2005 Recipients of The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research

Iman Ahmad
"Preventing Childhood Diarrhea in Pakistan"

Iman Ahmad studied the factors contributing to infectious gastroenteritis. This work is of extraordinary scope and importance, reflecting the health and survival of tens of thousand of infants.

For over three years, Iman has worked on the impact of diarrheal disease in Lyari Town, one of the most impoverished slums of Karachi, Pakistan. Iman's study is remarkable in that it used three distinct methodologies. These include the use of hospital records on the seasonal incidence of hospitalization, an intensive qualitative survey, and a direct microbiological examination of water samples. She conceptualized her work into a series of models underlying the problems and potential interventions associated with diarrhea disease in this community.

Iman's written thesis is a masterful document that could serve as the basis of a series of papers and additional research projects. Her oral presentation was compelling, integrating each phase of this massive effort into an articulate whole. Iman's thesis points to educational, behavioral and structural interventions that could impact transmission of gastrointestinal disease, significantly improving the health of many children at risk. Iman's project is work of the highest quality, well-deserving of this meritorious award.

Scott Carlson
"Methods of Analysis for SELDI-TOF Mass Spectra and an Application to Pediatric Biomarker Discovery"

A biomarker is defined as a physical, functional or biochemical indicator of a physiological or disease process that has diagnostic and / or prognostic utility. Our ability to study and treat disease is hampered by a lack of unique, reliable, quantifiable, easily measured biomarkers that correlate well with disease progression.

Scott Carlson worked with Professor Harvey J. Cohen, Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine. He developed ways of interpreting mass spectra of protein obtained from sick and well animals and human beings to identify possible biomarkers.

To determine which peaks may be compared across spectra in protein profiling studies, Scott developed a method of spectrum analysis, called Simultaneous Spectrum Analysis (SSA). He applied it with great success to analyze a published prostate cancer data set and demonstrated that SSA works correctly on clinical data.

Moreover, preliminary results on a data set of Kawasaki disease patients show the presence of several promising biomarkers, making diagnosis of this disease potentially much more reliable. The significance of this approach remains to be fully established, but it has the potential for revolutionizing medical treatment and practice.

Sheena Chestnut
"The 'Sopranos State'? North Korean Involvement in Criminal Activity and Implications for International Security"

After North Korea withdrew from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003, many scholars and US policy makers expressed fear that they might sell nuclear weapons and materials to terrorist organizations.

Sheena Chestnut’s thesis provides important and disturbing insights into this potential danger. She documents the existence of and explains the motives for extensive North Korean smuggling efforts in counterfeit currency, pharmaceuticals, and illicit drugs. This thesis provides the best existing data base for suspected cases of North Korean smuggling activities based on thorough research in government documents and press accounts. She also interviews US and foreign government officials (and even North Korean defectors).

Sheena Chestnut demonstrates the extent to which existing smuggling networks are resistant to law enforcement efforts. This problem is exacerbated by the growing links between the government officials in North Korea and transnational criminal networks.

This stellar thesis concludes that it will be difficult to stop North Korea from smuggling nuclear weapons in the future (if it chooses to do so). Forceful deterrence and firm diplomacy, not defense, may be the only solution to this vexing global security problem.

Porsha Cropper
"'Can We All Get Along?': Black Perceptions of Group Threat and the Challenge of New Racial Demographics in Los Angeles and Comptons"

Porsha Cropper’s well-written and forcefully argued thesis explores issues of inter-group conflict and competition in examining the sociopsychological underpinnings of African-American hostility toward Latinos., She combines both quantitative and qualitative data, extrapolating from the Multi-City Study on Urban Inequality (MCSUI) data set. From this, Porsha provides a “big picture” perspective on race relations in Los Angeles.

Moving from the macro to a microanalysis, Porsha draws on twenty oral histories she recorded with African-American residents in Compton. She argues that African-Americans’ perceptions about threats to their community and neighborhoods combine with stereotypes about Latinos to create social distance and tensions between the two groups. These factors contribute to feelings of racial alienation.

The thesis is analytically sharp, effectively researched and theoretically well-grounded in the discipline of sociology. Her original research expands knowledge about race relations by providing historical and contemporary context. She goes beyond most sociological perspectives that tend to focus on survey data without historical or ethnographic research.

Agnieszka Czechowicz
"Development of a robust human adaptive immune system in CD34+ enriched peripheral blood-transplanted mice through use of anti-murine-c-kit monoclonal antibody, ACK2"

Agnieszka's honors thesis focused on developing a novel model system for creating a human blood and immune system within a mouse using adult human blood-forming stem cells.

By transplanting immunodeficient newborn mice with CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells from adult human donors, Agnieska demonstrated that human stem cells could engraft within these mice. The result in the recipient mice consists of partially donor human blood, bone marrow, spleens, lymph nodes and thymus.

She showed that the degree of human donor engraftment could be improved by inhibiting mouse hematopoesis. She did this by treating recipient mice with an anti c-Kit monoclonal antibody which binds to and inhibits murine blood forming progenitors. Furthermore Agnieszka worked diligently to create a new transgenic mouse line in which mouse hematopoesis can be turned off through administering the drug gancylovir.

Agnieszka's oustanding dedication and hard work contributed to creating a humanized mouse model which should be useful in the study of human stem cell biology. Her work with blood-forming stem cells from normal and diseased donors can be used for investigating disorders and possible therapies for human malignancies and infectious disease.

Alejandro Diaz
"Through the Google Goggles: Sociopolitical Bias in Search Engine Design"

The Google Search Engine is the world's most popular and important means of navigating the Internet. Some admire its meteoric rise to dominance as a marvelous technological feat, while others revel in what has proven to be an inordinately sage investment.

Alex Diaz's brilliant honors thesis sheds light on a different, but no less important facet of the Google story. He shows how the implications of its Search Engine design supports the long-term health of democratic social values.

Alex Diaz’ thesis is technologically savvy, theoretically sophisticated and acute, intellectually nuanced and balanced, and a genuine joy to read. It is a graduate-level piece of research and scholarship that earned an A+ from all three of its readers. Through his thesis, Alex prys open the complex system of algorithms, hardware and software that makes up the Google Search Engine to reveal the following:

• Various subtle ways its design encodes values and embodies biases shaped by technological, economic and commercial factors
• Demonstrates that the design has a mixed bag of implications for the vital possibility of well informed, deliberative, democratic discourse on the Web

Alejandro M. Diaz is hereby designated a 2005 Firestone Award Winner.

Vikram Fielding-Singh
"Reputation Building as Counterterrorism: Theory and Evidence"

Vikram Fielding-Singh’s thesis examines terrorist attacks and government response. It combines an application of game theoretical reputation-building models to generate a testable hypothesis. Vikram’s hypothesis is, “Aggressive action immediately after a leadership change will have a greater deterrent effect than aggressive action at other times.”

Vikram assembled data from the following independent data sets:

• “International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events” (ITERATE) to identify terrorist events and government responses
• “Archigos” and “Polity IV” to identify government changes

Vikram uses two empirical models (Ordinary Least Squares and Duration Analysis) to demonstrate that his hypothesis is consistent with the data. His thesis has significant implications for counterterrorist policy: governments should consider responding aggressively soon after a leadership change to build a reputation and deter future events.

Vikram’s theory suggests that early aggressive action creates a credible threat of future aggressive actions, raising the risk and lowering the payoffs to terrorists. In this way, reputation building is a counterterrorism strategy.

Anne Friedman
"Broaching Race and Disenfranchisement: An Analysis of the Demographic Determinants of Voter Disenfranchisement in the 2004 Presidential Election"

"Broaching Race and Disenfranchisement" is a brilliant quantitative analysis of an important but understudied phenomenon: voter disenfranchisement in the 2004 presidential election.

Anne Friedman creatively combined data on reports of voter fraud, actual voting rates and census data from several different sources to find the correlates of voter disenfranchisement. Much has been written in the media about voter fraud in general and the disenfranchisement of voters in the swing states in particular. Friedman goes beyond mere rhetoric to empirically demonstrate a higher incidence of reported voter fraud among black, urban voters. These findings persist even after controls for education and income.

Friedman's methods (including negative binomial regression) reflect a technical skill and sophistication that is more typical of an advanced graduate student. At the same time, her thesis is well-written: creative, yet solidly grounded in the existing social scientific literature on voter disenfranchisement. Overall, this thesis is an insightful, important exposition of demographic correlates of voter disenfranchisement that should have real impact on the sociological literature and future public policy debates.

Aaron Gelband
"Opportunities After Sarbanes-Oxley: Can Outsiders Earn Abnormal Profits by Mimicking Insider Trades?"

Aaron Gelband tests one of the most important theories in modern finance, namely the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Aaron thought of a particularly interesting test of this hypothesis. Under Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, insider trades are filed with and released by the Securities and Exchange Commission within two business days.

Aaron asks whether a profitable portfolio strategy could be developed by mimicking the trades of particular insiders. Aaron’s results are revealing and impressive. Before Sarbanes-Oxley, it was not systematically profitable to mimic insiders. After Sarbanes-Oxley, it was very profitable to do so. Aaron finds that the excess risk-adjusted returns were largest right after Sarbanes-Oxley in late 2002. In fact, the returns from the strategy of mimicking insiders were tremendously profitable in the period August 2002 through December 2003. However, the strategy's excess risk-adjusted returns gradually dissipated. There were no significant excess returns in 2004.

The conclusion from Aaron Gelband's thesis is that while institutional change can open up temporary market inefficiencies, these inefficiencies are quickly corrected. With just a little more work, this thesis could be published in a top finance journal. I have not been able to write that about any honors thesis before.

Logan Grosenick
"Vicarious and context-independent use of transitive inference by an African Cichlid fish"

If we know that A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, we infer that A must be bigger than C. This logical ability, known as transitive inference, is not evident in children’s reasoning until five years of age. Yet Logan has shown that cichlid fish can reason in this way!

Transitive inference is the ability to arrange nonadjacent members of an ordered series in appropriate novel pairings, with no previous experience of these pairings. To explore whether fish can do this, Logan first devised an ingenious experimental paradigm by arranging test subjects to watch fights between pairs of other animals. The observer watched as Fish A beat up on B and then B beat up on C.
 
Logan found the observer could then successfully predict whether Fish A would triumph in a contest with Fish C, without actually witnessing that fight. He also showed that animals observing others fighting increased their circulating testosterone levels. Why did this ability evolve in fish? In this species, males fight for territories and access to females. The ability to predict winners of fights could conserve an animal’s energy, suggesting ancient evolutionary origins of human reasoning skills.

Katherine M. Hill
"Money Talks: The Commercialization of Microfinance in Uganda"

How can poor people in poor countries acquire more income and improve their lives? An increasingly popular answer to this question is microcredit. Small loans are made to poor individuals who invest in income-generating activities. In the absence of collateral, they apply social pressure on each other to repay the loans.

Katie Hill spent part of two summers in Uganda studying microcredit institutions. She interviewed their officers and clients, government regulators and representatives of external funding agencies, such as the World Bank and USAID.

Her thesis examines the current trend to expand operations from lending to taking deposits. While local people and the Uganda government do not oppose this trend, the major advocates of commercialization are the funding agencies. Katie shows in impressive detail how international norms and best practices are transferred from external to Ugandan actors. It’s not just outsiders’ money that “talks.” Their prestige, access to information, training programs and the visits they sponsor to other countries where new financial services are offered count as well.

Katie takes care not to describe external influence as harmful per se. But her thesis raises questions about how compatible it is with the microcredit philosophy of bottom-up, self-reliant development.

Jack Hogan
"Sensitivity Analysis of the North American Market for Natural Gas with a Focus on Liquid Imports"

In his thesis, Jack Hogan develops a simulation model of the North American natural gas market. He explores the potential role for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) imports in setting future prices.

Jack calibrated his model to the Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Outlook projections, using the National Energy Modeling System. With his model Jack investigates the implications of changing key parameters and conditions. Results indicate that subtle shifts in production and consumption can result in significant short-term price spikes, especially if LNG facilities are operating close to capacity.

His thesis has immediate implications for public policy because two competing federal government agencies currently regulate the approval of US LNG import terminals. In addition, considerable controversy exists regarding the respective roles for federal and state authorities. Energy government officials should find his paper insightful in understanding how LNG imports could influence natural gas prices in North America over the next 20 years.

Lucy Horton
"Adherence to Antiretroviral Therapy in Uganda: A Case Study of Reach Out, Kampala, Uganda"

Lucy Horton's thesis examines the factors affecting HIV patient adherence to antiretroviral drug therapy. The HIV epidemic in Uganda hit early and hard, but that nation is now making significant inroads in confronting the problem. Lucy traveled to Uganda twice, spending a total of six months there.

She carried out detailed interviews with 20 clients of the Reach Out clinic, addressing barriers and enabling factors associated with the use of antiretroviral therapy. (This clinic was recently singled out by President Bush as an exemplar in Uganda's fight against HIV.) 

Lucy found that even when the drugs were provided free of charge, key stumbling blocks were drug side effects, as well as dietary, social, scheduling and transportation issues. Most of the factors facilitating the use of antiretroviral drugs were provided by the clinic as part of their holistic approach. Lucy's research makes it clear that Reach Out is a highly effective intervention program and a potential model for intervention in other parts of the world.

She has shared her meticulous qualitative analysis with researchers in Uganda and publicly presented her findings at conferences and symposia on HIV and International Health. For her significant contribution to one of the most pressing health problems in the world, Lucy Horton is well-deserving of this prestigious award.

Emily Lehrman
"Elucidating synapse assembly: Scaffold protein SYD-2 localizes presynaptic components to the synapse in Caenorhabditis elegans"

Emily earned this award with her talent in research and her passion for science. Emily joined my lab in her sophomore year and quickly distinguished herself with her constant presence in the lab, even at nights and weekends. What's more impressive was her maturity in experimental research. Emily is rare an example of someone who just has the natural talent to handle complicated experiments from the start.

Not long after she started working in the lab, I realized she is capable of carrying out real experiments on her own. I decided to team her up with a graduate student Maulik Patel. The two of them started systematically exploring a fundamental question in developmental neuroscience: how synaptic connections between [what and what? This statement seems incomplete.]are made. Within a year, the two of them have generated many invaluable reagents and made some very exciting progress in our understanding of presynaptic assembly. Emily has carried out many of these experiments herself. She is a coauthor on the paper we are currently submitting.

I hope Emily has enjoyed her experience in the lab as much as my lab appreciates her presence. More importantly, I hope this experience has induced her appetite for neurobiology. She is such a talented student that I certainly hope to see her continue research as a career.

Nicholai Lidow
"Partners with the Enemy: Government-LTTE Cooperation and the Demand for Education in Sri Lanka"

Nicholai examines a fascinating puzzle: In the middle of a violent civil war, why does the Sri Lankan government work closely with rebel Tamil Tigers to provide education for those living under rebel control?

Nicholai argues that this unique cooperation reflects the political economy of education in Sri Lanka. Economics leads citizens in rebel areas to demand education, in the hope that their children will be able to live better lives. Politics — the need for support from citizens — leads the government and the rebels to work together to meet that demand. The result is a unique system of cooperation in the middle of conflict.

To support his analysis, Nicholai has assembled an impressive array of evidence, much of it gathered from interviews in the battle zones of Sri Lanka. As a result, his analysis is interesting and believable. It throws light, not just on conditions in Sri Lanka, but on the broader question of the relationship between public violence and public goods.

Joshua Mitchell
"Forecasting the Effects of the August 23rd Fair Labor Standards Act Overtime Changes: Evidence from a California Natural Experiment"

Joshua Mitchell’s study seeks to understand the August 2004 impact of federal overtime policies that changed worker coverage under the revised Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

By altering the “white-collar exemptions” to the FLSA, the Department of Labor ensured that some workers would gain coverage, while others would lose coverage. Josh focuses on coverage gainers: white-collar workers with weekly salaries between $250 and $455 per week. Since California satisfied federal overtime rules before the law passed, Josh can estimate work hours and earnings for those who newly become and previously were subject to overtime rules.

Josh’s empirical findings suggest that overtime coverage reduces the probability of working overtime, consistent with the predictions of a neoclassical labor demand model of overtime. His empirical results indicate that firms substitute hours of relatively less-expensive workers for those of workers whose hours become more costly with overtime laws. Finally, Josh’s thesis provides evidence that the FLSA coverage extension redistributed income from lower to higher earning workers.

Rita Nguyen
"Comparing Food Content and Preference in Areas of Varying Socioeconomic Status in Santa Clara County"

Rita Nguyen's honors thesis grapples with one of the most pressing social problems of our time: disparities in health status associated with income and race / ethnicity. Through studying grocery stores in Santa Clara County, Rita explored the issue of shopper’s food preferences and food availability in neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic status (SES).

Her results were provocative. Stores located in low SES areas provide less display space to healthier foods and more space to unhealthier foods than stores in high SES areas. In addition, consumers in stores in the low SES areas desire more healthy food options, but do not want to see their unhealthy food options decreased.

Throughout the year and a half that I have known Rita, she has exhibited a strong commitment to improving the lives of the poor. Her work with the Pacific Free Clinic and the HealthTrust exemplify this commitment. In her thesis, she was able to bring rigorous empirical methodology to bear on furthering our understanding of the relationship between dietary practices and income.

It is with great pleasure and pride that I celebrate this well-deserved award of a Firestone Medal to Rita Nguyen.

Jennifer O'Neil
"The Effects of Race and Facial Stereotypicality on Perceptions of Crime and Mental Illness"

Jennifer O'Neil's senior honors thesis is a highly original project based on two observations from courtroom trials. First, for a given offence, African-American offenders are perceived as more criminally responsible than European American offenders. Second, mental illness is sometimes a mitigating factor in the assessment of criminal responsibility.

Jennifer then asked if this mitigation would be seen when the offender is African-American. She found that the perception of mental illness does reduce criminal responsibility when the offender's facial features were stereotypically African-American. However, it did not when the features were not stereotypically African-American.

She also found that the race of the experimenter (African-American versus European American) exerted a significant influence. Such participants appeared to want to please the African-American experimenter by giving favorable ratings to the stereotypically African-American offender.

Given the great importance of these issues in our society, Jennifer's ambitious study should be replicated and extended. We are grateful to this brilliant, intellectually curious, hard-working scholar for her intriguing findings that deserve the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.

Victoria Parikh
"Stress Hormones and Reproduction in the African Cichlid Fish, Astatotilapia Burtoni"

Victoria Parikh is honored for her work on the role of endocrinological responses in behavioral coping strategies. Victoria joined the laboratory of Professor Russell Fernald in her sophomore year. She learned techniques to answer questions about how the internal physiological state and the external environment interact to produce social status in the African cichlid fish. This fish system lets investigators asses the gamut of events from behavior to genes, allowing sophisticated analyses not possible in other animals.

In collaboration with Dr. Tricia Clement, Victoria linked hormonal action to behavior using video images to test an animals' response to social challenges. She identified changes in the circulating hormones and social status in animals that are challenged.

Victoria presented her work at two national meetings. She is coauthor of a published paper and first author of a second paper recently accepted for publication.

For her honors research, Victoria measured levels of gene expression in response to social challenges. She is one of the top three honors researchers I have had the pleasure of advising since coming to Stanford. Vicki has been working at the level of a graduate student and richly deserves a Firestone Medal in recognition of her initiative and success.

Adam Phail-Liff
"A Return to 'Normalcy'? The 2004 National Defense Program Guidelines and Japan's Defense Policy"

Japan has in the last few years shifted its security orientation in major ways. It has instituted the following:

• Dispatched Self-Defense Forces for peacekeeping missions to combat areas such as Iraq
• Sent ships to the Indian Ocean in support of the campaign in Afghanistan
• Passed a battery of legislation designed to loosen restrictions on its military forces and US forces in Japan

What is the significance of Japan’s security shift? Why has Japan decided to abandon its old postwar policy of self-defense and low politico-military posture? Why are the Japanese openly talking about the possibility of revising Article Nine of the so-called peace Constitution?

In a polished, compelling piece of analysis, Adam Phail-Liff offers a compelling explanation, citing the emergence of serious threats to Japan's national security. This includes China’s emergence as a regional power and nuclear proliferation in North Korea, as the strategic reason for Japan's reorientation. With adverse shifts in the regional environment, Adam argues that Japan has moved from a passive policy constrained by its national identity as a semi-pacifist nation state. It shifted to a more assertive orientation based on neorealistic calculations of enhancing national interests and balancing the power of rival states in the region.

Carlyn Reichel
"Knee-Deep, the Smear Campaign in Modern American Politics: A Case Study of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"

Carlyn Reichel's beautifully written and rigorously argued essay illuminates a dark corner of recent American politics. She takes on the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and their role in the 2004 Presidential Campaign. She places this phenomenon in the context of changes in campaign finance, changes in the media, changes in campaign tactics and strategy.

She draws on social science research on negative campaigning and the following:

• Data on public opinion and the broadcast of the ads
• Their later coverage in the media, both nationally and in key states

Carlyn's essay helps explain the extraordinary impact of the Swift Boat Veterans on the Presidential campaign. It also demonstrates the continuing power of the Vietnam War to shape American public life. Moreover, it illustrates the degree to which the professional practices of the mass media and of American governance have become integrated into one another. It does not stop there, however.

Carlyn ends with suggestions for reforming both media practices and the campaign process. The result is a probing and insightful study on a timely and important topic.

Britt Sandler
"Bio-fortification to Reduce Vitamin A Deficiency: A Comparative Cost-Benefit Analysis of Golden Rice and Orange-Fleshed Sweet Potato"

Britt Sandler is awarded a Firestone Medal for her pathbreaking research on new mechanisms to conquer vitamin A deficiency in Africa and Asia.

More than 100 million children and 25 million pregnant and lactating women suffer from this. Annually vitamin A deficiency causes half a million cases of blindness and widespread weakening of immune systems. Fortification of bread, which Americans take for granted, is not an option in many poor countries.

Sandler therefore examines the costs and benefits of using molecular biology to breed enhanced vitamin A (beta carotene) directly into rice and sweet potatoes. She uses Bangladesh and Uganda as case countries. Sandler shows that over a thirty-year period, bio-fortification could reduce vitamin A deficiency by 30 percent in Bangladesh and 40 percent in Uganda. She also shows that benefit-cost ratios typically exceed 50 from bio-fortification and the investment per year of life saved could be as low as $2.

Sandler will soon be headed to graduate school to pursue a career combining medicine and public health.

Jacob Saperstein
"A Dysfunctional Family: An Analysis of San Francisco Electoral Politics in 2003-2004"

Working under the direction of Professor Luis Fraga, Jacob examines the changing fortunes of progressives in San Francisco city politics. He asks whether Matt Gonzalez's surprisingly strong showing in the 2003 mayoral race against Gavin Newsom marked a new era of progressive dominance in San Francisco.

He argues that it did not. The reason is not that San Francisco is not liberal, but that liberals are divided by such factors as income, age, race and home-ownership. Jacob argues that this diversity means city politics are likely to continue to be dominated by a coalition of more conservative Democrats and Republicans.

The strength of Jacob's thesis is his careful and detailed analysis of voting patterns in recent elections. Using precinct level data, he shows exactly how Newsom's winning coalition was put together and how that coalition fared in the next election. This allows him to show convincingly that liberals in San Francisco are a dysfunctional family, given to fighting among themselves over city politics, while agreeing on national issues.

Caroline Schuster
"Land, Credit, Identity: The Politics of Microfinance in Argentina's Altiplano"

Carly Schuster has been a consistently excellent, consistently serious student, who has produced work that is well-planned, well thought-out, well-reasoned, and well-executed. Her senior honors thesis displays the seriousness of purpose and maturity of mind that I have come to expect of her. It has also stimulated my own interest in new questions.

Carly undertook to study micro-financing by asking the most strategic questions: How does micro-financing connect the small community to the larger economic environment in which it lives? What are the cultural and noneconomic change implications of micro-financing projects? What are the politics within the micro-financed community, how do they influence micro-financing, and how do they relate to the politics of the surrounding community? How does the surrounding, national community understand the micro-financed community? All these questions Carly has approached intelligently and wisely in her work. Would I had more students like Carly Schuster!

Adam Sciambi
"A Simple Apparatus for the Observation of Quantized Conductance"

Adam Sciambi has demonstrated the experimental realization of a robust device for displaying and studying a quantum effect. It demonstrates the wave nature of electrons at room temperature and ambient pressure: the quantization of electrical conductance in a gold nanowire.

The device is deceptively simple, yet required many hours in the laboratory and large amounts of ingenuity to fabricate. Adam used data from this apparatus and employed sophisticated analysis techniques to measure the value of Planck's constant based on a pure electrical measurement.

This experiment has research implications on the robustness of quantum effects at room temperature and ambient conditions. It also has exceptional educational value as it may be the only apparatus simple enough to use in a teaching laboratory setting to demonstrate conductance quantization. In this way the experiment has great originality and scope due to its applicability to both research and teaching.

Roshan Shrestha
"In-vivo Expression of Bioten-Tagged Human Beta-2 Adrenergic Receptor as a Control for In-vitro Synthesis and Folding"

Human Beta-2 Adrenergic Receptor is a membrane protein that plays a vital role in the human adrenergic response. Its study is currently limited by our inability to produce large amounts of the protein.

Cell Free Protein Synthesis, a technology being developed in Professor James Swartz's Lab, allows large amounts of proteins to be produced rapidly, inexpensively and without living cells. Correct folding of membrane proteins poses a challenge however, because membrane proteins require hydrophobic interactions to fold to an active form.

Roshan Shrestha worked with Professor Swartz and with a senior graduate student, Norman Hovijitra. Roshan cloned the gene for the human beta-2 adrenergic receptor in Escherichia coli with an attached biotinylation region. He searched for the ideal conditions for maximizing protein yield, confirmed the receptor's activity, and successfully biotinylated it. The biotinylated protein has been shown to bind to an avidin column. This provides a new approach for recovery and analysis of beta adrenergic receptors and gives us a positive control for future work with cell-free expression.

Matthew Steiner
"Library-Based Prefetching for Pointer-Intensive Data Structures"

Matthew Steiner’s thesis describes a system for accelerating memory-intensive programs using multiprocessor chips. The exponentially increasing performance gap between processor and memory devices is the most significant problem for modern computers. The problem is particularly challenging for pointer-intensive applications for which conventional techniques such as hardware caches and prefetching are ineffective. The performance of such applications is dominated by memory access time and does not improve with faster processors.

Matthew’s thesis describes and implements a system that improves the performance of pointer-intensive applications by a factor of two. His work is based on two insights: (a) most pointer-intensive applications use regular data structures from libraries, and (b) the upcoming multiprocessor chips have computing resources available for software prefetching.

The two observations lead to the development of a data-structure library that uses an additional processor to track the access patterns in the program and prefetch data from memory before the program needs them. Matthew demonstrated that the use of the library hides the negative side effects of the increasing processor-memory gap.

Robin Stevens
"Genetic regulation of neural circuits: fruitless and degeneration of Drosophila wing song"

Robin’s thesis addresses how the central nervous system (CNS) functions to elicit complex innate behaviors. She focused on the courtship ritual of Drosophila melanogaster males, which consists of a stereotyped sequence of behaviors. One step in the courtship ritual consists of the male extending one wing perpendicular to his body and vibrating it rapidly to produce a species-specific “wing song.” Expression of male-specific Fruitless transcription factor (FruM) in the nervous system is required for all aspects of male courtship, including wing song.

Robin, in collaboration with others, used Gal4-directed expression of an RNAi construct targeting FruM isoforms, to carry out a prodigious screen of 1057 enhancer trap lines. These lines identify those which produce defects in courtship when FruM expression is inhibited in subsets of neurons. Analyzing these Gal4 lines for wing extension and vibration defects identified approximately 60 lines specifically affecting this behavior. Robin then looked for overlaps between Gal4-expressing and FruM-expressing neurons in selected lines. She identified several small neural clusters in the CNS that may be involved in the production of wing song. Robin’s careful and elegant analysis has laid the groundwork for the elucidation of the neural basis of wing song.

Sarah Sullivan
"You Never Lose the Ages You've Been: How Age Facilitates Perspective Taking Ability in an Affective Domain"

Most of the research about cognitive aging reveals deficits in the ability to process new information. However, recent research reveals an intriguing finding. When laboratory tasks about memory or attention involve positive information, performance of older adults sometimes equals and exceeds that of younger adults.

Sarah Sullivan posed an entirely original question in her honors research. She asked whether older people were aware of this developmental shift that favors positive information. Sarah had older and younger people recount stories from perspectives of story protagonists who varied by age. She found that younger people tell the story the same way regardless of the age of the protagonist. Older people modify their retellings. When telling the story from the perspective of an older person, they focus on the positive. Yet this is not so when retelling the story from the perspective of younger protagonists.

Sarah maintains that her findings offer empirical support for the fuzzy concept of wisdom. It is not altogether surprising that a student wise beyond her years should document this effect. Sarah is exceptionally intelligent and thoughtful. She also has an unsurpassed work ethic. Together these qualities insure that her career will be great fun to watch and will make Stanford proud for years to come.

Sok Tea
"Selective Interventions in Africa: A Comparative Study of American Democracy Promotion Efforts"

Sok’s thesis is a significant contribution to the academic literature on external pressures for democracy, democracy and US foreign policy, and African political transitions. It addresses an empirical puzzle that has long fascinated scholars of Africa. It brings together empirical data generated from difficult-to-get interviews with scores of senior policymakers. It uses the evidence to inductively generate a convincing theory. Then it tests the robustness of the argument by examining an out-of-sample comparison. Although the end of the Cold War marked an era of attention to promoting democracy, the US inconsistently pressured for liberalization across the developing world.

Sok draws attention to the dramatic differences in US policy toward Kenya and Uganda in the 1990s. Sok identifies independent variables that might explain these differences. Her thesis core chapters weave a compelling narrative about how these variables translate into different policies through those who actually engaged in the policy-making process. Identifying a causal theory, tracing the mechanisms through which it works, and telling a good story are the components of a great book and thesis. The extra effort of a second paired comparison and her findings are indicative of the high quality of her analysis.

Gregory Wayne
"Order and Word Order: How the Information Content of a Word in a Sentence Helps Explain a Linguistic Universal"

Gregory Wayne's honors thesis seeks to explain a well-known generalization about the grammars of human languages: most languages have consistent branching direction. Languages whose verbs precede their objects (such as English) have prepositions, whereas languages whose verbs follow their objects (such as Japanese) have postpositions. A recent attempt to explain why this and related correlations hold rests on the claim that consistent branching supports efficient language learning.  This idea was supported by computer simulations of learning artificial languages, some with consistent and others with inconsistent branching direction.

Gregory found fatal flaws in that work, both in the basic argumentation and in the implementation of the simulation. This in itself is a significant and publishable contribution. But Gregory went further to propose an entirely novel explanation for the consistency of branching direction. Drawing on Shannon's information theory, he argued that consistent branching direction optimizes information flow by spreading the information evenly throughout sentences. He backed this idea up with both analytic arguments and computational simulations.

Gregory has managed a combination of solid scholarship in a difficult area, a groundbreaking result based on a variety of methods. This is lucid, even humorous writing on a technically challenging topic. The technical parts of this thesis will make an outstanding journal article.

Daniella Witten
"An analysis of the power of tests of neutrality for DNA polymorphism data to detect selection in the presence of recombination"

Daniela's thesis concerns a difficult problem in evolutionary genetics. How can we tell by examining a sample of DNA sequences whether they, or a part of the DNA near to them on the chromosomes, have been under natural selection ? The alternative is that they have only been subject to random fluctuations- that is they are neutral to selection. Daniela helped to develop a powerful simulation tool that models the evolution of such sequences, evaluates a number of statistics that are designed to test for the presence of natural selection, and computes the power of these statistics, namely the probability that natural selection can be detected if it has indeed been occurring. This has a lot of potential applications to genomics from jumping genes in fruit flies to mutations that might cause diseases in humans. Large datasets on genomic variation are accumulating and Daniela has made an elegant and useful contribution to their interpretation.

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