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Name of Event: Nerd Night Summer 2025
Data of Presentation: July 16, 2025
Location of Presentation: 2nd floor Bentley Hall
Type of presentation: Informal Powerpoint Presentation

Name of event:  Welcome Week Nerd Night   

 Date of presentation: Sep 18th, 2024

Type of presentation: Informal Talk   

Title & Text of abstract: Experiment focusing on studying properties of particles called Neutrinos 

Abstract: No abstract for talk 

Name of event: Week of Undergraduate Excellence Quick Pitch Competition
Presentation: Tailored Exercise-Based Pain Interventions for People with Dementia
Dates: 5/17/2023, 5/19/2023
Location: Bentley Hall, 2nd floor
Presentation type: Quick Pitch

Abstract Title: Clinician Perspectives on Exercise-Based Pain Interventions for People Living with Dementia
Abstract: Pain affects 50-80% of people living with dementia (PLWD), and its effective management is critical to sustaining or improving quality of life. Exercise is a recommended first-line treatment for pain management in older adults; yet the use of exercise-based programs by clinicians working with those experiencing impaired cognitive processing is unclear. The purpose of this qualitative description study was to explore clinicians’ perceptions in managing chronic musculoskeletal pain in PLWD who are community-dwelling, with exercise-based pain interventions. Individual, semi-structured, virtual interviews were conducted with 12 clinicians (physical therapists = 6, occupational therapists = 4, and nurse practitioners = 2, mean age ± SD = 39.9 ±10.7 years, mean clinical experience ±SD = 8.8±6.7 years, female = 10) from 4 outpatient facilities. Through a conventional content analysis, the key theme that emerged was that exercise interventions used for pain management among PLWD needed to be “carefully tailored”. The clinicians reported that they consider several factors, including the PLWD’s underlying pain mechanism, cognitive ability, physical function, comorbidities, and preferences when developing their exercise programs to manage chronic pain of PLWD. Few studies have emphasized these factors in exercise-based pain interventions, which are especially critical and applicable for pain management in PLWD and should be prioritized in future research.

Name of Event: Nerd Night Welcome Week 2021
Date of Presentation: 09/16/2021
Location of Presentation: Drexel University Welcome Week Virtual 
Type of Presentation: Virtual powerpoint
Title: Phage Therapy in Combatting Antibiotic Resistance
Abstract: An alternative method to using antibiotics to treating virulent diseases is the use of phage therapy. The diversity, versatility and specificity of phages shows that they are viable and effective alternatives to antibiotics since isolating exact antibiotics, that are efficient at destroying bacteria, is becoming increasingly more difficult (Lin, D., et. al., 2017). Phage therapy has also evolved and proven to be even more specific and useful in combating virulent diseases with bio-engineered phages and purified phage lytic proteins. So, selecting new phages against phage resistant bacteria would be more efficient and effective than choosing new antibiotics for antibiotic resistant strains. More importantly, lytic phages cause the infected bacteria to be entirely dysfunctional and prevent it from infecting other organisms. This allows the phage to eliminate the entire population of infectious bacteria present, as compared to antibiotics that leave a few fit, resistant strains of bacteria present to cause future infection. Unique morphological traits will be selected to observe the phage lysis vs antibiotic lysis.

Have you ever given a second thought to that coffee cup you tossed out after finishing your latte? Have you ever considered cancelling that trip to that friend or destination because of greenhouse gas emissions? Moreover, have these seemingly benign afterthoughts ever caused or exacerbated anxiety or depression for you? Over the last few decades, there has been a well-documented mental health crisis. Whether this has been due to better diagnoses, less social stigmatization, or the rapidly changing landscape of society, it is undeniable that younger generations are enduring mental health struggles. In recent years, there has been an emergence of a new and unprecedented disruptions to mental health – climate anxiety and ecological grief. Whether you answered yes or no to the initial questions, this discussion may provide the discourse, foundation, or validation for us to together move forward with these issues, not past them. We will address questions such as: What is climate anxiety? What is ecological grief? How might they be impacting you or your peers? And what can we do about it?

In recent decades, amphibians have been undergoing populational declines and extinctions at an unprecedented rate. Of the approximately 6,000 species of extant amphibian species, nearly half are facing populational declines and nearly a third are threatened with imminent extinction. These declines have been attributed to various causes including but not limited to climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species, and the spread of infectious diseases. This presentation aims to discuss the importance of amphibians, explore a few drivers of this extinction crisis, and discuss the environmental and anthropocentric implications this crisis may have for the future.

HAT Tip60 restores learning and memory defects in ALS Drosophila model
Visha Parmar, Priyalakshmi Panikker, Mariah Beaver, and Felice Elefant

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease that attacks motor neurons, leading to paralysis, locomotive defects, and cognitive impairments. Epigenetic studies have shown that decreased histone acetyltransferase (HAT) activity, increased histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity, or overexpression of critical genes lead to the onset ofALS. Tip60, an important HAT greatly studied in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in our lab, has been shown to have potential neuroprotective roles in learning, memory, locomotion, synaptic plasticity, and axonal transport and outgrowth. Here, we investigated if increasing Tip60 HAT levels rescues cognitive impairments in Drosophila ALS model that overexpresses Vap-33-1, a VAPB protein homolog associated with ALS. We hypothesized that increasing Tip60 HAT levels will rescue ALS-related cognitive impairments in the Drosophila larvae. To test the hypothesis, we carried out a single odor paradigm for olfactory associative learning using sucrose as the gustatory reinforcer and Linalool as the associative odor. We show that ALS larvae exhibited defects in learning and short-term memory. Importantly, these impairments were partially rescued by increasing Tip60 HAT levels. Together, our findings suggest a neuroprotective role for Tip60 in restoring short-term memory defects seen in ALS Drosophila larvae.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems able to perform
tasks that normally require human intelligence. In previous AI research, there has been little
success in creating biologically plausible models that mimic naturally intelligent behavior. This
research focuses on understanding how learning works through decision making and also
finding a practical application of emulating learning. The model developed is an adaptive finite
state automaton with probabilistic outputs. Through a series of experiments, we are determining
if the model presents key properties psychologists find in nature through classical and operant
conditioning. The objectives of this research are to reproduce past results to corroborate the
validity of the model, illustrate natural intelligence, and portray a biologically accurate structure.
This investigation will be accomplished through simulating 100 trials of each experiment to
compare the results to data found in nature. In the end, the results were positive and showed
that this model is a compelling candidate for mirroring low level natural intelligence and clearly
demonstrates many properties of conditioning studied by psychologists.

Poster Presentation at the Week of Undergraduate Excellence at Drexel on May 17th 2018

Anisyl Sulfanyl Methyl IsoCyanide (ASMIC): Rapid Construction of Heterocyclic Scaffolds


To make heterocycles in one pot
And functionalize them is what we sought
Heterocycles are found in almost everything
They have atoms other than carbon also present in the ring
Heterocycles are found in small molecule drugs and even caffeine
Also in our DNA’s adenine, thymine, Guanine and cytosine
Formic acid, thiol, formaldehyde and formamide
Together form anisyl sulfanyl methyl formamide
From the product, POCl3 removes a water molecule
to make ASMIC while we keep it at -10° C cool
We then make different heterocycles from ASMIC
At first n-Butyl Lithium does a proton pick
Carbanion formed attacks on an electrophile
Like a ketone, ester or even a nitrile
Forming a ring like oxazole or imidazole
Making 5 membered heterocycles, we reach half the goal 
The ring has carbon and nitrogen from isocyanide
and carbons from the electrophile on their either side
proton on the C is something we can exchange
based on choice, with an alkyl group range
Ring has oxygen or nitrogen based on the electrophile
Making the heterocycle very versatile
However, sulphur anisyl handle was hard to cleave
so we oxidized it to sulfoxide, which is happier to leave
When t-Butyl lithium is added to sulfoxide
Lone pair on Sulphur attacks on benzyl bromide
Now the Sulphur has 10 electrons around
And five ligands that are bound
This sulfurane ligand coupling is too hard
With other organoLithium and Grignard
The big t-Butyl group we propose
Forces the oxazole and benzyl ligand close
So it can easily undergo reductive elimination
A new carbon carbon bond creation.

Climate change and rising sea levels are endangering coastal wetlands, which are well known to be essential to prevent coastline erosion and as nutrient buffers for benthic environments. As sea levels rise and salt marsh plants experience longer periods of inundation certain physiological mechanisms are necessary for plants to adapt to changing conditions. One such mechanism is the formation of aerenchyma, air spaces in the stems, roots, and rhizomes of wetland plants which allow for aerobic respiration during periods of inundation. Estuarine plants are experiencing increasingly high nutrient loads from riverine washout, particularly from nitrates due to fertilizer pollution. While the negative impact of nitrates on offshore benthic environments has been well documented, the impact of poor water quality on salt marshes has been inconclusive. Low nutrient availability has been shown to encourage the formation of aerenchyma in food plants such as rice and corn. If this is also the case for coastal marsh plants, poor water quality may prevent an important physiological process that can help these plants adapt to a changing climate. This study aims to examine the potential negative impact of high nutrient loads on the physiology of coastal marsh plants. Specifically, we focused on the formation of aerenchyma in the high marsh cordgrass species Spartina patens and its relationship to nutrient availability. We investigated this process using a controlled factorial experiment, in which we grew Spartina patens in a mesocosm to simulate tides, and subjected one group of plants to low nutrient conditions and one group to high nutrient conditions. We then compared the formation of aerenchyma in the roots of both groups using scanning electron microscopy. If aerenchyma formation is correlated to nutrient availability, this could clarify one variable leading to inconsistent results in previous studies on the effect of nutrient availability on salt marshes.