Keystone Symposium 2024

9:00 am – Opening Remarks by Professor Godley (Associate Director)

10:00 am – Sydney Ballard
Facilitated Communication as an Intervention for Non-Speaking Autism Spectrum Disorder

10:15 am – Brianna Spiegel
Thyroid Therapy: A Systematic Investigation of the Best Treatment for Hyperthyroidism

10:30 am – Virginia Popov
A History of Breast Milk Donation and the Socio-Cultural Factors that Impact the Modern Milk Donor Experience

10:45 am – Samuel Thomas
Way Out: A Queer Horror Podcast

11:00 am – Laurel Murphy
Foot Voting in a Post-Dobbs World: How Young Americans are Fighting Beyond the Ballot Box to Maintain Reproductive Autonomy

11:15 am – Taylor Coester
Amana: A Community of Inspiration, Steadfast through Generations

11:30 am – Julia Kapusta
Beyond Borders: Navigating Migrant Criminalization in the US Immigration System

11:45 am – Ilana Keusch
Symbiosis: Republican Presidents and the Federalist Society

12:00-1:00 pm – Lunch Break

1:00 pm – Leightta Sherrill
Beyond the Classroom: Exploring Student Perspectives on Sex Education

1:15 pm – Adam Shamsi
Unshackling Justice: Exploring the Transformative Impact of Bail Reform in the Carceral State

1:30 pm – Timothy Liu
The Effects of Anti-Prion Drugs on the Degradation of Neurotoxic PrPSc Protein

1:45 pm – Sofiya Filippova
Bicycle Mounted Air Pollution Monitors

2:00 pm – Alex DeRosa
Decoding Dialect: Ōsaka-ben and The Art of Translation

2:15 pm – Elliott Carlisle
An Investigation into the Importance of Familial Autoimmune Disease in Children with Neuropsychiatric Symptoms

2:30 pm – Yasmin Lountchenko
Labor Rights in Digital Platforms: A cost-benefit analysis of labor reform in the European Union

2:45 pm – Ethan Dillon
Mechanical Dry-Erase Pencil

3:00-3:30 pm – Break

3:30 pm – Precious Amiewalan
Examining the Status of Race Corrections in Clinical Algorithms in Medical Decision-Making

3:45 pm – Viktoria Popovska
Where We Went: Migration and the Macedonians

4:00 pm – Sydney Jessup
The “Remarkably Important” Extinction of Silphium: Antiquity, Botany, and Conservation

4:15 pm – Olga Victoria Benacerraf Rodriguez
A Digital Balancing Act: Navigating Freedom of Speech and Censorship in Social Media

4:30 pm – Man Viet Nguyen
Our language, our right to food: Translate & culturally adapt the national household food security survey into Vietnamese for Vietnamese people in the US

9:15 am – Poster Introductions:

Morgan Fleming
The “Paramount Duty” of the State: An Analysis of Washington State Education Budget Reform

Elizabeth Bakhnov
The Root of the Problem: Evaluating Demographic Patterns and Causes of Dental Anxiety

Elizabeth Mutka
Visualizing Connections Between Watershed Health and Neighborhood Wealth

Matthew Freitas
Post-COVID-19 Pandemic Risk Perception and Vaccine Booster Confidence in Recife, Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil

Grace Oluwatosin Adebogun
The News Media Blackbox: Media’s Relationship with Police Brutality Protests in America

9:40 am – Poster Presentations & Discussions in the Lobby
This portion of our presentations will not be live-streamed

10:00 am – Jansi Patel
Endometriosis: Identifying Associated Psychological Symptoms and Assessing Treatment Options

10:15 am – Tori Keefauver
Using prairie voles to model the effects of social deprivation on microglia

10:30 am – Madelyn Keller
Identifying the ‘Druggability’ Potential of Human Transmembrane Proteins

10:45 am – Uni Valdivieso Wooldridge
La Cocina Latina: An oral history of Latinx migration and diaspora recipes

11:00 am – Madeline Riddick-Seals
The Blackberry Quilt | Stories of Friendship Street: A Cultural Preservation Project

11:15 am – Dante Gonzalez
The Language of Intimacy: Desexualized Language in Consent-Based Performance

11:30 am – Edward Sturm
Staging Catastrophe: Theatre Historiography and the Hartford Circus Fire

11:45 am – Katherine Cardinale
Voting Patterns Among Boston University Students

12:00-1:00 pm – Lunch Break

1:00 pm – Tia Samaha
Gen Z’s identity crisis amidst social media’s commodification of women’s identities.

1:15 pm – Katie Shepardson
Curiosity, Learning, and Familiar Characters

1:30 pm – Mark Ruta
Translation of a Novel Microstructured Tissue Fastener into a Coronary Stent

1:45 pm – Cosette Potter
Premigration Education Level as a Determinant of Socioeconomic Mobility of Immigrants to Texas

2:00 pm – Amit Bhatia
Understanding the Power of Soft Skills

2:15 pm – Kennedy Harwood
What We Write: How Artists Use Handwriting in Process

2:30 pm – Emily Schwartz
Who Sees Whom? Visibility across socio-economic classes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2:45 pm – Hanna Dworkin
The Philosophy of Grief

3:00-3:30 pm – Break

3:30 pm – Tyler Critz
Protect the Plants! Evaluating the Environmental Regulation of the Defensive Response Mechanisms in Arabidopsis thaliana for Further Agricultural Applications

3:45 pm – Reshma Subramonian
The Path to Moksha: Examining Attitudes Towards Mental Health In Upper Middle Class Families in Chennai, India

4:00 pm – Danielle Everett
Defining a Barrier in Neuroscience: Spatial Navigation

4:15 pm – Anulika Nnadi
Evaluating Media Coverage of Underrepresented Groups in Boston: A Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Approach

4:30 pm – Gianna Gioscia
Creating a Space for Secondary Students to See Themselves in Physics: A Gendered Intervention

9:15 am – Poster Introductions:

Nicolas McMahon
Galactic Wings: A Case Study on the X-Shaped Radio Source in Abell 1145

Clara Garza
Prenatal Detection of Congenital Heart Disease in Rural Oregon

Madison Miranda
Prospera: Empowering Puerto Rico’s Small Businesses

Isabella Roman
Towards Inclusive Autism Care: Overcoming Barriers for Underserved Populations

Melissa Taylor
Exploring Cross-Cultural Collaboration and International Educational Children’s Television Through Sesame Street’s Co-Productions

9:40 am – Poster Presentations & Discussions in the Lobby
This portion of our presentations will not be live-streamed

10:00 am – Gabrielle Gewirtz
Analyzing the Partitions of 1947 and 1971 Through a Gendered Lens

10:15 am – Miku Makino
The Glass Wall: Quantifying Challenges in Balancing New Motherhood and Employment in Japan

10:30 am – Alex Shores
Heartbeat by Heartbeat: A Short Film on The Financial, Social, and Emotional Challenges of Pediatric Heart Conditions

10:45 am – Ligia Mardari
The Power of Sound: Creating Meaning at the Intersection of Film, Psychology, and Music

11:00 am – Nourhan El Sherif
Sex-Dependent Differences in Tensional Homeostasis

11:15 am – Phillip Tran
Marine Databaser: An Open-Source Desktop Application for Managing and Analyzing Field Data

11:30 am – Jacob Rose
Crisis in the Cubicle: Mental Health Resources in Corporate America

11:45 am – Pashma Sadiq
Resilience and Regulation: A Data-Driven Analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact on New York City’s Restaurant Industry

12:00-1:00 pm – Lunch Break

1:00 pm – Alexa Quintero
Tubie TO-GO: Improving Enteral Feeding Pumps for Modern User

1:15 pm – Sophie Bush
A Holistic Assessment of Food Insecurity in Native American Communities

1:30 pm – Anderson Warshaw
Symphonies in Swing: Composing Jazz Inspired By Classical Music

1:45 pm – Nicholas Speranza
Leasing the “Oldest Civilization”: The Transformation of German Colonial Policy in China, 1898-1914

2:00 pm – Nashr El Auliya
Morphing Sail

2:15 pm – Rithvik Doshi
SafeSteps: Empowering Campus Commuters through Community Reporting

2:30 pm – Faisal Ahmed
Understanding Sector Differences in International Trade

2:45 pm – Samuel Wu
Tales of the College Journey: 101 Stories from BU Students

3:00-3:30 pm – Break

3:30 pm – Sophia Huynh
The WIMP Miracle & Dark Matter Model

3:45 pm – Diana Reno
Employment Practices in Kenya’s Refugee-Serving Organizations

4:00 pm – Emily Yoder
Natural Loss: Henry David Thoreau’s Poetic Reception of Virgilian Pastoral

4:15 pm – Jesse Wang
People, Food & Culture: The Connection through Photography

4:30 pm – Alexandria Barnes
Analyzing E-Cigarette Prevention Curriculums in Boston Area Middle and High Schools