Faculty Mentor: Nathan Magee Student: Andrew Miller We studied the optical properties of ice crystals using environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM). The ESEM allowed us to image the mesoscopic surface of ice crystals, and rough surface topography (including linear strands, crevasses, islands, and steps) was discovered at an unprecedented level of magnification: 10,000x. We used an… Continue Reading
Author Archives: fscollab
Mathematical Modeling of Cancer Progression: the Impact of Invasion and the Immune System
Faculty Mentor: Jana Gevertz Students: Warren Jagger Cancer is a complex disease characterized by several major “hallmarks” that disrupt the normal state of a cell. My project focused on developing a mathematical model of tumor progression while concentrating on one cancer hallmark: the interaction between a tumor and the immune system. I developed a 2D… Continue Reading
Conducting Robot
Faculty Mentor: Andrea Salgian Students: Michael Bauer & Laurence Agina The goal of this project is to design, fabricate, and assemble a humanoid robot can conduct an orchestra with a large, varied, and non-predetermined repertoire. The robot was designed using CAD (Computer Aided Design) software. Both of its arms have four degrees of freedom, each… Continue Reading
Balancing Open Information Access With Maintaining Privacy, Security and Reliability In the Age of Social Computing
Faculty Mentor: Monisha Pulimood Students: Francisco Estevez & Shahzore Qureshi Advances in technology have made it easier to collect and store massive amounts of data. However, it has become increasingly challenging for users to find pertinent, reliable, and current information, particularly for data related to social issues of concern to local communities, for example, environmental… Continue Reading
Integrating Cloud Services and Social Network Characteristics in Application Development
Faculty Mentor: Peter DePasquale Students: Alexa Cain & Lindsey Nice This project’s goal was to develop a web-based application for the TCNJ Admissions Office. The students gained experience in both theory and implementation of technologies such as Enterprise-level Java, HTML, CSS, Java Server Pages, and MySQL databases. A combination of a Tomcat server and cloud… Continue Reading
Development of New Nickel and Palladium Complexes Containing Stabilizing Hemilabile Groups to Serve as Catalysts in Alkene Hydrogenation and Polymerization
Faculty Mentor: Abby O’Connor Students: Chris Bregna One of the driving forces in the field of organometallic chemistry is catalysis, where a catalyst is defined as an additive substance that allows a chemical reaction to occur by lowering its barrier to activation. Nickel, a relatively inexpensive metal found in high abundance in the Earth’s crust,… Continue Reading
Novel Ring Forming Reactions
Faculty Mentor: David Hunt Students: John Farrokh Benzo-fused 7-membered heterocyclic ketones have been shown to possess pharmacological activity. The goal of our project is to develop a new method of synthesizing these compounds. Starting materials were typically prepared by reacting a compound unique to each reaction with 2-cyanobenzylbromide. The reaction utilized to prepare these products… Continue Reading
Testing hormone mimic function against biological protein targets implied in human health
Faculty Mentor: Danielle Guarracino Students: Jessica Gruskos & Ari Goldwaser Vasopressin and Oxytocin are two naturally occurring hormones with biological importance. Vasopressin helps regulate water levels in the body, and lack of vasopressin is associated with Neurogenic Diabetes Insipidus (DI). Oxytocin has many biologically important functions such as initiating uterine contraction, cell signaling, and regulating… Continue Reading
Single-Molecule Investigation of Multi-Domain Folding: A Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy Study
Faculty Mentor: Michelle Bunagan Students: Andrew Apicello & Priya Gupta The focus of our project is on human serum albumin (HSA), which is a protein that can bind to many ligands (ions or molecules that form a certain type of bond with the molecule in question) and is therefore important in the study of interactions… Continue Reading
Identification of novel motifs in unaligned protein sequences Genetic and Biochemical analysis of enzymes that regulate plant growth and metabolism
Faculty Mentor: Leeann Thornton Students: Joseph Montes, Dylan McDivitt, & Amanda Soler In order grow enough food and plant products for the increasing human population, agriculture productivity must continue to improve. Currently, most plants only yield about 20 percent of their potential productivity when grown in the field. Much is unknown about how plants respond… Continue Reading