“Gimme the Light”: Black Self-Representation through Music Videos is a history of music videos by black artists and producers from the late 1970s through the early twenty-first century. The study examines music video production and cultural representation of blacks by considering the technological and aesthetic significance of the genre. One central question is: How and why does the medium of video become an important tool for black cultural producers to experiment with visual signs of blackness (...)
General Research
SAS - American Studies
Media , Performance , Popular culture , Race and ethnicity (...)
This project will be devoted to an exploration of modern methods in machine learning, a field at the interface of computer science and statistics. Specifically, we are interested in applying these methods to biological data sets that our group has already produced and studied. An example of such a project would be methods for learning time-varying networks from data, and applying them to a time course of microarray gene expression data from cells in response to drug doses.
This project will be (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - CCS - BIOMAPS, SAS - Computer Science, SAS - (...)
Bioinformatics, Computational Molecular Biology, Computer (...)
Literary thought—both theory and criticism—is the prerequisite for situating literature and its function in a society, especially one that viewed letters as its preeminent civilizing enterprise. Over the course of early and medieval Chinese history, the character wen 文came to stand for the dynastic enterprise defined as a civilization of culture, scholarship and literature. The arc and substance of a literary tradition are not merely, or even mostly, penned by authors, but are no less equally inscribed (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - Asian Languages and Cultures
Literature
Conservation conflicts have increased in size and number throughout the world. These conflicts include fights over land and protected areas; disputes over rights to access goods like forests and water; and 'illegal' hunting and poaching of endangered or protected species. This project involves analyzing land, forest and wildlife conflicts in the country of Vietnam (and related countries as producers and consumers of exported and imported wildlife goods that move through Vietnam).
This project (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SEBS - Human Ecology
Anthropology, Conservation , Environmental Policy, (...)
Duckweed has the remarkable ability to grow on wastewater streams all over the world. As the fastest growing flowering plants in the world, these tiny aquatic species has the potential to be the feedstock-of-choice to economically produce biomass via sunlight and wastewater, while minimal impact on land use will be expected. Working with two wastewater sources in New Jersey, a nursery and a municipal wastewater treatment plan, we aim to create a demonstration pipeline to produce biofuels from (...)
General Research
SEBS - Plant Biology and Pathology
Biological Sciences, Energy Systems and Engineering, (...)
Spinal cord injury (SCI) results in progressive destruction of spinal cord tissue. Controlling inflammation, which is amplified within the first several post-injury days, has become a critical objective in controlling SCI damage. Recent studies have attributed the degenerative inflammatory cascade to the activation of the proinflammatory M1 macrophage subpopulation, and the absence of the M2 alternative anti-inflammatory subpopulation. An expanding body of evidence suggests that transplanted mesenchymal (...)
General Research
Engn - Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering, Medicine, Neuroscience
Environmental protests were once rare in Vietnam, as it is a politically closed system. However, in the past 5 years, protests against pollution, deforestation, land use, overexploitation of minerals, and other problems have increased, indicating that citizens feel more empowered to protest against government actions than ever before. This project involves gathering data from media reports on environmental protests in Vietnam since 2005.
This project will systematically assess through newspaper (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SEBS - Human Ecology
Anthropology, Conservation , Environmental Policy, (...)
Due to its high accuracy, modeling of materials properties from quantum mechanical first-principles methods has proven to be very successful. These sophisticated methods, which in essence solve the Schrodinger wave equation for electrons in a solid, are now in the form of large and in some cases freely available computer codes. We use these codes to investigate electronic and catalytic properties of transition metal dichalcogenides which can potentially be used as catalysts for hydrogen evolution (...)
General Research
Engn - Materials Science and Engineering, Engn - Mechanical (...)
Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, (...)
Ocean-exposed sandy beaches are considered ecosystems with low structural complexity and apparent homogeneity, leading to low taxonomic and functional diversity. However, beaches receive nutrient subsidies from both marine and terrestrial resources, thus potentially support a diverse community of vertebrate scavengers. This project will use remote camera traps to survey ocean beaches throughout New Jersey to determine the scavenger community composition in relation to landscape configuration.
Life Sciences Alliance SURF
SEBS - Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources
Ecology
Many, indeed most, foods contain luminescent compounds, molecules that absorb UV or visible light and remit light of a longer wavelength (lower energy). These compounds include both natural (chlorophyll) and artificial (red dye # 3) colors, flavors (vanillin), vitamins (riboflavine), and many others. Luminescence, both prompt fluorescence and delayed phosphorescence, from molecules is often very sensitive to the local chemical and physical properties of the liquid or solid matrix in which the (...)
General Research
SEBS - Food Science
Biochemistry, Food Science , Biophysics
Few scholars have explored the religious landscape of medieval China (200-1000 CE). China was then at a crossroad where foreign religions met native traditions. The result was the appearance and development of many new religious ideas and practices. Some of them can still be observed in contemporary Chinese communities; but many more have been forgotten. My work as a historian of culture is to recover and reconstruct these ideas and practices in an effort to study the people and the society that (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - Asian Languages and Cultures
History, Religion
Memoirs of the Sex Trade: A Cultural History of Prostitution is a study of how workers in the sex trade, both prostitutes and madams, in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century United States publicly represent themselves, including their response to vice regulation, and the relationship that this representation bears to the identity of straight women in their society. Too much of what we know about prostitution comes exclusively from the point of view of those who view prostitution only (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - American Studies
American Ethnic Studies, Gender , History, Interdisciplinary (...)
Today, most newly fabricated materials are nanostructured. There are many interfaces in such materials and the understanding of the electronic properties near the interface helps to assess the effect of these nanostructures on the properties of materials. Our interest is in the electronic and thermoelectric properties, and we would like to model how electrons behave near an interface between two different (or similar) materials, and how this behavior affect materials properties such as electrical (...)
General Research
Engn - Materials Science and Engineering, Engn - Mechanical (...)
Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, (...)
We have a general interest in naturally-occurring or investigator-designed nanoscale vesicles that act as transporters for delivery of molecules to cells. In gram negative bacteria, outer membrane vesicles (OMV) that bud off of the bacterial surface have been implicated in such activities as horizontal gene transfer, the transport of virulence factors and the development of biofilms in human diseases such as cystic fibrosis. In eukaryotes, secreted exosome vesicles have recently been shown to (...)
General Research
SEBS - Plant Biology and Pathology
Bacteria , Biochemistry, Biological Sciences, Biomedical (...)
Archival research for a multi-volume annotated edition on EMMY HENNINGS' (1885-1948) collected poems and prose.
The annotated and critical edition reconstructs of one of the most exciting yet underestimated women writers of 20th century German literature.
Throughout Dada historiography it has been claimed that women did not play any crucial role in this movement and that Dada was an inherently male movement. On early vanguard stages before the First World War, Emmy Hennings embodied and (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - Germanic, Russian & E. European Lang & (...)
Germanics
Ferroelectric (FE) materials exhibit a characteristic transition temperature below which their broken inversion symmetry leads to a spontaneous electrical polarization. Because of their low cost and applicability to nonvolatile high-density data storage, FEs have been utilized for thin film memory devices. Often, the functionality of FE devices is compromised by charge conduction, i.e., leakage current, which is one of the technical bottlenecks for their practical application. However, remarkable (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - Physics & Astronomy
Nanotechnology , Physics
The Hultzsch group is interested in the development and application of transition metal-based catalysts for atom-economical (= green) and efficient reactions that allow rapid access to potentially biologically active target molecules starting from simple and inexpensive precursors. One of such reactions, the so-called hydroamination, involves the addition of amine N-H functionalities to unsaturated carbon-carbon bonds, generating pharmacologically important nitrogen-containing molecules in a most (...)
General Research
SAS - Chemistry & Chemical Biology
Chemistry
In this twin study, we are investigating how genetic factors and various prenatal and postnatal environment factors affect linguistic and nonlinguistic development. Over the course of the project, students will learn how to collect and analyze data and to perform literature searches. Armed with this knowledge, the student will investigate how genetic and/or specific environmental factors affect a particular aspect of development. Examples of projects conducted by former undergraduate students (...)
General Research
SAS - Center for Cognitive Sciences, SAS - Psychology
Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, Genetics, (...)
I’m currently researching the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, a collection of over 50,000 video interviews with survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust. Rutgers is one of several dozen institutions worldwide that have online access to the full collection. I’m examining different ways that these interviews both facilitate and shape the ways that survivors tell their life stories, especially the impact of video as a medium for documenting these recollections. In addition, I’m (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - Jewish Studies
Holocaust , Media
This project focuses on German Jewish refugees who fled Germany between 1933 and 1941, and resettled in the U.S. before the war’s end. The people who are the subjects of my inquiry escaped Europe before the Nazis began the mass deportations and implemented the Final Solution. Although many public domain definitions of “Holocaust survivor” include these refugees under their rubric, often they refuse the term “survivor” and prefer instead to think of themselves as immigrants. I analyze 64 largely (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
A number of projects are available in our Lab:
Mentor:
Characterization of Photosynthetic Water Oxidation Efficiency in the Hydrogen-Producing Green Alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
Optimizing primary photosynthetic productivity is a key step in applying aquatic microbial oxygenic phototrophs (AMOPs) to bio-energy solutions. In this project, the student will work with a graduate student mentor to characterize the efficiency of photosynthetic water oxidation in strains of the green alga Chlamydomonas (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
Biochemistry, Biological Sciences, Biology, Cell & (...)
The project title outlines the purpose and "question" of the research: how to utilize research in Chinese dialects and the writing system to undertake the study of the Chinese language and literature. This project is part of the advisor's ongoing effort to gather and analyze published data on Chinese dialects, the history of Chinese verse, and the development of Chinese script, and to translate relevant Chinese sources in the study of Chinese language history, dialect relationships, the interplay (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - Asian Languages and Cultures
Language , Linguistics, Literature
The autophagy-lysosomal pathway is essential for neuronal homeostasis, and defects within this pathway have been directly linked to a growing number of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A key neuropathological feature of AD is cerebral accumulation of a 4-kDa peptide, termed amyloid β-peptide (Aβ), which is the principle component of senile plaques. Autophagy-lysosomal dysfunction is one of the main cellular defects contributing to the onset and progression of AD. Proper (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
SAS - DLS - Cell Biology and Neuroscience
Cell & Molecular Biology, Neuroscience
Image registration aims to obtain the best possible spatial correspondence between misaligned datasets. Landmark-based registration involves matching corresponding landmark points for two images. Previous research revealed that such landmark driven schemes are sensitive to the numbers and locations of landmarks. Major work has been done to compute landmark localization through a certain criterion. We have extracted a collection of landmarks using thousands of iterative simulations on a synthetic (...)
Aresty Research Assistant
Engn - Biomedical Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the fundamental theory of the strong force, predicts the liberation of quarks and gluons to create a new phase of matter, the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). During the last 10 years, experiments performed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) tested this prediction and explored the properties of this novel form of matter. While the naive interpretations of QCD calculations suggested that this QGP produced at RHIC should behave like a dilute gas, the experimental (...)
General Research
SAS - Physics & Astronomy
Physics
