2025 Honors Summer Fellows

Meet the 2025 cohort of Honors Summer Fellows.

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Early childhood experiences, like when a child first begins speaking English or when families start reading together, can play a decisive role in shaping language development. This project examines how these early milestones influence grammatical growth in Spanish-English bilingual children. Specifically, it investigates whether the age of first English word production and the age at which shared English reading begins are linked to children’s grammar skills later in life. This research focuses on sentence length, word variety, and grammatical complexity — features captured through storytelling samples and a grammar assessment.

By analyzing how children naturally structure their sentences and use vocabulary in storytelling, the study offers insight into how language skills develop in real-world contexts, not just on formal tests. These patterns are then examined alongside family background information, including parent-reported timelines and reading habits. The ultimate goal is to better understand how home language environments support English development and to promote more inclusive, culturally aware tools for evaluating and supporting bilingual children in school settings.

Annalise Aponte is a senior at the University of Michigan, majoring in Psychology with a minor in Education. She is a research assistant in the Language and Literacy Lab, where she works on projects analyzing bilingual children’s storytelling and grammar development. Her academic interests lie in early childhood education, language acquisition, and educational equity, focusing on supporting students from linguistically diverse backgrounds. After graduation, she plans to pursue a graduate degree in school psychology, where she hopes to use her research experience to advocate for more inclusive practices in K–12 education. Her long-term goal is to help create school systems that are more responsive to all children's diverse developmental and educational needs.
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Bone healing after a fracture is a process that most of us go through at least once in our lives with minimal problems. For this to occur, though, an exceptional amount of teamwork must be accomplished by the body’s cells to be able to close and fortify the fracture to a nearly identical pre-injury condition. However, for a subset of us, this process does not work as harmoniously as it should (around 10-13% of people exhibit delayed or non-union healing of fractures), resulting in a poor repair of the fracture, and more consequently, a reduced quality of life for the patient. To this end, homologs Thrombospondin 1 & 2 have been chosen to be investigated as a potential target for future therapeutics because of their high expression in musculoskeletal injuries and the subsequent repair process.

The goal of Marc’s project is to elucidate the roles that bone proteins Thrombospondin 1 & 2 have on fracture repair. More specifically, Marc will look at whether these proteins should be knocked out during certain phases of the repair process in order to generate the greatest positive outcome for the formation of new bone callus and blood vessels at the site of injury.

Marc is a graduating senior pursuing a double major in Microbiology and Spanish at the University of Michigan and is from the suburbia of Philadelphia. He began working in the Hankenson Lab on a related project in his sophomore year because of their expertise in orthopaedics and the project’s strong translational aspects to patients. Marc strives to become a pediatric orthopaedic surgeon, realizing his passion for medicine in this specialty after an accident in his junior year of high school. In his free time, Marc enjoys swimming, cycling, scuba diving, hiking outdoors, and reading books.

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In China, family is often imagined in narrow, heteronormative ways shaped by both state policy and cultural tradition. But what happens when queer women try to picture a different kind of future? Drawn to this topic through personal experience navigating queerness and traditional expectations within a Chinese immigrant family, Qiying is deeply curious about how other queer individuals imagine parenthood — whether they want children, what kinds of families they envision, and how they conceive of family roles beyond the conventional binary. While much existing research focuses on the legal and logistical barriers faced by LGBTQ+ families, Qiying’s project turns to a more intimate question: Before any decisions are made, how do queer people internalize — or resist — the idea of becoming a parent?

Approaching research through the lens of lived experience, interviews will be analyzed thematically to explore the intersectional pressures queer women face in contemporary China. Ultimately, the project seeks to amplify voices that are often silenced in public discourse, particularly in a society where queer futures remain marginalized.

Qiying is a rising senior triple majoring in Sociology, Psychology, and Creative Writing. As a first-generation college student and a queer Chinese individual, she is passionate about exploring identity, community, and the transformative power of narrative in driving social change. Beyond research, Qiying is a poet, film producer, and community organizer who prefers tea over coffee and works solely to provide a better life for her cat, Fuya.

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Most of us understand genetics as the concrete set of instructions that give us our discrete characteristics. However, current research reveals that DNA, the molecule containing our genetic code, is dynamic and is affected by our environment. Most notably, food organisms consumed can alter the way DNA is expressed, affecting physical features and physiological functions. Prior research has shown us that stressful diets, most notably high sugar diets, create stress for an organism’s metabolism, affecting many of the building blocks an organism would use to synthesize important structures; more specifically, the neuromuscular junction is impaired. This junction is the site where neural system sends commands to the muscles of the body, carrying them out.

Furthermore, the effects of stressful diets on genes go beyond impacting an individual organism; offsprings in its genetic line inherit these irreversible genetic changes. Ghaith’s thesis through the Dus lab will explore the effects of a high sugar diet on the neuromuscular junctions of the offsprings of Drosophila flies (fruit flies), supplementing them with nutrients such as Vitamin B (nicotinamide) to reverse the impact and rescue the neuromuscular junctions.

Ghaith is a rising senior majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology with a Minor in Music. He joined the Monica Dus lab in his sophomore year and is heavily interested in metabolomics research regarding diets, believing that lab experience is a key experience in understanding the natural sciences’ learning process and production of useful knowledge. Outside of the lab, Ghaith enjoys playing the guitar and improvising music with others, cooking, and watching films.

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The solar system is full of a diverse array of non-planetary objects such as moons, rings, and comets. Yet despite the ubiquity of moons and rings within our solar system, there have been no extrasolar moons and only two candidate ring systems discovered to date. Though if we look towards the National Academies’ “Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s” Decadal Report, we could perhaps find ways to actually detect these moons and rings with the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). HWO is a proposed space telescope concept that will conduct observations in ultraviolet/visible/near-infrared wavelengths with the aim to directly image potentially habitable planets in nearby star systems.

Motivated by HWO’s potential to image planets by capturing their reflected light, Sam’s project seeks to explore how HWO could be utilized for detecting icy extrasolar moons and rings by using the solar system – specifically Neptune+Triton and Saturn+Saturn’s Ring – as an analog to determine how moons and rings might impact our observations of the reflected light of planets. By examining in what ranges of wavelengths these moons/rings shine brighter than their host planet, we are able to see how a moon/ring might show up in a planet’s spectral energy distribution (SED) plot – which is the emitted energy across a range of wavelengths – and determine the detectability of these regions where the moon/ring dominates with HWO by calculating a signal’s strength compared to background noise (SNR or signal-to-noise ratio) in these moon/ring dominated regions.

Sam is a rising 5th year senior studying Astronomy and Astrophysics, Chemistry, and Interdisciplinary Physics. The diverse environments of extrasolar planets, the moons of our solar system, and the ways in which the study of these environments ties in multiple fields of science has fascinated Sam since he was young. Once he graduates, Sam hopes to pursue a Ph.D in astrophysics and continue studying planets and planetary systems. Outside of research and studying, Sam enjoys creating art, playing video games, or working at his job at the Detroit Observatory.

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Quantum computing is a rapidly developing field that has many promising applications. In classical computers information is encoded in bits, or one and zeros, and operations can be performed directly on those bits. However in quantum computers, information is encoded in quantum systems (a quantum bit- or “qubit”) and operations are performed by interacting with those quantum systems. This allows quantum computers to behave in ways that are fundamentally different from classical computers but also creates novel issues.

One of these issues is error correction. Even in classical systems bits sometimes fail and the information gets corrupted (think a 0 switching to a 1). The way this problem is solved is with error correction codes, which refers to adding redundancy to how information is stored (i.e. using more bits to store the same amount of information). Quantum error codes work similarly, except certain properties of quantum mechanics constrain how you are allowed to store data and which sort of errors can occur on qubits. There are many different error codes, each with their own advantages and drawbacks.

Formal verification is the field of using rigorous mathematical techniques to prove the correctness of a design. Ryan’s work involves using tools from formal verification to prove properties of different quantum computing error codes. For instance one such property is distance which relates to how many errors the code can handle before losing information.

Ryan is a rising senior studying computer science and physics. He is interested in quantum computing because it lies at the intersection of those two fields, and wants to pursue a Ph.D. in the subject. 

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Carbon fixation is the single most important step of photosynthesis in reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and converting inorganic carbon into a biologically available form. Photosynthesis is largely attributed to plants; however, over 30% of the carbon fixation on Earth is performed by cyanobacteria, a class of bacteria that can perform photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria are so efficient at carbon fixation because they contain a specialized bacterial microcompartment (BMC) called the carboxysome. The carboxysome encapsulates and sequesters ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCO), the enzyme responsible for the fixation of carbon, allowing for an increase of catalytic activity of the enzyme. Carboxysomes are positioned along the nucleoid of the model organism Synechococcus elongatus by the partner proteins Maintenance of carboxysome distribution A (McdA) and Maintenance of carboxysome distribution B (McdB). Olivia’s project is focused on the circadian clock of S. elongatus and how it impacts the McdAB system, carboxysome positioning, and nucleoid compaction.

Olivia is a rising Senior studying Microbiology. She is currently the founder and President of the Microbiology Club at the University of Michigan and participates in local theater in her free time. Coming from a strong science background, she has always had a fascination with the natural world. With rising global temperatures and climate change, microbes are being negatively affected just as much as macrobes and she hopes to be able to use research and teaching in order to help mitigate these changes. She hopes to join the Peace Corps after graduation to teach sustainability practices and further expand upon her teaching experience and undergraduate research by pursuing a Ph.D in Environmental Microbiology.

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Heart disease is the number one killer in the Western world. In many cases, heart disease is led by a build-up of cholesterol, called plaques, in the arteries which constrict blood flow to the heart. High density lipoproteins (HDLs) play a protective role in the human body to transport cholesterol from these plaques to the liver, reducing the risk of heart disease. Synthetic HDLs (sHDLs) have been developed as a potential therapeutic, mimicking native HDL’s function as a carrier. sHDLs have been used in HDL replacement therapies and as drug delivery carriers. These nanoparticles have a wide range of applications outside of heart diseases, from Alzheimer’s to sepsis.

As sHDLs continue being optimized, it is important to understand what happens once they are in the body. sHDLs have a flexible structure that participates in a remodeling process, exchanging components with other lipoproteins in the blood. This process will have a profound impact on the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of the sHDLs. The current literature on sHDL remodeling is limited. Lindsay’s thesis aims to understand this process using Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) as her main method. Lindsay is focusing on the optimization of FRET for its applications to sHDL remodeling and using this method to understand the sHDLs interactions with blood serum.

Lindsay is a rising senior pursuing a major in Biochemistry and a minor in Mathematics. After college, she hopes to pursue a Ph.D in molecular medicine, focusing on translational research. In her free time, Lindsay enjoys playing soccer, going to the gym, reading, and playing board games.

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Crossing the 100-mile-width Taiwan Strait seems straightforward, until the Strait itself contests who you really are. Qihao Liang’s Honors thesis investigates Mainland China-Taiwan migration after 2008, when the “Three Links” policies reopened direct travel, trade, and postal routes between Mainland China and Taiwan — connections severed since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Two competing national narratives collide: Mainland China invokes kinship and national reunification; Taiwan asserts its own independent sovereignty. Within this contested terrain of overlapping jurisdictions, Chinese/Taiwanese ethnic identity becomes a site of continuous negotiation rather than fixed inheritance.

Qihao focuses on four migration groups navigating this ambiguous terrain: Taiwanese businesspeople and students in Mainland China, alongside Mainland Chinese students and marriage-migrants in Taiwan. How do these Mainland China-Taiwan migration groups keep their lives moving when both Mainland China and Taiwan treat them ambiguously as contentious co-ethnic members, neither completely foreign nor fully domestic?

Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews, two months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across university campuses and Taiwanese business districts, and archival analysis of post- 2008 migration policies, Qihao reveals that Mainland China-Taiwan migrants survive concurrent jurisdiction by fashioning what he terms a “document mosaic,” the strategic assembly and reassembly of passports, entry-exit permits, household registrations, residence cards, ID cards, and marriage certificates issued by both states to secure enough legal footing and social resources for work, study, families connections, and stepwise migration. Ultimately, his research demonstrates that ethnicity functions less as an inherent, fixed category and birthright than a legally, politically and psychosocially malleable resource, continuously reshaped by states, society, and the people who traverse the Taiwan Strait.

Qihao is a rising senior studying Sociology with Honors at the University of Michigan. Born and raised on Zhoushan Island off Mainland China's coast, his family's experiences of separation and reunion across the Taiwan Strait inspired his scholarly trajectory toward migration studies and transnational kinship. After graduation, he plans to pursue doctoral studies in Sociology, extending his current research to examine same-sex marriage migration between Mainland China and Taiwan. Beyond academic pursuits, Qihao enjoys K-pop, riverside walks along the Huron, and revisiting novels by Yukio Mishima.

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How has coercive enforcement of China's one-child policy shaped people’s trust in local government officials? This study uses historical data from 32 provinces covering the years 1981 to 2007, focusing on how often long-term birth control methods — including sterilization and IUD insertion — were used. These numbers estimate how coercive the policy enforcement was in different areas across different years, as long-term birth controls are more intrusive and more likely to be forced.

The preliminary results of this research show that women with children living in areas with more intense enforcement were less likely to trust their local government. Interestingly, there was no clear impact on men or women without children. But when the study uses only sterilization (excluding IUD insertion) as the estimate of coercion, the results were the opposite: Men, no matter if they had kids or not, showed more trust in local government, and the negative effect for women disappeared.

These mixed results suggest that the impact of the one-child policy on political trust could be different for different groups — and that the way the study estimates for coercion matters. As her next step, Lily plans to explore different estimates for coercion further and establish causal inferences.

Lily is a rising junior double majoring in Economics and Statistics. Her research interest lies in development economics and public policy, especially the long-term impact of policy on behaviors and social preferences. As an international student from China, Lily is also interested in public policy in
China. Beyond research, Lily enjoys travelling, translating, and making junk journals. 

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Gianna’s research seeks to examine how religious narratives shaped public perceptions of communism and state violence during Indonesia’s anti-communist purges in the mid-1960s. Following a failed coup in 1965, Indonesia’s military, led by General Suharto, launched a sweeping campaign against the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), resulting in mass imprisonment and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians — many of them PKI members, suspected sympathizers, or individuals labeled as such. Gianna’s project specifically investigates how religious rhetoric was utilized in the media to justify and encourage these actions, casting Islam as a moral counterforce to communism. Through archival research, drawing on government documents, microfilm collections, and contemporary news reports, she aims to analyze the complex ways religious language was leveraged to rally public support and legitimize state-sanctioned violence, while also considering the influence of broader anti-communist and anti-Chinese sentiments prevalent at the time. Through this project, Gianna hopes to better understand how religious discourse is mobilized during times of crisis and how it intersects with broader forces like Cold War anti-communism and ethnic scapegoating.

Gianna Limarvin is a rising senior at the University of Michigan majoring in International Studies with a subplan in International Security, Norms, & Cooperation (ISNC). After graduation, she plans to pursue a Master’s in International and Regional Studies, where she hopes to continue researching Southeast Asian politics, history, and religion.

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Maeve Lyon’s research investigates the historical emergence of voluntary vegetarianism in China, focusing on its role in fostering cooperation and signaling religious identity within early Buddhist communities. Her project explores how cultural and biological factors may have worked together to shape dietary choices, particularly during the emergence of Chinese Buddhism. Drawing on her dual majors in East Asian Studies and Human Origins, Biology, and Behavior, Maeve plans to conduct a literature review and analyze archival primary sources to examine how religious practices influenced social interaction. Her research aims to connect themes across the humanities and evolutionary theory, making sense of how plant-based diets may have functioned in historical contexts.

Maeve Lyon is a rising junior at the University of Michigan, studying Human Origins, Biology, and Behavior, as well as East Asian Studies with a concentration in Chinese. She is passionate about understanding the intersections of culture, evolution, and belief systems, particularly in relation to nutrition, health, and community. Outside the classroom, Maeve enjoys traveling, running, cooking, and reading nonfiction. She plans to pursue a Ph.D in genetics or biological anthropology and hopes to become a professor conducting interdisciplinary research on human evolution, health, and biology.

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The human brain has approximately 86 billion neurons that are connected to form a unique network in every individual. One of Uma’s deepest curiosities about the brain is understanding what these connections actually mean. Why do some neuronal networks withstand neurodegeneration (the progressive loss of neuronal function) better than others? How does the loss of a single neuron affect the entire network? And is it possible to quantify the importance of that neuron to the functionality of the network? These are the questions Uma aims to explore in her senior thesis, where she will use mathematical analysis to gain a deeper understanding of how neuronal connectivity shapes network resilience and influences the progression of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Uma is a rising senior studying mathematics and neuroscience. Outside of school, she loves to read, play violin, run, hike, backpack, and spend time with her family and friends.

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Code-switching is when a multilingual speaker switches languages in the middle of a conversation. It can be a prominent and recurrent aspect in the lives of multilingual people serving as a means of expressing one’s cultural identity and communicating more fluidly. In many cases, however, such as in professional and educational settings, code-switching has been frowned upon as the use of a predominant language is generally enforced, which privileges dominant languages over marginalized ones. Victor’s thesis aims to challenge this historical perception of code-switching and instead shift towards highlighting the potential benefits code-switching can have in educational settings. More specifically, his thesis will further explore the role code-switching plays in memory in a naturalistic speech setting. The hypothesis is that bilingual Spanish and English speakers will better remember information when it was given during a code-switch as opposed to in a single-language sentence.

Victor is a rising senior and a Psychology major on the pre-med track. Born in Houston, Texas and raised in São Paulo, Brazil by his Colombian family, Victor has always been surrounded by a variety of languages and cultures. Since coming to Michigan, Victor wanted to get involved with research at U-M, and when the opportunity presented itself to do so on a topic that has permeated every aspect of his life, it resonated with him. His career goal is to receive his MD from medical school and practice surgery in order to help others. Outside of his lab work, Victor enjoys playing pickup basketball at gyms, going on runs, and listening to music.

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In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) emerged as a Black political organization for self-defense and liberation in Oakland, California and soon spread nationally. In 1968, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), led by J. Edgar Hoover, began to intensely surveil and spearhead counterintelligence efforts (COINTELPRO) to “neutralize” the BPP. Adesewa is writing her thesis on how Black Panther Party members understood, navigated, and resisted surveillance both from national agencies and local police departments.

Adesewa will be using archival sources from a number of Black Panther collections across the United States to write her thesis. In these files, counterintelligence operations detail the lengths the FBI went to destroy the party, including using informants to agitate ideological differences within party members or wiretapping Panther phone lines to document their conversations. Adesewa also plans to draw from written works by Panthers penned during their time within the party, after the party’s collapse in the 1980s, and during their incarceration.

Questions include: 1) How did the surveillance and destruction of Black liberation movements in the 1960s and '70s shape how surveillance works today? 2) How do surveillance, fugitivity, and Black social life intertwine? 3) What insights can be gained about surveillance by centering Black radical thought? She is interested in how surveillance responds to Black social life or resistance, conversely how Black communities adapt in response to surveillance. Her current reading is that the Panthers understood the surveillance they faced as racialized subjects with radical politics, and therefore their surveillance served as a means to police Panther and the surrounding Black communities’ bodies and minds. Therefore, BPP member experiences demonstrate the larger trend of surveillance and policing of the Black civil rights and liberation movements due to the government's interest in suppressing dissent, concern over communism, and white supremacy.

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Transcription factors are DNA-binding proteins that regulate gene expression and are crucial in balancing the body’s elaborate system of cellular processes. The essential mechanisms that transcription factors utilize to execute their regulatory roles are unknown, leaving details of their functionality undiscovered. PRDM13 is a transcription factor that has been linked with several central nervous system disorders when mutated or dysregulated. However, how PRDM13 leads to these diseases remains unknown, leaving important questions regarding its function and its role in regulating the transcription of developmental genes. To help address this, Hana is interested in discovering the protein-protein interactions (PPIs) PRDM13 engages in.

Hana is a rising senior majoring in Biophysics with aspirations of becoming a physician. She is excited to continue pursuing research and plans to be involved in drug and therapy discovery. Outside of lab, she enjoys crocheting, going on coffee runs, and hanging out with friends.

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Attempts to implement democracy-related reforms like ranked-choice voting (RCV) are increasing in prevalence across the country as many voters become disenchanted with the political system. Proponents of RCV argue it leads to more moderate politics and allows more candidates to participate in elections. RCV gives voters the chance to rank available candidates in order of preference. Lower-performing candidates are eliminated, and those who voted for those candidates have their votes reassigned to their next-preference pick—a process that is repeated until there is a majority winner. Ballot initiatives in various states seeking to implement RCV have differed greatly in their degrees of success, with some earning enough support to be adopted, as in Maine and Alaska, and others falling well short. 

Christian’s thesis asks the question: Which factors contributed to the varying degrees of success of statewide RCV campaigns? Through a series of case studies, he will compare the factors present or absent from both successful and unsuccessful statewide efforts to enact RCV to test his hypothesis that campaign quality, strength of opposition, and influential interest groups play central roles in determining their outcomes. As an RCV activist, Christian is highly interested in these results and hopes to apply his findings to his work with Rank MI Vote, the organization dedicated to bringing ranked-choice voting to Michigan. 

Christian plans to attend law school after he graduates, where he hopes to find a path into the public sector to work on policy reform and implementation.

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“Good lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise”: an Appalachian aspiration that means, in essence, “hopefully.” What does it mean to hope in Appalachian? Who gets to tell their stories of optimism, and who doesn’t?

Macie’s thesis will take the shape of a poetry collection based in research. The poetry will tell the story of “The Devil’s Stairs” — a piece of Appalachian folklore originating in Ashe County, North Carolina. The Devil’s Stairs are a geographical feature along NC Highway 194 between West Jefferson, North Carolina and Mountain City, Tennessee. They resemble a staircase carved out of rock on the side of the road and are a result of an early-20th century dynamite blast performed for the purposes of railroad expansion. As one version of the associated folktale goes, driving past The Devil’s Stairs and glancing in the rearview mirror results in seeing a physical manifestation of the devil sitting in the backseat of the car. Macie’s thesis aims to use this folklore as a metaphor, telling the story of The Devil’s Stairs and various related phenomena to arrive at the larger theme of queerness and intimate partner violence in the queer community.

Macie’s aim is to tell unheard stories — stories of Appalachia, queer Appalachians, and queer survivalism in the face of violence. Using the “devil in the backseat” as a vehicle to discuss trauma, memory, and, most of all, hope, Macie will research The Devil’s Stairs and queer survivalism through investigating oral histories, published works, and other methods of knowing, ultimately using that research to write a chapbook-length poetry collection.

Macie is a rising senior studying Creative Writing & Literature with a concentration in poetry. Macie was born and raised in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, and they would consider those mountains to be the backdrop for most of their creative and academic endeavors. After completing their B.A., Macie hopes to obtain an MFA and, eventually, a Ph.D in Creative Writing in order to work in higher education as a professor.

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How does a historically marginalized group react to tragedy when the tables are turned and they are on the privileged side? In 1948, three years after the end of the Holocaust genocide in central Europe, another injustice began halfway across the globe: legal discrimination against Black South Africans, now known as apartheid. In the same year that apartheid began, over 110,000 Jews resided in South Africa, representing approximately 4 percent of the White population. Within the White Jewish community, responses to the system of apartheid were divided; some in favor, some neutral, and many opposed. It has been argued that Jews were significantly overrepresented amongst the White resistance. But upon further investigation, the reality seems to be more complicated.

Gabrielle’s overarching question is: Did the collective memory of the Holocaust influence the Jewish response to apartheid in South Africa? And if so, how and when? If not, how to account for these things? With these questions she will examine archival materials at the Kaplan Center at the University of Cape Town.

Gabrielle was drawn to this subject because of its complex nature. For her degree, she focuses on war and genocide studies, Jewish experience, and the Holocaust. She was surprised to learn that, at its peak during the 1940s and 1950s, South Africa had the seventh largest Jewish community in the world. She then began to wonder what role the Jews played in apartheid, particularly right after experiencing a mass tragedy themselves.

Gabrielle is a rising senior studying History with minors in Political Science and Judaic Studies. After college she hopes to pursue a Ph.D in History and continue researching challenging historical topics. In her free time, Gabrielle sings in the University of Michigan Women's Glee Club, enjoys walking in the Arb, and traveling.

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Consider a doctor consulting a patient over receiving bariatric surgery to help with weight loss. In order for the patient to be eligible to undergo the treatment, the doctor sets a certain weight loss requirement to be met preemptively to both reduce patient risk as well as build weight loss habits. How does a doctor determine this threshold for patients to maximize their benefit? How do patients react and change their behavior in response to this threshold? Luka’s research focuses on optimizing thresholds like these in what are called performative and non-performative settings through data simulations and theoretical work, aiming to identify how these thresholds behave in different statistical and mathematical settings. Luka has taken an interest in this topic because of his experience taking classes in probability theory and stochastic processes, as well as his interest in exploring mathematical structures and theories with numerical simulations.

Luka is pursuing a dual major in Honors Mathematics and Honors Statistics with a Minor in Complex Systems, in pursuit of a Ph.D in either Mathematics or Statistics. Beyond just numbers and symbols, Luka is an avid academic, fond of reading and collecting books and conducting research in many different topics, such as physics, economics, and meteorology. Luka is big into tornado science and storm chasing, with a love for watching radars and documentaries. Beyond just school, Luka loves cooking, weightlifting, and playing musical instruments like guitar and saxophone. 

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Particle detection experiments are often very large and expensive, requiring large amounts of public funding. Being able to reuse facilities and infrastructure from already existing detectors is an important way to save money and continue to run experiments fundamental to the development of modern physics.  

Alan's project is an investigation into the possibility of converting an existing experiment to detect dark matter into a detector that detects the theorized process of neutrinoless double beta decay. The existing LZ detector is an ongoing experiment trying to detect dark matter that will shut down within a few years. Alan's project looks at the feasibility of reusing the detector for a future experiment to detect neutrinoless double beta decay. Neutrinoless double beta decay is a theorized process which, if detected, would reveal answers on fundamental questions of the universe such as why matter exists in the modern universe at all. His project will consist of running computer simulations of the current detector to determine if it would be sensitive enough to detect a neutrinoless double beta decay event, along with designing potential modifications to the existing detector to improve results.

Alan Vellenga is a rising senior majoring in physics with a minor in Japanese language and culture. Alan is strongly passionate about finding how the universe works on a fundamental level; for as long as he could remember, he has wanted to understand the universe and become a scientist. This goal is influenced by his additional passion for political activism and how political decisions can determine the capacity for scientific progress. Beyond his academic interests, Alan practices the Japanese martial art of Kendo and is the vice president of LSA Student Government.

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In 2025, the President of the Louvre, Laurence des Cars, announced that the museum would be undergoing major renovations, including the completion of a separate room for a more enriched viewer experience with the Mona Lisa, which would come at the additional cost of a specific “Mona Lisa Fee.” When one thinks of engaging with art, one may think of a museum with red ropes, glass frames, and ticket fees. To interact with art is to view a work at a distance, to conduct an emotional exchange while physically divided from the piece one is viewing. But how does this emotional exchange shift when we take the art from behind those barriers and place it into the hands of the people?

Studying protest art is one way to answer this question. As a History of Art major with a minor in American Culture, Maya has studied and experienced a surplus of protest art, particularly that of her fellow students, past and present. With her thesis, she will be studying the impact of student protest art’s dynamic position as a communicator within the movements it has represented. Studying this category of art involves looking at pieces made specifically by and for the hands of the people, meant not to adorn the walls of museums but the front of movements. As an artistic trend that has changed the course of American politics and whose history is becoming increasingly relevant in our current political climate, understanding the method of communication that protest art has made available on college campuses throughout time can honor the work done by activists while exemplifying the power of art in inciting feeling, inspiration, and change. 

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Stand up. Walk a few meters. Turn around. Sit back down. This series of movements, known as the Timed Up and Go (TUG) task, is a common tool to assess functional mobility, particularly motor planning and execution. Previous literature indicates that the TUG task can be used as a predictor of falls. However, there is limited research on TUG task performance among individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), despite their higher vulnerability to falls. Katelyn’s thesis will characterize the relationship between reaction time, movement jerk, and fall risk in individuals with IDD using markerless motion capture to quantify movement kinematics. The results will inform efforts to improve clinical screenings for fall risk, fall prevention interventions, and overall understanding of movement patterns in the IDD population.

Katelyn is a rising senior majoring in Neuroscience with a minor in Medical Anthropology. She hopes to pursue a medical degree. In her free time, Katelyn enjoys dancing, volunteering at Mott, and spending time with loved ones.

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As both an instrument and an architectural element, the carillon (a set of stationary bells played manually by a keyboard in a bell tower) creates and disseminates meaning through its sonic and physical presence. Meghan’s thesis examines the dual presence of the Mayo Clinic’s carillon in Rochester, Minnesota – the only one owned by a hospital in North America. Her research articulates how this instrument operates outside the bounds of clinical control, destabilizing conventional boundaries between music and noise in a hospital setting and, ultimately, subverting dominant bioethical values embedded in the western biomedical environment.

Particularly, the carillon’s ambiguous position reveals ethical tensions around three core bioethical principles of autonomy, non-maleficience, and justice. Meghan’s project incorporates interviews, sound recording, sound mapping (a visual sketch of an aural environment), photo documentation, and analysis of archival materials and carillon scores. As part of her fieldwork, she will also perform three concerts on the Mayo Clinic instrument.

Meghan Wysocki (she/her) is an active carillonist and senior pursuing dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Anthropology (Medical) and Music at the University of Michigan, where she studies the carillon under Dr. Tiffany Ng and the organ under Dr. Caroline Robinson. She hopes to pursue a doctorate in bioethics or medical anthropology, eventually teaching in the health humanities or working as a clinical ethicist in a hospital. On the carillon, Meghan performs at bell towers in cities around the Midwest and internationally in Belgium and the Netherlands. She has given noon and evening recitals at Burton and Lurie Towers and serves as president of the student-run Carillon Guild at the University of Michigan. When not in the bell tower or the classroom, she enjoys singing in several choral ensembles, journaling, and taking long walks through North Campus.

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