Lauren Rubenstein#THISISWHY Duminda Ranasinghe, a Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry, spoke April 16 in Exley in the fourth event of the Graduate Student Speaker Series. (Photos by Hannah Norman '16.)
Olivia DrakeChristina Othon and Erika Taylor, along with physics graduate student Nimesh Shukla, Lee Chen ’15, Inha Cho ’15 and Erin Cohn ’15, are the co-authors of a paper titled “Sucralose Destabilization of Protein Structure” published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, March 2015. Othon is assistant professor of physics and was PI on the paper. Taylor is assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies. Sucralose is a commonly employed artificial sweetener that behaves very differently than its natural disaccharide counterpart, sucrose, in terms of its interaction with biomolecules. This research suggests that people may need to think about the impact…
Bryan Stascavage '18#THISISWHY In this Q&A, we speak with Peter Blasser, a music graduate student. Q: What was your first experiences with music? When did you decide that music would be your life work? A: I was in elementary school in the 1980s when music programs were still part of the public school curriculum. I remember that those music classes were not very noteworthy at the time. In middle school I took a wood shop class and liked working with the tools. After taking classical civilization classes, I started to triangulate all three — I wanted to work with wood to make ancient Greek…
#THISISWHY For many years, pilots in the Air Force, scientists conducting research with high-powered lasers, and others have struggled to protect their eyes and sensitive equipment from being damaged by intense laser pulses. In many cases, this was achieved by intense power filters, which offered protection, but self-destructed. Now they have a solution, which provides protection without damaging the filters themselves, thanks to a research collaboration between the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and a team of researchers in Wesleyan's Physics Department. The research, led by Tsampikos Kottos, the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Associate Professor of Physics, is included…
The NASA Connecticut Space Grant Consortium awarded two Student Travel Grants on Nov. 11. Each award is worth $1000. Lisa Korn, a graduate student in earth and environmental sciences, will attend the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held March 16-20 in The Woodlands, Texas. Her advisor is Marty Gilmore, chair and professor of earth and environmental sciences and the George I. Seney Professor of Geology. Sam Factor, a BA/MA student in astronomy, will use the grant to attend the American Astronomical Society 223rd Meeting, held Jan 4-8 in Seattle, Wash. Factor's advisor is Meredith Hughes, assistant professor of astronomy. Dilovan Serindag '15, Jesse Lieman-Sifry '15 and Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein '15 also…
During the 2014 Society for Ethnomusicology's 59th Annual Meeting, held Nov. 13-16 in Pittsburgh, Pa., Wesleyan graduate students collaborated to present the first panel dedicated to Taiwanese identity and music. The panel, titled "How Taiwanese Should I Be? Contesting Taiwanese Identities in Local, Regional and Global Contexts," comprised of Ph.D. candidates Joy Lu and Po-wei Weng, and graduate student Ender Terwilliger. Su Zheng, associate professor of music, chaired the panel. Covering Taiwanese opera, Pili Budaixi, and fusion performances, the panel explored the process of identity formation when promoting Taiwanese identity in politically delicate situations domestically and overseas. In addition, Ph.D. candidates…
A study co-authored by Graduate Research Assistant Eleana Makri and two other Wesleyan researchers is a topic of a Oct. 20 article published in Scientific Reports. Due to the ultrahigh-speed and ultrawide-band brought by adopting photons as information carriers, photonic integration has been a long-term pursuit for researchers, which can break the performance bottleneck incurred in modern semiconductor-based electronic integrated circuits. The article states that "recently, Makri theoretically proposed the concept of reflective power limiter based on nonlinear localized modes, where a nonlinear layer was sandwiched by two reflective mirrors, thus increased the device complexity." The report is based on Makri's study, titled "Non-Linear Localized Modes Give Rise…
Tsampikos Kottos and Ali Basiri, a Ph.D. student in physics, are co-authors of a paper titled "Light localization induced by a random imaginary refractive index," published in Physical Review A 90, on Oct. 13, 2014. Kottos is the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Associate Professor of Physics. In the paper, the authors show the emergence of light localization in arrays of coupled optical waveguides with randomness.
Three more graduate students will tentatively speak as part of the series this fall and next spring including Duminda Ranasinghe, a chemistry Ph.D. candidate; Katie Kaus, a molecular biology and biochemistry Ph.D. candidate and Peter Blasser, a graduate student in music. For more information, visit the Graduate Studies website.
Jan Naegele, Gloster Aaron and several Wesleyan researchers are the co-authors of an article titled "Long-Term Seizure Suppression and Optogenetic Analyses of Synaptic Connectivity in Epileptic Mice with Hippocampal Grafts of GABAergic Interneurons," published in the October 2014 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, Issue 34(40): 13492-13504. Naegele is professor of biology, professor of neuroscience and behavior, and director of the Center for Faculty Career Development. Aaron is associate professor of biology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior. The article is co-authored by Diana Lin '15; graduate students Jyoti Gupta and Meghan Van Zandt; recent alumni Elizabeth Litvina BA/MA '11, XiaoTing Zheng '14, Nicholas Woods '13 and…
Biology Ph.D. candidate Jacob Herman and Sonia Sultan, chair and professor of biology, professor of environmental studies, are the co-authors of an article titled "How stable 'should' epigenetic modifications be? Insights from adaptive plasticity and bet hedging," published in Evolution, Issue 68(3), pages 632-43. Herman was the Private Investigator on the paper. The article also was selected by Faculty 1000, a platform for life scientists that helps scientists to discover, discuss and publish research. Epigenetics is the study of ways chemical reactions change the way an organism grows and develops, and the factors that influence them. Epigenetic modifications can be stable…