Year: 2021

Ripple Effects: How Early Relationships Influence Health

On Wednesday, November 10, the Psychology Department’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee invited their first outside speaker to campus. Dr. Evelyn Mercado is a professor at UMass Amherst in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Her talk “Exploring Relationship Behaviors, Emotions, & Biological Processes that Impact Health Across the Lifespan” drew a large crowd…

New Deep Learning Network to aid Prostate Cancer Discovery

In addition to being one of the common forms of cancer for men, ,prostate cancer is responsible for the second highest number of cancer-related deaths for men across the United States. ,In a recent study, researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard developed a biologically informed deep learning…

The Beauty Behind Mathematics and Communities: An Interview with Professor Moore

Katherine Moore is a visiting assistant professor of mathematics who came to Amherst this year. She received a Ph.D. in mathematics at Dartmouth College and was a postdoc at Wake Forest University. This fall, she is teaching courses in Calculus and Linear Algebra. What did you do before you started teaching here at Amherst, and…

AI and the Future of Your Mind by Dr. Susan Schneider

Dr. Susan Schneider published “Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind” in 2019. On October 19, 2021, she gave an eponymous talk at Amherst College, discussing AI-based brain enhancement at a rate higher than biological evolution and analyzing the merging of human mind and AI from a philosophical perspective. Image above: Hybrid event,…

What Can Spatial Separation of Ribosomes and DNA Tell Us About The Evolution of Eukaryotic Cells?

Where do eukaryotic cells come from? The simple answer is, we do not know. However, Asgard archaea is currently seen as the closest prokaryotic relative of eukaryotes, and recent research has been conducted to explore Asgard archaea on a microscopic level. Eukaryotic Signature Proteins (ESPs) are proteins that differentiate eukaryotes from prokaryotes. Interestingly enough, genomes…

Back in Action: Psychology SURF Presentations

On Friday, September 24, nine students from the psychology department presented their summer research in the Powerhouse to a crowd of students and professors. Topics ranged from prejudice to mental health to child development, and everyone was excited to share their findings. The first poster in the lineup was presented by Nyla Guadalupe ‘23, who…

Reflecting on LIGO SURF

As one of the postdocs who mentored the LIGO SURF program put it, there are five goals to an REU, which are, in order of importance: Safety and health Have fun I learn something My mentors learn something The project A major aim of a summer research internship is to learn what it means to…

A Research Reflection

With one more week left in my internship, I have been spending some time recounting my experiences and thinking about how they have helped me grow as a student, researcher, and person. Research I loved being in a space surrounded by people who were challenging previous assumptions and asking a variety of questions to narrow…

Educated and Enlightened by E. Coli Experiments

The past seven weeks at the Wu Orr Lab have zipped past me so quickly. It feels like just yesterday that we were attending the Boston Bacterial Meeting and setting up our goals for this summer. And although I may not have been able to fully analyze all 32 of my mutant strains before I…

A new kind of astronomical collision!

Still image from a numerical simulation of a black hole / neutron star merger. Image credit: S.V.Chaurasia (Stockholm University), T. Dietrich (Potsdam University and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), N. Fischer, S. Ossokine, H. Pfeiffer (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), ,https://www.ligo.org/detections/NSBH2020/files/BHNS_GW200115.png. Scientists have long predicted that neutron stars and black holes could orbit…