COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH DAY

Milgram’s small-world experiments provided evidence for six degrees of separation, only a chain of five contacts separates any two random people. In theory, this small-world phenomenon is prevalent from a network structure perspective. However, empirical evidence shows that successful message chains are occasional, and the length of message chains are... View the poster.

Building design and operation impact the accumulation and survival of microorganisms in indoor spaces. These microorganisms, together referred to as the indoor microbiome, have implications for human health and well being. However, the relative importance of factors like architecture compared to, e.g., human occupancy, remains unclear. This study aimed to... View the poster.

Regardless of how it may seem at times, the President of the United States is not in charge of all the major decisions made by the government. The laws that we must adhere to are made, formed, and passed by Congress which is composed of the House of Representatives and... View the poster.

Contagion processes arise broadly in the social and biological sciences, manifested as, for example the spread of infectious and the diffusion of innovations. Depending on the network structure, the transmission dynamics can have different. However, when the structure is too complex (e.g. multipartite networks), understanding the properties of the network... View the poster.

The advent of next-generation sequencing has made it increasingly feasible to survey microbes in situ, including inside buildings where many people spend extended periods of time. Microbes in buildings, and specifically in dust, are linked to various health outcomes, and the amount of antimicrobial chemicals in dust is associated to... View the poster.

It is well documented that an individual’s ability to know who knows whom in their network has positive benefits in various facets of professional life. But people vary in their network acuity - that is, their ability to accurately assess who knows whom in their network. This poster seeks to... View the poster.

A medical prescription is a set of health care instructions that govern the plan of care for an individual patient; it includes orders for drug therapy, diet, clinical assessment, laboratory testing, and more. Clinicians have long used algorithmic thinking to describe and implement these prescriptions but without the benefit of... View the poster.

Three-dimensional imaging techniques have been widely used in both industry and academia. Time-of-flight (ToF) sensors offer a promising method of 3D imaging due to compact size and slow complexity. However, state-of-the-art ToF sensors only have depth resolutions of centimeters due to limitations in the modulation frequencies that can be used.... View the poster.

Investigating the drug response at the transcriptional level is powerful for understanding the mechanism of drug adverse effects, elucidating inter-individual drug response variability and developing personalized therapies. However, drug perturbation experiments are limited to immortal cell lines which do not reflect the true physiology and gene expression of the liver,... View the poster.

After stroke, motor recovery usually occurs with functional changes in the sensorimotor network rather than healing damaged brain areas. Clinical assessments and structural brain imaging techniques (CT/MRI) provide an overview of stroke severity and anatomical damages but cannot reveal the dynamic changes of brain function. Electroencephalography (EEG) as a non-invasive... View the poster.

High throughput single cell transcriptomics is a powerful tool for unbiased marker-free discovery of the new cell types and activation states. This process involves reverse transcribing RNA using beads containing oligonucleotide bar codes to perform whole genome amplification such that a barcoded cDNA library is produced. This library can then... View the poster.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a complex genetic disorder characterized by hyperandrogenism, chronic anovulation, and polycystic ovarian morphology. PCOS affects up to 15% of premenopausal women worldwide, is the leading cause of anovulatory infertility, and is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes. A number of susceptibility loci have... View the poster.

The ribosome, a 2.5-MDa molecular machine that polymerizes α-amino acids into proteins, is the catalytic workhorse of the translation apparatus. The catalytic capacity of the translation machinery has attracted extensive efforts to repurpose it for novel functions. One key idea is that the natural translation machinery can be harnessed to... View the poster.

Genetic instability is one of the hallmarks of cancer. Neoplastic cells accumulate somatic mutations in their genomes, resulting in aberrant homeostasis, cancer cell survival, and proliferation. Different genetic instability processes result in distinct non-random patterns of DNA mutations, also known as mutational signatures. The interest in the identification of mutational... View the poster.

Numerical simulations have shown that black holes (BHs) have significant influence on the evolution of globular clusters (GCs), and therefore shape their observational features. Recently, a BH-main sequence star (MS) binary system has been observed in the Milky Way GC NGC 3201. Our group uses Cluster Monte Carlo (CMC) code... View the poster.

Seismic waves from large-magnitude earthquakes sometime trigger small secondary earthquakes or tectonic tremor. These secondary signals are important to observe and study because their occurrence reflects on the state of stress of the subsurface, which is important for hazard assessment. Here we first report on how individual inspection by a... View the poster.

Poor air quality causes 2 to 4 million premature deaths per year globally. Individual high-impact events, like Beijing’s January 2013 “airpocalypse,” have drawn significant attention, as they have demonstrated that short-lived air quality events can have outsized effects on public health and economic vitality. Poor air quality events are the... View the poster.

ESA and NASA are moving forward with plans to launch LISA around 2030. With data from the Illustris large-scale cosmological simulation, we provide analysis of LISA detection rates accompanied by characterization of the merging massive black holes and their host galaxies. Massive black holes of total mass are the main... View the poster.

The search for life beyond Earth is one of the big questions in the modern science community, and a primary motivation behind a range of NASA's ground-based and space-bourne missions. In the near future, the James Webb Space Telescope, LUVOIR, and HabEx will characterize the atmospheres of nearby Earth-like exoplanets.... View the poster.

Air pollution increases mortality risk up to 18 percent due to cardiovascular causes. Poor air quality occurs more when meteorological components prevent the dispersal of pollutants in the lower atmosphere. The atmospheric and hydrological patterns change as global warming alters the pattern of circulations seasonally. The purpose of this study... View the poster.

Recent discoveries of black hole (BH) candidates in galactic and extragalactic globular clusters (GCs) have ignited interest in understanding how BHs dynamically evolve in a GC and the number of BHs (NBH) that may still be retained by today's GCs. Numerical models show that even if stellar-mass BHs are retained... View the poster.

The distribution of tsunami amplitudes in the open ocean is controlled by fault geometry and ocean depth -- or, bathymetry. Forecasting tsunami amplitudes at the coastlines by means of simulation of propagation -- especially in large grids -- is time-consuming. Therefore, on one hand, it is of interest to eliminate... View the poster.

Hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation have proven to be incredibly useful tools in understanding the nature of star formation. Many modern simulations have identified the importance of and implemented new and powerful schemes for including the stellar feedback processes that regulate star formation, such as the FIRE simulations. The FIRE... View the poster.

Developmental dyslexia cannot currently be diagnosed until a child has failed to learn to read as expected. Researchers have sought to find neural measures that may help predict a child’s later reading ability. One of these measures is the mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related potential (ERP) component elicited by an... View the poster.

Objectives: Poor infant health is associated with lower wellbeing later in life. Food insecurity has been associated with higher rates of some morbidities in young children. However, this relationship has not been well studied in infants younger than six months or in Kenya. Thus, we sought to determine the relationship... View the poster.

The sexual network topology of individuals and their communities may affect the spread of infectious disease both within and across specific populations. To better understand this process, we collected ego-centric data on the personal sexual networks of 175 young men who have sex with men. Respondents were asked to nominate... View the poster.

In an environment with limited time and resources, why do some legislators repeatedly sponsoring the same bills that never pass? Are they only appealing to constituents or lobbyists, or do they reintroduce legislation for strategic purposes? Bachrach and Baratz (1962) characterize the second-face of power as having control over agenda-setting.... View the poster.

Phylogenetic analysis of HIV is a useful tool in determining factors that may contribute to transmission cluster growth. To better target HIV prevention, it is necessary to understand how research and surveillance data can be combined in a meaningful way. HIV genetic sequences were collected in the RADAR cohort of... View the poster.