Visiting Student Researcher Fellowships

California’s mining and industrial history have led to an excessive build-up of mercury in the Bay Area. As one of the top ten pollutants of the world, this toxic heavy metal has troubling implications for human and environmental health. Although mercury is relatively well studied in aquatic ecosystems, less work has focused on terrestrial animals. However, we know that soil organisms, such as earthworms, accumulate mercury by consuming decaying plant and animal materials in the ground.

I intend to fill the lack of systematic studies concerning the similar trajectories, both literary and biographic, of the Italian author Curzio Malaparte and the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Unlike the surface currents that have been extensively studied thanks to satellite observations, the oceanic deep circulation is poorly known. In the tropics, observational cruises have revealed the presence of energetic currents, which are able to transport and mix water masses and their biogeochemical properties, such as the oxygen content.

Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter and is by far the most abundant one in the universe. It is ionized gas and has several applications including space travel and more precisely space propulsion. While visiting the Stanford Plasma Physics Laboratory under the supervision of Professor Mark Cappelli, I will continue an ongoing project by operating a Hall thruster with air. This thruster displaces electron with a magnetic field to ionize the air creating a plasma. This formed air plasma is finally accelerated by an electric field.

B and T cell lymphomas are common cancers of the immune system. Although diverse, theses cancers characteristically harbor mutations and genomic aberrations that are solely found in malignant cells. The identification and characterization of these genomic aberrations is a major challenge for designing novel targeted therapies against cancers. Typically cells of the immune system develop via a process that causes intentional breaks in DNA – double strand breaks (DSBs).

This 
is 
a comparative 
cultural
 project 
that
 examines 
the
 evolvement
 of 
Paris
 in to
 the 
capital 
of
 the 
modern
 world 
in 
the
 nineteenth
 and
 twentieth 
centuries,
 especially
 the 
city's
 treatment
 of
 its 
historic
heritage 
in 
light
 of
 modernization:
 museums,
 monuments,
 and
 vernacular
 districts.

This study is relating to the treatment of bank failure in a comparative perspective. As banking institutions manage their business globally, the treatment of their failure may not be ended in one single jurisdiction.

As one of the category of World Heritage, as the intervention between human and nature, cultural landscape has complicated geography and cultural background; under the influence of the socio-economic and political changes, evolving is one of the important features of cultural landscape, so the controversy and contradictions are always exist during the planning and management of site, such as the relocation of indigenous people, excessive tourism development, the loss of intangible cultural heritage, etc.

My research aims to explain the reasons and conditions of the renewal of the aesthetic reflection on the concept of “Imagination” in interwar France. Considering the different theories of imagination elaborated by authors such as Gaston Bachelard, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Caillois, and Armand Petitjean and their mutual relations, I wish to analyze the role of this complex and multifaceted notion in the cultural context of the period.

What makes individuals different? How and when do differences appear during early embryogenesis? Can we identify the sources of these differences, from random processes to precise mechanisms? These classical questions can be re-explored based on the quantitative reconstruction of multi scale dynamics from in vivo and in toto 4D images of developing model organisms (e.g. sea urchin, zebrafish…).