Summer Program 2025

Summer Science Symposium

The 2025 Summer Science Symposium was held Friday, July 25, 2025.

Oral Presentations 8:50am-11:20am, Shanklin 107
- Abigail Lopez and Nadine Stetzelberg (Gonzalez-Pech), Patrick Schechtman-Taylor (Jimenez-Hoyos), Kate DiTullio (Northrop), Julian Frank (Elling), Ada Qin (Adeboye), Vandana Ravi (Melón), Liam Jones (Mitchel), Halcyon Botvinick-Greenhouse (Starr, Mitchel), Casey Gao (Starr), Ethan Chu (Gooyabadi), Jamie Sloves (Barth), Sara Ben Abdallah, Asher Harris, Jacey Henry, and Shalyna Said (Black Box Labs)
Prize Presentations and Keynote Address 12pm-1:30pm, Exley 150
- Disrupting Drug Discovery Dogma: Rethinking the Aminoglycosides Mechanism of Action,Erika Taylor, Professor of Chemistry and Director of WesMaSS
Poster Session 1:30pm-3:15pm, Exley Lobby
- 137 posters were presented as part of our annual poster session

Scientific Imaging Prize

Judges Amy MacQueen, Boris Tezak, Sarah Wellons

1st Place, Arjun Menezes

My research this summer has been on the study of sedimentation of chiral geometries, and thus far, it has been on computing the mobility tensors (geometric properties) which govern the movement of these bodies in highly viscous fluid.

This image was generated when we took one of the geometries we have been studying, the helical ribbon, and we introduced the ability for the system to becoming chaotic. Usually, our dynamics depend only on the tilt and the spin of the helical ribbon, but through time-periodic driving of the center of mass (experimentally this could be done with a motor, but this is a simulation in MATLAB) we introduce a third dimension that can lead to chaos.

The image you see is the sedimentation dynamics of the chaotic helical ribbon (I have rotated it 90º counterclockwise to fit best on the page). There are some “regular regions” where the ribbon can oscillate and return to its original position, and large regions of chaotic dynamics.

2nd Place, Brandon Wong

In this image, a turtle embryo is shown during its early developmental stages. Particularly, the shadow of the embryo’s shell, or carapace, and slight digits of its limbs may be visible. I captured this image using the Tezak Lab’s microscope in the standard grayscale format. In the Tezak Lab, we use the Trachemys scripta elegans as our model organism to study how specific incubation temperatures affect sex determination and germ cells. Over the Summer, my project focused on documenting and imaging the full developmental timeline of eggs incubated at intermediate temperatures. Recording the development is crucial, as eggs in nature are not entirely exposed to one extreme climate or the other. With this, these images allowed me to create a graph of several developmental times, which may provide insight into the growth rate, size, and fitness of a turtle hatchling.

3rd Place, Aliya Nurohamed

This image shows the distribution of stars (first and third rows) and gas (second and fourth rows) at redshifts 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1—illustrating how the galaxy evolves over time from left to right. The bright blue regions indicate areas of cold, dense gas in which star formation can take place. The first two rows show the galaxy face-on, whereas the bottom two rows show it edge-on to highlight its full morphology.

This visualization is directly relevant to my research, as I am studying how galaxies change in shape (morphology) over time and how they shut down star formation—transitioning from blue gas to pink gas in these images. The simulations I use generate many snapshots like these, effectively creating a “movie” of a galaxy’s evolution. In this particular sequence, we can see that the galaxy continues forming stars throughout its life and eventually develops into a disk with spiral arms.

These images were generated using FIREStudio (Gurvich, A.B., 2022).