This is a list of things I’ve written over the years, with short descriptions. External links lead to resources hosted on other websites, and PDF links direct to resources hosted here.

Genetic evidence from zooarchaeological samples suggests Iron Age horses not specialized in size or speed

PDF

December 11, 2023

This was a paper completed for a class on applying archaeological methods to the study of past environments, revealing the history of human and non-human life on Earth. I examined whether genetic data sequenced from ancient DNA molecules could tell us about the physical builds of horses from thousands of years ago.

Multiple Paths to Drought Resistance in Wheat: Zinc finger protein gene TaZFP13D Is Important, but Redundant

PDF

June 12, 2023

This was a paper completed for a graduate-level class I qualified into. Common wheat or bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) has many methods of responding to stresses caused by drought. I investigated whether the under- or over-activation of one method of dealing with drought would lead to compensatory changes in other drought response pathways. It was found that when the gene TaZFP13D was silenced, changes in other genes typical of the “drought response” were intensified, and when the same gene was overexpressed, other genes either did not respond or responded in a direction opposite to the “drought response”. This result shows that for an important function like drought resistance, the effect of knocking out one method, whether it occurs naturally or is induced for a study, is offset by the continued and heightened effects of other pathways.

Far From Heimat: German Nationality, Careers, and Allegiance in Kiautschou Bay.

External Link (Macksey Journal, JHU)

September 20, 2021

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a legal regime founded on multinational treaties afforded foreigners extraordinary privileges, roles, and duties within the Chinese imperial (late Qing) and Republican states. In particular, China’s Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) was staffed near-exclusively by European and later Japanese foreigners at the higher levels. I examined how this multinational role in Chinese governance overlapped with the exclusive spheres of interest carved out by specific countries. The hypothesis was that since Germany at the time had an exclusive sphere of influence in the Kiaochow Bay Leased Territory (today Qingdao, Shandong), German officials might have been favored for promotion in that territory’s CMCS office.

The data turned out not to support this hypothesis! But I learned a lot, and was happy to have had my work published in the Macksey Journal, journal of proceedings of the Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium at Johns Hopkins University.

  • Analyzed the careers of almost 1000 19th European officials in China by tracking the dates of hiring and promotion- Visualized tendencies among officials of different backgrounds through Python’s Matplotlib. Made statistical arguments based on this data with the help of Python’s SciPy.
  • Excel to collate the initial data, transcribed from digitized Google Books.

A Proposed Probabilistic Method for Distinguishing Between Delusions and Other Environmental Judgements, With Applications to Psychotherapy

External Link (Frontiers of Psychology)

August 9, 2021

  • Participated in original research with the advice of Professor Sarah Marzen of Claremont McKenna College, which was published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology. Used Python for data manipulation/statistical operations, made graphs in Python’s Matplotlib library.