Sara Anees
Sara came to BU this summer from Houston, Texas. She currently attends Lone Star College. Sara is majoring in biotechnology. Engineered Heart Tissue Scaffold Design for Long Term Mechanical Stimulation: Sara worked with Leuko and the Bifano Lab. She was mentored by Francisco Sanchez and worked alongside Ethan Hathaway (REU), Maxwell Baruetta (REU), and Paul […]
Machine Learning Optimization of OAM-Mediated Nonlinear Fiber Optics
Mentors Project Description Structured light – i.e. light with spatially-tailored intensity, phase, or polarization properties – has become a ubiquitous tool across myriad applications in optics; including biological imaging, quantum optics, telecommunications, and more. In particular, it has been shown that light beams which carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) can propagate for kilometer-scale distances in […]
Studying Thermal Properties of Direct Air Capture Adsorbents with Hot Disk Instruments
Mentors Project Description Climate change is among the most critical challenges facing humanity today. Society’s infrastructure, agriculture, and health are threatened by global warming, which leads to floods, unprecedented weather patterns, and damaging natural disasters. No amount of emissions reductions alone will be able to reduce emissions enough to stop irreparable global warming. Thus, Direct […]
User Interface for Electronic Control of a Biospired Soft Robot
Mentors Project Description The project will involve developing a graphical user interface for controlling electro-permanent magnets (EPMs)- based valves. To select the fluid lines that will activate the channel of our soft actuators, we configure electro-permanent magnets as electronically activated pinch valves. These are used to control an octopus-inspired soft robot for underwater exploration. The […]
Population Responses of Living Neural Networks to Periodic Drive
Mentors Project Description The hippocampal formation (HF) in mammals is responsible for collecting information about the sensory world and, if appropriate, storing that information as memories, to be offloaded to other brain structures later. The HF has a number of notable response properties, including nested, quasi-periodic activity. In this project, the student will work with […]
An In Vitro Model of the Infarct Border Zone
Mentors Project Description The severity of a heart attack is determined by the area of heart muscle affected by the occluded vessel, but also by a‘border zone’ (BZ) that separates the infarct region from the unaffected heart muscle. The BZ has been implicated in adverse remodeling that occurs after a heart attack, but because the […]
RNA Delivery for Therapeutic Applications
Mentors Project Description Therapeutic RNA delivery has applications in protein replacement, vaccine development, genetic engineering, and even the creation of fundamental research tools and cell lines. In this project, the student will start with a therapeutic target of interest encoded within a DNA plasmid and perform all steps necessary to successfully create RNA, transfect the […]