 Good afternoon. My name is Lisa Garcia-Bibleia and I have the privilege of serving as Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division here at UC Berkeley. It is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Berkeley's 2024 grad slam competition. Today's event comes on the heels of Graduate and Professional Student Appreciation Week, a week that seeks to emphasize the contributions, impact and value of graduate and professional students on campuses throughout the United States. What could be more fitting than to round up that week with grad slam, an opportunity to celebrate and make visible the outstanding research done by our graduate students. Grad slam was launched 10 years ago by former University of California President, Janet Napolitano, with the goal of sharpening graduate student communication skills and providing an opportunity for the public to learn more about the research being undertaken by graduate students at the 10 UC campuses. This program also enables us to demonstrate our commitment to access in that it asks graduate students to present their research in jargon-free language, especially as a public university, it is our responsibility to communicate our research in a manner that is accessible to a general audience, not just to academic specialists. So here's how the UC-wide grad slam competition works. Each of the 10 UC campuses conducts its own campus-wide competition and selects a finalist to compete in the system-wide event, which will be hosted this year by UC President Michael Drake on May 3rd. That competition will be live-streamed and we hope that you will all log on and join us again to cheer on the 10 UC finalists. Here's the process we use at Berkeley to determine who our campus finalists will be. A faculty subcommittee of the Graduate Council reviewed videos submitted by graduate students from a wide range of disciplines and selected the eight semifinalists whose presentations you will hear today. Let me take this opportunity to thank the members of the Advisory Committee for Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Professional Development for all their hard work. We know there were many worthy submissions and every year these are really difficult decisions to make. Today's presentations have been evaluated by a distinguished panel of judges. I would like to take a minute to thank each of them. First, Wendy Takuta, an award-winning TV journalist, speech coach, media consultant, author, speaker, and naturalist. Eric Stern, who's a partner at Capital International Investors, serves as vice chair of the UC Berkeley Foundation and also is the chair of the Graduate Division's Executive Advisory Committee. Professor Emerita Fiona Doyle, the distinguished professor emerita of material science and engineering and our former vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the Graduate Division. Our heartfelt thanks to all of you for volunteering your time and giving us your expertise each year. In addition to the panel of judges, several years ago we introduced a new feature to our competition. You, our audience members, will also be judges. Later in the program, you will be invited to select a people's choice winner. So please stay tuned. Now I am very pleased to introduce our keynote speaker, Justin Lee, a PhD candidate in metabolic biology here at Berkeley. Justin was not only our Berkeley campus grad slam champion in 2022, he also took home first prize in the 2022 UC system-wide competition. Knowing that he would be unavailable today, Justin kindly recorded a message for us to share his reflections on the value of the grad slam competition. Hello, world. Thank you to grad div and the grad slam team for inviting me back to share this moment with you all. I am thrilled to have been asked to speak to you all today about my experience and the importance of grad slam. We all don't realize it, but storytelling is interwoven into every fabric of our lives. It's at every dinner gathering when we tell our closest family and best friends how our days went. It's at those water cooler chats at work, after spring break to tell everyone what amazing adventures we embarked on. And of course, storytelling is present in our professional and graduate research in sharing our work and building our dissertations to publish. A good story is how information is transferred from generation to generation, from peer to peer, and today from the technical researcher to the general broad audience. For most stories, it starts with a problem, a conflict to solve. My grad slam story started with my research project that stemmed around studying the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding the biology of how the virus works in order to better combat its spread and disease. I was super excited to share my findings and work, but was unsure on how to deliver the right messages and succinctly deliver that message to a larger non-expert audience. Then my story enters writing action. I threw my hat into the ring to try grad slam as an opportunity for professional development, but also a chance to finesse, work through, and receive feedback on my verbal communication. But the biggest unexpected twist to the story was the challenge of compressing years of work and discovery into just three minutes. It really forced me to look inward at my work and pull out what was really important and the big takeaways I would want an audience to walk away with. The climax of my journey was receiving the honor of representing Berkeley at the UC level grad slam competition. Preparing for that competition put preparation into overdrive in terms of copy editing, practicing, rewriting, and then practicing it all over again. But above it all, it put my work into a new perspective. We get so immersed in the day to day that sometimes we forget to see the big picture impacts of the work. Since grad slam, I have taken the skills and natural communication style that I found and have continued to practice and apply those skills to my personal presentations at meetings and conferences to continue sharing updates and findings of my work to others. One of the coolest parts of learning to communicate and using this platform to send the message out to the community is hearing the interest, engaging in meaningful conversations and uncovering impact of the research in areas beyond what I imagined it would impact. For my project in particular, my research has been published and subsequently picked up by philanthropic foundations to continue our research and study for future pandemic readiness. The importance of effective communication and storytelling cannot be understated. Let's not look too far back to the COVID-19 pandemic. When science and information communication was at the forefront as policy makers, scientists, educators, healthcare leaders, and the like all grappled with the challenges of communicating the rapidly evolving field of knowledge around the virus and the pandemic. How research is shared matters not to just other academics, but to the general public to whom the research is meant to benefit and to impact. We use research insights to make everyday decisions but the only way we can make the best decisions is to have the right information. GradSlam helps bring the storytelling aspect of communication to the forefront to make mindful decisions and choices on how we communicate and convey our messages and work to the world. We all love compelling stories, stories to cheer for, stories to follow and stories we can share. But the biggest challenge is telling the right story, to tell a story that makes you care, to tell a story that makes you think and remember and to tell a story that makes you want to find the sequel and learn more. I'm so excited for everyone to hear from these graduate students today who are working on answering some of the world's toughest questions to influence the next generation of decision makers and thought leaders. They are compelling stories spanning the rich and diverse studies being conducted here on campus, stories out from the field about adolescent mental health, to stories showing how to make social impact stemming from personal experiences, to story fresh off the lab bench, uncovering how our body, the environment and the physical world around us operates. To the GradSlamers today, I hope through this GradSlam process, you found your own storytelling style and thank you for sharing your voice, impact and stories to the community and stories to the community. Thank you, Justin. In a minute, we will begin the presentations, but first a word about the order of the speakers. Rather than the usual last name alphabetical order in an effort toward greater fairness, we have randomized the selection. For the GradSlam competition, each contestant has three minutes to present their research. According to the guidelines used in all GradSlam competitions, presentations are judged on intellectual significance, appropriateness, clarity, organization, engagement, delivery and visuals. Points are deducted for every three seconds a presenter exceeds the three minute time maximum. In preparation for today's event, we had each contestant prerecord their presentation. Please note that the contestants were prohibited from editing their videos after they were recorded. Our contestants are also here with us live in studio. So after each presentation, I'll be asking each student one or two informal questions so we can get to know them a little bit better and hear about how they came to their research area and their future plans. After all eight presentations, you will be invited to select our People's Choice Award recipient through an online link that we will provide. At that time, we will also invite the audience to submit questions. After our contestants have answered audience questions, I will then announce the winners. All eight competitors today will receive at least $300 with the People's Choice, second and first place finalists receiving $750, $1,000 and $3,000 respectively. Today's first place winner will also go on to represent Berkeley at the UC-wide competition next month on May 3rd. Our first presentation is from Radha Mastandreya, a third year PhD student in physics. Let's play the video. Introducing the Higgs boson. Even if you haven't heard of this fundamental particle, you've definitely interacted with it or at least your atoms have because when the Higgs boson interacts with other particles, it gives them mass. Let's go back to the 1960s. Particle physicists are trying to create a theory called the standard model to describe all the particles and forces in the universe. But they have a huge problem. The theory only works if all the particles are mass less, which is not true of the world that we live in. But then the physicists introduced a new particle called the Higgs boson. And this boson had just the right properties such that it could give a mass to other particles. In 2012, 50 years later, we observed the Higgs boson at particle colliders. We smashed together two protons, combed through all the decay products and we found evidence for the production of about five Higgs bosons. A tiny number, but a definite discovery. Now, our discovery told us a lot about the Higgs boson's behavior. We know, for example, that the Higgs boson interacts with some particles like electrons to give them mass. We know that it doesn't interact with other particles like photons, which explains why photons are mass less. And this knowledge can be encoded into the shape of what we call the Higgs potential function. If we imagine the Higgs boson to be like a golf ball, then measuring the Higgs potential function is like asking what the golf course looks like. Is it flat or is it hilly? Now, the Higgs boson can give other particles mass because it sits in the base of a double valley potential. But we don't know the exact equation for the curve of these valleys. And far away from the center, we have no idea what the potential even looks like. If we can measure the full Higgs potential, then we would know so much more about the exact process that allows the Higgs boson to give particles mass. So how do we measure the full Higgs potential? Well, we can look at pairs of Higgs bosons produced at particle colliders. For my research, I designed machine learning tools to analyze Higgs boson pairs. As it turns out, Higgs pairs aren't produced very often, but my machine learning tools are great at extracting every bit of information from them. My hope is for the tools to convert this information into a hypothesis about what the shape of the Higgs potential should look like in order to produce the observed data. And right now is just the perfect time to do this research as our particle colliders have never been more powerful and our machine learning tools have never been more diverse. To conclude, we owe the Higgs boson a lot. It's the reason that you and I can step on a scale and see a number that isn't zero because the Higgs boson gives us our mass. But how does this mass transfer happen? Well, we are just a few collision events away from uncovering the final secrets of the Higgs boson. Thank you so much, Radha, for that wonderful presentation. I'd like to ask you a few questions so that the audience has the opportunity to get to know you just a little bit better. The first is just what brought you, what made you interested in this particular area of research? Well, I mean, to be honest, I first got interested in physics when I was really young. I was really interested in astronomy. I think everyone has that feeling of looking up at the stars and just saying, wow, there's a whole universe out there and we could discover the laws that govern it. But I got into particle physics in my undergraduate years when I had a really cool teacher and I decided, hey, I'd really like to work with you. I don't really care what research you do. And it turns out he did particle physics. So that kind of changed my trajectory and I've been doing particle physics ever since. Thank you for reminding us how important it is to have great teachers in whatever subject it may be. What do you think is the most fun part of your research? What do you enjoy the most? I think a lot of it, a lot of what's most fun is sort of the day-to-day problem solving. You know, there's all these big ideas that govern us, discovering the fundamental forces that, as I said, govern the universe. But what is really exciting and what I can actually focus on is the problems of coding and actually writing the analysis. A lot of times writing code is like solving a puzzle or yeah, I guess it is like solving a puzzle and that's the kind of stuff that I really enjoy doing. And it means that I can actually have a concrete thing that makes me happy at the end of a work day instead of just a sort of more lofty idea that is hard to really like, you know, see the end goal of. So yeah, I would say the little problem solving and the little challenges and the actual coding work is the most fun. And making them work, right? Because that's always the joy of learning what it runs. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Radha. Our second presentation is from Mafunki Kumar, a third year PhD candidate in vision and science. Let's play the video. A sunny day, children playing outside, but imagine your world gradually fading to darkness. This is the reality for millions of people across the world diagnosed with open-ink glaucoma. But what is open-ink glaucoma? It's the most common form of this disease and causes degeneration of the optic nerve and ventral ganglion cells, often due to high pressure. Currently, there's no cure for glaucoma and patients still experience death of their ventral ganglion cells and loss of their vision with current treatments. But what if instead, we could protect our retinal ganglion cells from dying? Let's take a step back and look at a healthy eye under normal or homeostatic conditions. The retina consists of a network of neurons and support cells that work together to help us see. These support cells are called glial cells and my research focuses on one glial cell type in particular, mule glia, a cell type that spans the entire retina and interacts with all the surrounding neurons, especially the retinal ganglion cells by clearing toxins and regulating nutrients around the eye. Our eye, like our body, even when healthy, responds to cycles of small inflammatory insults. In response to these insults, glia can become reactive as a sort of protective mechanism in order to maintain a homeostatic environment to surrounding neurons. Now, let's look at this in the context of glaucoma. Unlike everyday small insults, the constant increased pressure acts as a chronic ongoing attack, again prompting mule glia to become reactive. But while reactive mule glia can initially be a protective mechanism, the continuous reactivity starts to cause detrimental effects to retinal ganglion cells. My research also looks at lipoxins, a type of lipid mediator that regulates immune cells and resolves inflammation. Our lab previously discovered that these lipoxins can actually protect retinal ganglion cells from dying in the face of ocular pressure, and that certain glial cells can make lipoxins under homeostatic condition. However, the exact mechanisms of this pathway were unidentified, and my research hopes to build on this by trying to understand how mule glia can produce lipoxins and how this pathway could potentially be dysregulated under ocular pressure. The goals of my research are to understand the lipoxin pathway in reactive mule glia using techniques such as primary cell culture where we can extract mule glia from the retina and understand this pathway on a single cell level, or using animal models of ocular pressure where we can understand mule glia reactivity in the context of the entire retina. Using some of these techniques, we can try to understand how this pathway is protective to retinal ganglion cells. And the goals of this research are to find a novel neuro therapeutic cure so that glaucoma is not a sentence to darkness, but a treatment that can be effectively managed and potentially cured. Thank you. Thank you, Matangi, for your wonderful presentation. So again, I just want folks to have the chance to get to know you a little bit better. So let's start with you talk a little bit in your video about this, but what brought you to this particular area of research focusing on glaucoma? Yes, thank you. So I've actually always really, really enjoyed biology since taking it from my elementary and middle and high school classes, but I was always really interested in glaucoma because my dad got diagnosed with glaucoma when I was really young. So I've kind of always just been surrounded by the jargon of glaucoma. And so when I had the opportunity to continue studying it in grad school, it was really cool to be able to understand the mechanisms of the disease and like really get into it, like after just hearing about it as a kid to now like understanding it from a more scientific level. Well, as someone with a lot of family members that have it, I hope you're successful in your research. Thank you. In a self-interested way. So what is the most fun aspect of your research for you? I actually really enjoy being in what we call a wet bio lab. So every day is super different. It's like the standard, like wearing the lab coats and wearing the gloves. And every day you're doing a different experiment. So I like the novelty of being able to like do a different problem or like do different experiments every day and try to understand like the results of your experiments and how that's furthering like your scientific question. Thank you so much, Babangi, for your. Thank you. For your research and for your presentation. So our third presentation is from Jin He Yong Lim who is a second year PhD student in school psychology. Let's play the video. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, many Chinese American adolescents have experienced significant mental health challenges which was mainly caused by the discrimination against the Asian and Chinese American population. A few researchers emphasize the necessity of supporting Chinese American adolescents, especially who showed high psychopathological symptoms such as depression and anxiety during the pandemic. However, considering psychopathological symptoms is not sufficient for identifying those who need mental health support. According to the dual factor model of mental health, not only the psychopathological symptoms, but also subjective well-being such as one's happiness and life satisfaction is important to be considered when examining one's mental health. Based on those two axes, the dual factor model suggests four quadrants of mental health. Complete mental health with low symptoms and high well-being, symptomatic but content group with high symptoms and high well-being, trouble group with high symptoms and low well-being and vulnerable group with low symptoms and low well-being. In this research, I conducted a profile analysis on psychopathological symptoms and subjective well-being of 207 Chinese American adolescents. The data supported the four profile solution that is consistent with the dual factor model and the percentage of students included in each quadrant were showed like this. The subsequent analysis suggested that the complete mental health group showed the best academic and social emotional outcomes, but the trouble group had the lowest level of academic engagement and the vulnerable group had the lowest score in their social emotional competencies indicating that those students may struggle with managing their emotions and maintaining good relationship with others. What do you see here? If we are to support Chinese American students who have mental health issues only by their psychopathological symptoms, we can only support 29% of the students in quadrants two and three. However, you can see the students in the vulnerable group show low social emotional outcomes and also need urgent education and support. So by considering both psychopathological symptoms and subjective well-being, we should also capture the hardships of the vulnerable group who accounts for another 29% of the sample. Now, this is the post-pandemic era when we should strive for the recovery of Chinese American students who have been largely marginalized during the pandemic. Whom would you give support? We should not ignore the students and the vulnerable group with low symptoms, but also with low subject well-being. Thank you so much, Juntion, for the great presentation. So I have the same two questions for you. The first, you talked a little bit about this, but maybe if you could expand a little bit more about how you developed an interest in this particular area of research. Yeah, as an international student from Korea, I have always been curious about why mental health issue is so disrewarded compared to academic issues in Korea. And I think that that's mostly because of the stigmatization if we acknowledge that we have mental health issues. And that's also because we have understood mental health issues only in terms of pathologies. So from that idea, I became interested in dual factor model of mental health and also Asian American mental health research to relieve that some kind of stigmatization around mental health issues and mental problems. Thank you for that. And while the study of mental health may not sound fun in our traditional definition, what do you enjoy most about your research? Or what are the things that make you come back to it day after day? Actually the most exciting part of school psychology research is that what I found in research can also be found in my actual practice because the school psych program adopts a scientist's practitioner training model. So we are trying not only in conducting research, but also in providing professional psychological services. So we engage in a lot of practicum and internship work as well. So my practicum experience has highly influenced my research questions and also vice versa. I hope my research can also be translated and beneficial to actual educational practices. Could you explain a little bit for people who may not understand what a practicum is? Practicum is more about practicing our psychological service skills related to assessments and intervention and consultation skills that should be very beneficial of like psychological perspectives of like teachers, students, and yeah, parents. Thank you so much, Jin-hyong. It's been a pleasure. Our fourth presentation is from Anna Dmitriyeva, a third year PhD candidate in plant biology. Let's play the video. What would you do if a severe weather event, say a hurricane, was to threaten your home? You would likely evacuate until conditions are safe again, right? But now imagine this crazy nightmare. What if in such a chaos, your feet were physically stuck in the ground and you just couldn't escape at all? That's the reality for plants. As climate change becomes more extreme, many species of both farm and wild plants will not survive in places they grow today. So how can we ensure that the plants we rely on do survive and keep feeding us? Many solutions come from genetic engineering, making a small precise change in the plant's DNA to make them resilient to stress, like drought or flooding. And that's really promising. But the process of creating such engineered plants holds many challenges. The key challenge comes from this critical step called regeneration. Picture a succulent. Many of them can regenerate an entire plant from a single leaf, right? But most crops cannot do that as easily, making it slow and difficult to engineer them. This is where my research comes in. I'm studying a plant related to mustard that is really well studied and easier to work with than most crops, enabling me to do cool experiments. This plant also has an impressive ability. When I cut off just one leaf and place it on nutrients, it can form new stem cells and grow new roots, similar to many succulents. Such regeneration of roots is critical for genetic engineering. But we don't fully understand how do these leaf cells eventually become root cells? To understand this mechanism better, I am studying many variants of the same plant which come from all around the world and have small differences in their DNA, giving them different adaptations. From testing over 40 such variants so far and analyzing their root growth, I have found that some can regenerate really well, like variant one, and others are terrible at it, like variant two, making almost no roots at all. During the rest of my PhD, I want to find what are the differences in DNA making some variants regenerate so much better. And here's why you should be excited. Even though we don't eat the plant I study, if I find a part of DNA that makes my mustard relatives regenerate better, the same DNA fragment could be added to important crop species like tomato to make them regenerate better as well. That would make it easier and faster to engineer such crops and give them the resilience traits we need as we head into more extreme weather patterns. So even though plants have their feet stuck in the ground, my research will make it easier to make them stronger so they can face climate change head on. Thank you so much, Anna. Now I'm gonna picture a little feet at the bottom of all my plants as I plant them this spring. But thank you for that presentation. And we just like to hear a little bit more about you. So why don't we start with what brought you and what made you interested in this particular research? Yeah. So I got into plant biology somewhat accidentally, I would say. I got a summer job working for a very cool plant lab as I was beginning college and it inspired me to stay studying plants. But as I took more classes and I got some different research experience, I became really fascinated by plant diversity that's out there and also plant adaptations. And I didn't know much about regeneration until I came to Berkeley, but my professor here actually really wanted to study the school mechanism. So now I get to study still plant natural variation or diversity, but also the underlying genetics, which is really exciting and very cool. And potentially transformative, I think. So what are the most fun aspects of your research? That's a great question. I would say a couple of things. I think one of my favorite things is the sharing of ideas in research. So many times when I present in a lab meeting, I will get new potential experiments, new suggestions, new interpretations from people in the room. And I find that very uplifting and motivating. But I also really enjoy mentoring. So I currently am working with an undergraduate student and I get to see her get excited when I tell her about the experiments or when I teach her new lab skills. And I find that gives me a lot of joy as well. Thank you for reminding us how much research is really a team sport in terms of people building ideas in community. So thank you so much, Ana. Our fifth presentation is from Camar Beirusi, a fifth year PhD student in mechanical engineering. Let's play the video. In the name of God, you're all used to check the weather forecasting apps on your smartphones before going on a trip just to make sure that we are well-equipped for different weather conditions. But how often do you check the weather inside your body and how many devices are available for the user? Through my PhD, I was trying to build a super sensitive sensor for regular health monitoring. To accomplish this goal, we need to decode the communications between different organs inside your body. And since most of these communications are happening through the chemicals, we need to somehow see and count them. These chemicals are very small, and unfortunately, we can't use conventional lenses to magnify them. So what should we do? Fortunately, we have the metallic nanoparticles. These tiny particles are supporting surface plasmoons, enabling us to shrink the light down to the nanometric scale and magnify these tiny molecules. But you cannot achieve this superlensing effect by randomly leaving these nanoparticles. I spent almost four years on different possible designs, and eventually I came up with a unique field arranging these particles into a 2D priotic pattern, which we call it plasmonic metasurface. And using that, I achieved record-breaking sensitivity. Equivalent to find a tennis ball inside a one kilometer by one kilometer line tennis court. But this is not the entire story. Together with a super-sensitive sensor, you need a super-sensitive measurement technique. I was always inspired by the way astronomers are looking into the sky and searching for far galaxies using huge instruments such as LIGO. I just shrink it down into a table top set up and combine that with artificial intelligence models, similar to those being used in creativity. And using this unique combination, I'll build my own sensitive measurement technique. Let's just imagine the impact of the sensor that I built. Just leave a drop of sample on top of a chip, which is smaller than a penny, and leave it there for 20 minutes, then passing this through the AI algorithm, and then you will get a complete report of different biomarkers moving inside your body, like different vitamins, potential viruses, or even early signs of cancer. And that's how you can be ready for the rainy day inside your body. Come here. Never thought about internal weather before, so I appreciate that. So similar to other folks, I thought I'd start by just asking you, what made you interested in thinking about this area of research? Yeah, I was always thinking about somehow helping people dealing with different diseases, but my interest was in the physics. So that was like a challenging problem for me. I wanted to find something that can basically take a boost of these things. And I found out things related to bioengineering are the best because I can do my interesting. And at the same time, I can basically help the patients and solve these challenging issues out there. And fortunately, when I just joined Berkeley, that was a good opportunity for me to just go into different classes, work with different faculties, and eventually I can find the best thing that I can work on it doing my PhD as my PhD thesis. Thank you. And what did you find to be the most fun in your research area? Actually, from TriHoy, I was always interested in playing with lasers. And yeah, my research topic right now is just living with different lasers, like huge lasers. And every day I'm going there, playing with them, doing some measurement. And in like other time, I just learned to see what can I do else with these instruments in the land. And that's very fun and interesting for me. So I had to get people interested in mechanical engineering. You get to play with lasers to do on a good basis. Thank you so much. Come here. You're welcome. Our sixth presentation is from Akeana Ortiz-Sedeno, who is a second-year master's student in city and regional planning. Let's play the video. From New Orleans to San Juan, disaster recovery has been abused to fast-track gentrification. As a climate and cost of living crisis climax worldwide, my research explores how to develop safe and affordable housing for long-term residents of rural and coastal communities with tourist economies. Using the lens of disaster capitalism, I explore how community land trusts can prevent land speculation and improve resilience, wealth distribution, and relocation practices. Recovery is a renaissance, an opportunity to correct burning qualities in the built environment or rebuild them. After Katrina Congressman Baker bragged, we finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did. Disaster capitalists appreciate how disasters clear an open frontier to settle or explore on vacation. For example, for hundreds of years, there was little private property on Burbida. Descendants of slaves shared the land and voted on new developments. But after Irma, Robert De Niro worked with the prime minister to change the constitution and build a resort that cost millions more than rebuilding the entire island. So what's the alternative? I suggest cities invest in community land trusts or CLTs. In CLTs, homes are permanently affordable and members have equal slices of equity in the land and votes on property improvements. Community land trust balance, housing as a right versus a commodity and help bridge the racial wealth gap by enabling residents to build generational wealth. My research includes comparative analysis and interviews. I interviewed owners of mobile homes, developers and CLT organizers. Additionally, I look at rates of demographic change and damage between homes owned by CLTs versus large developers. My findings conclude that CLTs often do better after disasters. When empowered to choose how their monthly payments are spent, residents are more likely to invest in safety and prioritize affordability, while large developers are more likely to prioritize amenities that attract healthier tenants. Take Pasadena Trails, a resident owned community in Texas. Thanks to drainage built before Harvey, they were the only surrounding community with no major damages. Inspired nearby Houston did what I'd love to see more cities do and use disaster recovery money to make the largest investment in the CLT ever by a U.S. city. But because marginalized communities have historically been forced to live in hazard zones, it's sometimes better to cut and paste neighborhoods elsewhere through manager tree. That's like the episode of SpongeBob where Patrick suggested taking Bikini Bottom and pushing it over there. El Camino Marquina and San Juan is the gold standard. Thanks to the participatory structure of the CLT, they were able to relocate more than 5,000 homes from a polluted mangrove. Overall, building and planning shared equity housing in coastal communities can help build resilience in neighborhoods that haven't historically had access to how their communities grow and change. Donna, I think the first time in grads land that SpongeBob has been referenced. So I like that. Would love to know, I mean, this is obviously a very important topic as the climate changes. So I'm just curious what made you interested in pursuing this research? Of course. So I originally became interested in the intersection of disaster capitalism, displacement and racial justice in the fourth grade. While my community was not directly impacted by Katrina, the floodwaters were high enough so that my principal had to carry us on her shoulders and swim us home from school. And so shortly thereafter, we ended up relocating into the storm for Hurricane Rita and staying in a mega shelter with people who were displaced from New Orleans and Texas. And from there, I became really involved in grassroots organizing and homelessness outreach. Then fast forwarding a bit to sophomore year in undergrad, Hurricane Harvey completely devastated my hometown and completely permanently changed the landscape of Puerto Rico where I still have family. And so I spent several months off and on in between doing grassroots work back home, doing some advocacy work in DC, and then months out from the storm doing hands-on disaster recovery work in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. And the devastation and predatory development there was so severe that I really wanted to look upstream for solutions versus focusing on the response element of things. And the next semester, I had the opportunity to shadow and connect with some really beautiful transformative and collectivist communities in Brazil, Spain and South Africa through a human rights-based urban planning program. And so when I returned home to the United States, I was really eager to figure out how we could apply some of these amazing transformative solutions to improve similar communities in the States. And that's how I became interested in community land trust. And I've been pursuing that interest ever since. Thank you. I think your story and all the others show how much kind of early life experiences really do impact the kinds of things we want to think about later in life. And I'm sorry you had to go through a number of natural disasters to get there. Yeah. And I know again, similarly, like disaster capitalism doesn't sound like fun necessarily, but which aspects of the research do you find the most fulfilling or just make you feel like you're having the impact? Yeah. I think some of the most fun and fulfilling elements of my research are the interviews. Like this summer, I had an opportunity to do some Spanish translation in Watsonville with some mobile home or manufactured home part communities for my professor and just being able to communicate with people who are developers, people who are living in and organizing community land trust has been really fruitful for me. Then also just growing up in a pretty disadvantaged rural community, I am really inspired by the potential to be able to make tangible change in communities like mine and in my actual hometown. So that is something that pushes me forward. Thank you so much. I too, when I've done qualitative research, I'm always humbled at people's generosity and also their wisdom. So a great part of the research process. Thank you so much, Kayana. Thank you. Our seventh, so second to last presentation is from Victoria Cheve, six-year PhD candidate in molecular and cell biology. Let's play the video. They are generally pretty inoffensive. They share the world with us and their presence benefits our environment and our health. However, some of them can cause disease and we refer to these as pathogens. When pathogens get into our body, like when we eat infected food, they make more copies of themselves, which we call to replicate, and they tend to move around, which we call to disseminate. Different pathogens infect different tissues, but the one our lab studies is called Listeria and it can infect the brain. When I gave Listeria orally to a susceptible host, I found that bacteria crossed the intestinal barrier and disseminated to the spleen and the liver. Few bacteria were ever found in the blood, but eventually, after about two weeks, many bacteria were found in the brain. The issue here is that all Listeria look the same, so we can't know if there are many bacteria because one, they easily disseminated to that tissue, or two, getting there was difficult, but once they reached their destination, they were able to replicate very efficiently. To follow the bacteria on their journey from the gut to the brain, I used a mixture of Listeria that were labeled with a genetic barcode. All the Listeria and the mixture are the same, but they have a small DNA tag that allows us to identify them. Using a sequencer, we can read the barcode on each bacterium, represented here as colors, and assess the diversity of the bacterial population in a sample. When I gave these labeled Listeria orally to a susceptible host, I found that many barcodes are recovered from the spleen and the liver. So Listeria was able to cross the intestinal barrier somewhat efficiently and disseminate across the host. However, when I looked at the brain, there was only one barcode. This means that it's quite hard to get into the brain, but once bacteria get there, they can replicate really efficiently. I also noticed that in this oral infection model, the blood was very poorly infected. When I tried infections directly into the blood, I found that a highly infected and highly diverse blood indeed led to greater diversity of Listeria in the brain. This analysis gave us insight into the critical points in Listeria's journey that could be targeted to prevent disease progression, namely dissemination across the intestines and invasion of the blood. Although Listeriosis can be a lethal diagnosis, cases are very rare. So the work we're doing here aims at laying the foundation for future studies to assess trafficking pathways and other more clinically relevant pathogens such as tuberculosis or salmonella. Thank you so much, Victoria. So I'm gonna start with you as with everybody else to just ask what brought you to this topic of research. Yeah, so I've been really interested in studying health and disease for a very long time. And the really the interaction between microbes and hosts and us in particular is something that I've been pursuing for a while. And throughout my education, I've worked with a few different pathogens. And I've always found it really cool to just see how different pathogens have different ways of interacting with their hosts. And so when I was starting grad school and trying to decide what I wanted to do with the six years that I ended up spending here, I was getting really interested in the brain. And I had this sort of serendipitous interaction with my now current principal investigator, Dan, where he had a project from like 20 years ago where someone had found interesting data with Listeria in the brain. And so we sort of revived this project and created something that's been really fun to work with. Thank you for that. And speaking of fun, so which aspects do you find the most fun? Usually pathogens and fun don't go together in a sentence. So just curious, what's most fun for you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've been really fortunate throughout my graduate career to get to collaborate a lot. And so all of the technology building was done already before. I started and so I studied this really tight collaboration with another lab across the country. And so I've had the chance to go and discuss ideas with people who are away, but also discuss a lot with the people at Berkeley and even within my lab. So it has been a lot of interaction that I have been very fruitful and exciting. And then I also really like the day-to-day like what has been discussed earlier, just getting to do something, see what comes out and think about the broader impacts and the story that we're trying to create and think about what this means for the next step that we have to take. And so sort of building the story from the start has been really, really exciting. Thank you. And again, I think we tend to think about science as a solitary activity, but what you learn on this campus is how much it is a social one. So thank you so much for your research and for your presentation. And last but not least, our final presentation is from Paul Rubio, who is a second-year MPH student in the School of Public Health. Let's play the video. Yes, be after the needle. Wake up son. They have out of the papa. They took your father. As an adolescent separated from his parents, I am now here today with an anxiety disorder and depression, serving as a testament to the repercussions of immigration enforcement strategies. While my story is unique, it's a tragedy that countless others in the immigrant community continue to face. This is why it's important for public health professionals and legislators to come together and redirect immigration priorities for addressing health disparities, not exacerbating them. By reframing immigration enforcement as a public health crisis, we could pave the way for more effective interventions and solutions. This is where my research becomes apparent. I address the association between heightened concerns regarding U.S. immigration policies, such as the fear of family evocation and increased levels of aggression among U.S. born Latin analysts. Using cohort data obtained from the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas, my analysis dives into this precedent issue. To assess 16-year-old self-reported concerns regarding immigration policy, I utilize the perceived immigration policy effect scale, also known as pipes. With these survey results, I examine how pipe scores alongside two validated measurement variables for aggression. These behavior assessment tools are often used to evaluate the extent of aggressive tendencies and hostile behaviors in individuals. After running carefully different models, my findings reveal statistically significant outcomes, illustrating how immigration enforcement strategies profoundly impact the psychological well-being of Latina adolescents. Notably, higher pipe scores correlate with an increased likelihood of exhibiting aggressive behaviors compared to youth who reported lower moderate or no immigration policy concerns. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, immigration emerges as a leading voter concern, sparking increased anti-immigrant matters. In response, my research advocates for actionable solutions to support Latina youth and Black youth, such as calling forth the abolition of ICE, also known as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Thank you. Thank you so much, Choyne. You talked about in your video what brought you to this work, so I thought I'd ask a slightly different question if that's okay. Which is really immigration policies in area of our politics that has become somewhat calcified in terms of its progress through the federal legislature. So I'm just wondering if you think this reframe of really thinking about the health impacts of immigration enforcement might help us come to a better solution in the immigration area. Yeah, that's a great question. I believe that oftentimes during these big, monumental election moments such as this year's presidential election, people think of it as a political issue, yet there's clear research such as my own that indicates this is a public health crisis. And by getting people to think, oh, wow, these immigration policies have adverse health outcomes to some of our U.S. born citizens and in bigger picture, the undocumented immigrant community, I feel we can finally start to see the repercussions of passing an executive order or being able to think about like, how can we better assist our marginalized communities? Thank you so much. And similar to Kiana, there's no fun in thinking about people's suffering, but I guess I'm just curious which parts of the research did you find the most fulfilling or the most meaningful to you? Yeah, I feel like diving into uncharted territory has been very rewarding. There's not a lot of research or if any research, then similar to the research question that I'm asking, which is seeing whether or not U.S. immigration policies link to aggression in Latina youth. But in addition, just being able to go to different conferences such as last year's American Public Health Association conference and just talking to people about my research and getting the word out there and also going to these events and just raising awareness in general about the repercussions of immigration and then just using my voice to talk to the audience, talk to members to urge folks to those who have the ability to vote, to go out and vote, whether it's this presidential election or different elections in their own districts and see what can they do as a voter to assist the immigrant community and marginalized communities because at the end of the day, it's our responsibility to use our own privileges to be able to assist these communities who are often targeted directly or often left out. Thank you so much, Hoyle. I appreciate you focusing on the human costs of something that we see is just about law enforcement. And thanks to everyone. This is the last of our presentations. I hope you all see why it is such an honor to get to work with graduate students on this campus. They are all amazing and are doing incredible work. This is just a snapshot of some of the great things that are happening at Berkeley. And now, members of the audience, it is your turn. Now is the time for you to vote. And while you're voting, you will have the opportunity to ask questions of our participants. So if you could please go to the URL that is on the slide, grad.berkeley.edu, forward slash grad slam, and submit a question for one of our contestants and also vote. And if you are viewing this through our website, you can find the links above the live stream. We'll have a 10 minute break right now to allow you to vote and to write in your questions. And so please join us back promptly at four 10. Thanks, everyone. Welcome back, everyone. Now we'll have a chance to ask the contestants your questions. Thanks to everyone who submitted a question. The first is Harada. If you remember, she taught us about how to uncover the potential of Higgs Boston. I think I'd probably do that wrong. So Harada, considering the complexities of particle interactions, how do you envision future experiments leveraging the Higgs mechanism to explore uncharted territories in physics? And this is a classic academic question because it has two parts. What are some of the challenges and breakthroughs in conducting experiments at the forefront of particle physics research? Yes. Okay, so I hope I can give a satisfying answer to this question. In my opinion, I think it really comes down to using machine learning technologies. So a lot of people are more familiar with machine learning now. It's sort of going through a revolution and it's really accelerated our computing technologies. Basically, yes, so we measure the Higgs boson on our particle colliders and this is a really complicated process because we're smashing together tons and tons of protons and it's a challenge to sort through all the decay products because there's just a lot of things happening but machine learning tools are, I'm sort of repeating what I said in my talk, but machine learning tools are really good at these complex problems, especially when the complexity comes not so much from like an, well, not so much from like an inherently challenging problem but from an inherently messy problem. So I would say that, yeah, in order to make these discoveries, then we really need to start embracing machine learning technologies. And I think the field of particle physics is doing that really well. And I'm trying to do that as well in my PhD research. So that, yeah, I guess in two words, machine learning is how we were going to discover these secrets of the Higgs boson. Wonderful, thank you so much, Radha. Our next question is for Matangi who told us about the eye under pressure novel therapeutics to treat glaucoma. Your question is your research focuses on developing novel therapeutics for glaucoma by targeting intraocular pressure. What are the potential challenges in translating these therapies from the laboratory to clinical practice and how do you envision overcoming them? Yeah, so actually we're trying to find novel therapeutics that addresses the inflammation in the retina that occurs during glaucoma. So right now the current treatments that exist for glaucoma are just to lower intraocular pressure but that doesn't really solve the question of protecting the dying cells in a retina. So we're trying to instead focus on treatments that are able to protect ourselves in the retina. So while a lot of our research is definitely on the basic science level, so not as translational, I think this is kind of where the collaboration of understanding how the treatments we have affect different cell types and being able to utilize technology like cell sequencing, we can kind of understand how our therapeutics are affecting each of the cell types and then working with clinicians, like different clinicians to see how we can best administer these treatments that give more like a holistic effect for patients. I hope that is a satisfying answer as from not a clinician. Thank you for that. Well, I think you've pointed out why it's so important for us to have basic research combined with the clinical program in the School of Optometry to actually give researchers the opportunity to think about clinical practice in that way. So thank you. I'm gonna give a shout out to Optometry. Our next question is for Jin Yong Lim, who talked about seeing the unseen Chinese-American adolescence mental health. The questioner asks, could you elaborate on the unique cultural and social factors that influence mental health outcomes in this demographic? Why do you think the vulnerable group showed the lowest social-emotional competencies? Yes, I'm happy to answer to that question. Actually, these data were collected during COVID-19, so we should be mindful of that context. And actually, this study is just cross-sectional study, but I also conducted another longitudinal study by revisiting the participants once again, and we were able to see that Chinese-American adolescence mental health aggravated during COVID-19, and their mental health and well-being could be explained by the discrimination experiences, actually. So the kind of COVID-19-related discrimination experiences did impact this result, although I cannot show you in this video clip. And also, the second part was about why vulnerable group has the low social-emotional competencies, right? So actually, in this profile, so as you can see, the vulnerable group showed very low satisfaction in terms of their interactions with their peers, actually, which I could not show you very specifically, but also social-emotional competencies include five constructs, like self-awareness, self-management, social-awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. And among these five constructs, the students in the vulnerable group especially showed low scores in the social-awareness relationship skills and responsible decision-making parts, which are also related to the interaction with other people. So they're all correlated because they're kind of also conceptually related. So their satisfaction and peer relationships might have been affected, or might have affected their social-emotional competencies which are also very important to get adjusted and thrive in the school environment. Thank you so much, Jin-Hyu. Our next question is for Anna, who asked us to root for plants getting stronger. The questioner asks, could you discuss how findings from your lab studies might inform strategies for cultivating more resilient crops in increasingly challenging environmental conditions? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know for sure if I'll get to the translation to other crops during my PhD, but I hope to find some findings that could be used by someone else. I think there's a lot of possible approaches. So right now in my research, I am looking for genetic associations. So these are parts of the DNA that are associated with the higher regeneration trait. And then later in my PhD, I'm going to do some validation studies where I try to prove more causality. Does that part of DNA actually cause that change in regeneration? And then my hope is that the variants in the genes I find, that some important crops might have similar genes. That's something commonly we see. So like similar conserved genes, maybe not fully the same, but very similar in tomato or in corn or something else. So I hope that if I find like, what is it in the gene that makes it regenerate better? Some other researcher or plant scientist could make that same change in the crop, in that same gene and then see if it shows the same phenotype. So that's what we hope for. Thank you, Anna. And I hope it's clear to folks that not only are our students brilliant, but our audience members are also brilliant since they're asking some really, really difficult questions. Our next question is for Kamya who talked about AI-powered plasmonic biosensing. They ask, how do you foresee the integration of AI in biosensing technologies impacting various fields such as healthcare, environmental monitoring and food safety? Thank you. I think the impact should be huge because for this kind of is we are dealing with a huge amount of data that we are receiving from different fields and this artificial engineering, especially helping us to manage this more carefully. And we can extract more features from each of these pieces of information. And because from the human side, we are not capable of doing all this kind of computation at the same time with this huge amount of data. But from the computer side, it can process all these things in a second and we can get a lot of things out of that. And the impact should be huge, but we should be also careful about the results. We always need to check the outcome of the machine learning and make sure that these models are giving the right answer to us. Thank you so much, Camila. You're welcome. Next question is for Kiana, who talked about how community land trusts can prevent disaster capitalism. They ask, how do you propose overcoming challenges such as funding, governance and community engagement to scale up the implementation of community land trusts for disaster prevention? Another super easy question. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting and valid question. So I've been really heartened at the way that community land trusts have gained steam across the country. Like just in Berkeley recently, we had the rematriation of land to the Seguritate Land Trust, which just took over the West Berkeley shell mound. And we've been seeing a lot of really interesting projects across the country that are using community land trusts, not just to prevent disaster capitalism, but as like really important reparations projects for both black and indigenous communities. So that's something that I feel like there's a really big appetite for, especially in the state of California, where we have some really interesting research at a statewide level being done for social housing. So at least within the California context, there's an active appetite at the statewide level to invest financially and politically in scaling up social housing initiatives, which is inclusive of community land trust at like a larger level. Now, scaling out to the rest of the United States, there is also an appetite for community land trust. Financial led logistics can be complicated because historically banks have not been particularly amenable to community land trusts. I think that there's some concerns about feasibility, but at the end of the day, we do have really complicated housing policy programs, such as LIGTECH as a low income housing tax credit program that are in existence. And ultimately, I think that the more community land trust become mainstream, like the more likely banks are willing to put financing into them. So at the heart, by their nature, community land trust are local solutions. So they're not things that would necessarily, I would necessarily expect to exist like at a state level to have like a state of Texas community land trust. But even like as I mentioned in my speech, like the city of Houston invested in a city wide community land trust. And so again, like that's something we're beginning to see people experiment with financially and politically at a large and larger level. And it's something of an iterative and experimentative process, but I'm really excited to see that process take place as the housing crisis and the climate crisis do escalate. I think that there's more of an appetite to push past the way that we have been thinking about housing as an asset and the environment as something that is going to continue to serve us. And so like as the situation becomes more severe, we were forced to become more creative. And I think that that will increase the buy-in over time. Thank you so much, Kiana. Our next question is for Victoria who talked about a bacterium's journey from guts to brain. Our audience member was wondering if there's a specific bacterial effectors that allow them to better colonize the brain and what are potential real-world applications or implications of your findings? Yeah, so for the first part of the question, it's not really what our research is addressing. So in our library is what we call it, this mix of bacteria, all the bacteria are the same. And that's a really important part of the research because it means that we're not looking for effectors. We're looking for sort of host barriers that are leading to these stochastic changes or these changes as the bacteria are making their way throughout their host. So our work isn't going to lead us to finding specific effectors, which is where actually a lot of the work that other folks are doing is looking for effectors. So it's sort of another way of tackling the same problem but we do know that there are a few effectors, certain sort of cell surface markers that help the bacteria get into the brain. For your second question, which was how does our research help tackle listerosis more broadly? As I mentioned, listerosis is a very rare disease. So it's actually, it really doesn't happen often, but when it happens, it's very severe. And so our research is sort of, we're part of this consortium of folks who are trying to understand bacterial spread and bacterial dissemination. And so we sort of fit as part of this sort of greater understanding of how bacteria and how microbes in general sort of move across the host. And that allows us to get a better understanding of what we call bottlenecks, which are sort of what are the choke points as bacteria make their way between different areas. And that in diseases that are more prevalent can be targeted for further treatment. Thank you so much, Victoria. And our last question is for Hoyl, who talked about how to expose the public health crisis in immigration enforcement. Your question is, how do you envision your research influencing policies or initiatives aimed at improving the health and wellbeing of immigrant communities affected by enforcement actions? Yeah, that's an excellent question. I wanna say, I actually took one of our health policy advocacy classes here at Berkeley Public Health. And I feel like with that class, I learned a lot on how to use my research and use all these different findings and technical terms, but switch that into more of a policy brief style where not only do we include the recent findings of information, but kind of create a proposal that a congressperson or an assembly member can pick up to become the author of set proposal and then kind of list out the different organizations and community members and important key factors who are in support of such policy brief or in such a policy or amendment. And I think with these recent findings, especially from the study population being in California, I think by using this and maybe using other, incorporating other factors, we can bring this to a potential author to be like, hey, like why don't we do something that can support immigrant communities such as when we ended the 287G program, which is when ICE, the US Immigration Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement, like they have like agreements to talk to each other. So when we ended that, and that's something that a lot of researchers and the ACLU in different immigrant communities like came together to fight against this in the state of California, I feel like creating movements such as that one can be, it's like kind of like the foundation, right? Of where my research is highlighting different important factors. And then we kind of use that to see like, okay, what policy implications can we make? What can we do for Congress folks and for assembly members to be able to support a bill and hopefully get a bill passed in the future? Thank you, Juan. Okay, now that's the end of our Q&A period. Now's the time everyone has been waiting for. I have received the judges decisions and the audience's choice. Thank you everyone for voting and we will begin with the people's choice winner. And I'm excited to say that the people's choice winner is Joel Rubio for his presentation Exposing the Public Health Crisis in Immigration in 14. Thank you, gracias. And please would you like to say a few words? Yeah, I want to say, well, thank you to all the audience members. Shout out to my wife and spouse who definitely rallied up different of our community members here at the University Village who has definitely been a huge supporting factor. Also want to thank my capstone chair, Juliana Diordorf, all the MCH cohort and the rest of the Berkeley Public Health Community who came out to support me and stay tuned to find out more on the research that I come through. Thank you. Thank you, Joel and congratulations. Now our second place winner is Matangi Kumar from Vision Science for her presentation, The Eye Under Pressure. Novel Therapeutics to teach Wacoma, congratulations. Would you like to say thank you? Oh, yeah, thank you so much for, for a grad for giving me the opportunity to present my research and then also my mentors, Dr. Kirsten Kroener and Dr. John Flanagan for mentoring me and providing me the space to do this research and then to the rest of my lab members and my family as well who like helped me complete this research and support me through this process. Thank you so much. Congratulations. And now our first place winner and our campus grad slam champion is Victoria Cheve from the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for her presentation, A Bacterium Tree from Guts to Brain. Congratulations, Victoria. It's amazing, thank you. Yeah, that's wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah, well thank you to Dan, my PI who's been very supportive to all of the MCB community who always rallies and comes together to help us sort of get through all of these things. To my family who's in France and has been up till 1 a.m. to be able to vote and participate and to sort of the whole Berkeley campus has been a really wonderful place to do all of my graduate work. So thank you everyone. And my lab was wonderful and I can hear plotting from the outside. Thank you. Congratulations again. Victoria will represent Berkeley at the UC-wide grad slam on May 3rd and will compete against the finalists from the other nine UC campuses. And so as we wrap things up I'd like to thank our judges again for their time, our keynote speaker Justin, the advisory committee for graduate student and post-doctoral scholar professional development and all of the many staff members in the graduate division who worked so hard to make this event possible. And lastly, I hope you will all show your agreement with me that all of our contestants are amazing, are doing incredible work, have incredible vision, intellect, brilliance and poise and have shown it all today. And so please let's give a special round of applause to all of our contestants who did such a wonderful job today as they shared their research with us. So congratulations to everyone. I know this was a really hard decision for all the judges to make and we appreciate all of you taking part in our competition. And I thank all of you for coming and for supporting graduate education at Berkeley. I hope it's clear why I am just so joyful every day to have the opportunity to support all of our amazing students. So thank you for being here and please be sure to tune in on May 3rd as Victoria represents all of us, no pressure at the system-wide competition. Thanks everyone.