First, a huge thanks to all those who participated and attended the Fall 2020 Honors College Research Symposium & UIC Impact Day on Friday, November 20th. This year’s symposium was a remarkable one with over 200 attendees! A very special thanks to all of our Faculty Judges for their assistance in adjudicating each of the student presentations and selecting our winners!
Before we announce the winners of this year’s Symposium awards, it is also worth noting that the Symposium featured remarkably strong work from more than 50 undergraduate students, spread across nearly two dozen disciplines and each student was adjudicated by 4 Faculty/Staff Judges, which resulted in a fierce competition for the Research Symposium Awards, so fierce in fact that we have a tie for the Award for High Distinction. Thus, winning these awards is no small feat and we hope you will join us in congratulating your classmates on their achievements.
Without further ado, at this time it is our pleasure to announce the recipients of the Research Symposium Awards.
Highest Distinction:
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Student Name
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Rumi Venkatesh
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Project Title
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Claiming Roots: A Reclamation of Jewish Identity in Judah Halevi's Kuzari
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Project Supervisor
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Young Kim
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Project Abstract
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Judah Halevi wrote the Kuzari in the twelfth century following the breakdown of the Cordoban Caliphate in Muslim-occupied medieval Spain, also known as al Andalus. The legacy of this “paradise” and its relatively high religious tolerance contributed to a period of flourishing Arabized Jewish culture and a philosophical revival in Spain. Despite some historians’ common perception of the Kuzari as a polemical treatise against Islam and Christianity or a revolutionary explanation of the Jewish religion, we can understand the Kuzari on a deeper level with consideration of Halevi’s sociocultural context as an upper-class member of the Jewish community in twelfth-century Spain. In a society characterized by cultural intermixing and a changing intellectual sphere, Halevi’s Kuzari serves as a reclamation of Jewish identity. Throughout the Kuzari, Halevi establishes the superiority of native Jews as direct descendants of Adam, highlighting the importance of Jewish tradition and the Jewish homeland of Palestine, and he highlights the primacy of the Jewish religion itself. In order to do so, he not only identifies Islam and Christianity as corruptions of the original Jewish religion, but he also depicts philosophical rationalization of spirituality as woefully inadequate. However, as a philosopher himself, Halevi employs logical explanations for many facets of Judaism discussed in the Kuzari. Through the inherent contradiction posed by the use of philosophical methods to reject philosophy, we can see Halevi’s rejection of the “corrupting” influences on Judaism in his society while still being a product of the same society. In his efforts to encourage a return to the roots of Judaism, Halevi works to reaffirm a particular Jewish identity.
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High Distinction
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Student Name
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Srishti Pyasi
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Project Title
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Investigating Radicalization Pathways in Twitter
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Project Supervisor
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Chris Kanich
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Project Abstract
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Originating from places of congregation, radicalization largely occurs in the virtual world of the internet via social networking platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Given increased screen times amid people staying at home due to COVID-19, this can be problematic, providing a way for people to migrate towards more radicalized Alt-right white nationalist and white supremacist ideas. Our results indicate that there is a pathway from a non-radical to a radicalized account. In the internet age, radicalization largely occurs via social networking platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Given increased screen times amid people staying at home due to COVID-19, this can be problematic. This study shows that a non-radical Twitter account can follow a pathway to radicalization. People may migrate towards the more radicalized Alt-right ideas.
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High Distinction
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Student Name
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Shivani Dhebar
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Project Title
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Enhancing Immunotherapy with Metformin in Drug-Resistant and Metastatic Breast Cancer
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Project Supervisor
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Josef Goldufsky
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Project Abstract
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Over the last decade, an increased usage of immune checkpoint inhibitors in strengthening tumor-specific T cells has shown promising success, shifting tumor immunotherapy to the forefront of cancer treatment. However, the efficacy of these immunotherapies is still restricted to a small proportion of cancer patients who meet required criteria. Current clinical trials have been using combinatorial approaches to enhance the effectiveness of an immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy against tumors. A major challenge preventing patient responsiveness to ICB stems from the metabolic limitations that the tumor microenvironment (TME) imposes on tumor-specific T cells. Previous studies have demonstrated enhanced responsiveness to immunotherapy by using the known antidiabetic drug, metformin in combination with anti-PD-1 therapy to improve T cell tumor-destroying activity by reducing states of hypoxia in the TME. Our experiment sought to understand how metformin, a complex I inhibitor, directly affects metabolism in human and murine breast cancer lines. Our data demonstrate that metformin specifically reduces ATP production in both mouse and human drug-resistant and advanced metastatic breast cancers, by gradually minimizing the mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation pathway. Additionally, metformin’s anticancer effects include an increase in reactive oxygen species and diminished proliferation of the cancerous cells. While the metformin treatment of mice bearing drug-resistant and metastatic breast cancer showed a delay in tumor growth and progression, there was no synergistic effect of metformin combined with PD-1 blockade observed. The in vivo data obtained in this experiment did not align with previous studies showing metformin’s ability to incorporate anti-PD-1 therapy and drive T-cell abilities in clearance of the tumor. The limitations of metformin illustrate the need for further investigations to determine its ability to enhance PD1 blockade by reprogramming metabolism in the TME and reinvigorating anti-tumor activity of T cells in breast cancer.
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Distinction
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Student Name
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Refah Zabin
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Project Title
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Understanding the role of DCV1 and SLA1 in Yeast Cell Signaling
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Project Supervisor
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David Stone
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Project Abstract
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The goal of this project is to better understand DCV1 and SLA1. It is hypothesized that DCV1 plays a role in membrane fluidity. DCV1 affects the polarity proteins that are responsible for the polarized growth at specific locations of the cell. This project aims to learn more about DCV1 and SLA1 genes though time-lapse imaging using specialized microscope and to categorize and analyze the acquired data.
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Congratulations to all of our stellar undergraduate researchers!
