whaley
College: Queens College
Turning Last Place Into First
Jamar Whaley hasn't had it easy. Not when he quit Stuyvesant High School because he was unprepared. Not when he talked his way into a networking job without a GED. Not when he fired himself, rather than laying off a subordinate who needed work more. Not when he clawed his way into Queens College after rescuing a crack-addicted friend. Not when Teach for America sent him to a violent Houston middle school.
And not now, when at age 36 Whaley (Queens College, B.A. magna cum laude in psychology,...>>
Limited Edition!
2013 All-Star Team
"CUNY students continue to win the nation's most prestigious awards, 'coached' by our world-class faculty."
— Matthew Goldstein, Chancellor