Class of 2024 Presentations

Alice Du, Economics and Biology

“Entrepreneurship as a toolkit for change”

I reflect on my journey founding Seek, my second startup, aimed at addressing educational inequity. Drawing from personal experiences abroad and discussions with over 50 teachers worldwide, I highlight how outdated textbooks, language barriers, and teacher workload can deny students timely and relevant information and an engaging learning process.  Seek is an AI-powered educational platform that combines any teaching concept with each student’s unique learning interests. I speak to the process of rapid prototyping, user interviews, and building a team across 6 schools. Seek is currently beta testing in Swarthmore’s Modern Language Department with a goal to make learning accessible, engaging, and motivating for every student. 

Anna Miller, Neuroscience and Global Studies

“Effect of maternal depression and malnutrition on the cognitive development of children in Kisumu, Kenya”

One in five children under five worldwide experiences malnutrition, which alters neurological, cognitive, and behavioral development and makes children susceptible to comorbidities such as infectious disease. Studies have shown maternal depression is a root cause of malnutrition, due to decreased breastfeeding, non-responsive caregiving, and poor parenting behavior, particularly in Kenya. Both factors are known to affect the cognitive function of children, but the impact of the co-morbidity on the brain is yet to be explored. This study uses the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 and Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development to determine how, and to what extent, maternal depression and malnutrition impact childhood development in Kisumu, Kenya. 

Annabel Zhao, German Studies

“Awe and Terror: die Natur in 19th Century German Texts”

The two 19th century German short stories I'm comparing, Joseph von Eichendorff's "The Marble Statue" (1818) and Theodor Storm's "The Rider on the White Horse” (1888), raise questions that are still relevant today: is nature something to be/that can be conquered? How much power over nature do individuals have? In analyzing how the role of nature shifts from a supporting to an antagonistic character in the texts, I argue that the texts warn of the consequences of human hubris. I also investigate how nature assists the subversive depictions of women, and I reflect on the process of literary analysis in (language) education as additional capstone components.

Daniel Oakes, Theater and Biology

“Umwelt: My Self-Centered World”

This solo performance is a presentation of material that combines Biology and Theater into an interactive experience that will give the audience a new animal perspective on the world around us. I have been devising ways to lend the audience a new dimension to their sensory experience, as inspired by a few different animal species. The project centers around the concept of the Umwelt which can be translated from German to “self-centered world” and describes the way in which organisms perceive their world and synthesize their sensory information into the way they experience life. To keep with this theme I will detail how I came to understand my self-centered world, and how every single living thing creates its own universe simply by existing. I hope to create a curiosity in my audience, such that they will be able to empathize with the animal kingdom and hope for a better natural future.

Elpiniki (Ellie) Tsapatsaris, Film & Media Studies major, Dance minor

“Call Time”

My piece is a dance film that captures the backstage moments before a dance performance. Inspired by Classic Hollywood musical numbers, the film follows a “vignette” format, where small groups of dancers perform sections of choreography throughout Swarthmore’s Lang Performing Arts Center. The film features 21 Swarthmore Dance students and one Swarthmore Film student cinematographer. While the choreography is precise, the narrative is comedic and lighthearted. Underscored by 1920s jazz music (Two Deuces and Knee Drops, both by jazz musician Louis Armstrong) and framed by tracking and handheld camera shots, I hope to create a piece in which the viewer feels a sense of closeness with the dancers–as if they too are getting ready for the performance. 

Gwendolyn Lam, Biochemistry and Mathematics

“Atomic Snapshot: Crystal Structure of the DNA-ligand Complex THM-RHPS4”

Guanine quadruplexes, a DNA structure different from the typical Watson-Crick DNA double helix, have biological relevance. The stabilization of guanine quadruplexes by small molecule ligands may represent a novel way to regulate cellular processes as an anticancer therapeutic. This work focuses on the first x-ray crystallographic structure of a guanine quadruplex in complex with the ligand RHPS4. The DNA sequence 5’-(GGGTT)3GGG-3’ is known as THM.

Harrison Kim, Biochemistry

“Left-handed G-Quadruplexes and their Interactions with Small-Molecule Ligands”

G-quadruplexes (GQs) are fascinating structures made up of guanine nucleotides, one of the building blocks of DNA. My research focuses on the left-handed GQ topology and its biological relevance to the KRAS proto-oncogene which is associated with a number of cancers. I use various biochemical techniques to assess whether stability and left-handedness are maintained when adding nucleotides to the left or right side of the left-handed DNA sequence. I also examined the ability for certain small molecules to target a left-handed GQ as it may aid in the development of therapeutics.

Jules Kyung Lee-Zacheis, Theatre and Biology

“Angels in America: An Empathy Study on New York During the AIDS Crisis”

I am directing a production of Millennium Approaches, the first play from Tony Kushner's award-winning play Angels in America. The play takes place in New York during the heart of the AIDS epidemic, and our work is grounded in questions of how we feel this horrific moment in the culture we live in today—as an all-queer cast, as young people living in the urban northeast, and as Americans at large. My team has approached this question from a number of angles, all aimed at finding ways to empathize with the characters in these impossible circumstances. These conversations can then inform our theatre-making, with the fundamental goal of allowing our 2024 audience, the majority of whom did not live through this moment, to share in our exercise in empathy. The performances will be April 27 & 28, and we would be honored to share our full work with you there!

Kate Carlyle, Linguistics & Languages (French, Spanish)

“Beyond the Binary: L1 strategies for spoken non-binary French”

French, like other Romance languages, carries a lot of binary gender at the grammatical level, which makes it difficult to avoid either masculine or feminine gender marking in speech. So how can we refer to non-binary individuals in spoken French? I interviewed 7 cisgender native French speakers and asked them to verbally describe images with stick figures marked as having binary (M, F) and non-binary (NB) gender. I found that compared to the binarily-gendered figures, participants describing the NB figures more frequently used constructions that avoided ascribing personal gender. By exploring how spoken non-binary French can behave in practice, this study illuminates strategies for employing and promoting NB language in historically binary language contexts.

Lucia Navarro, Special major in Educational Studies & Sociology/Anthropology

“Beyond the Classroom: Examining the Impact of an After-School Program on Latine Immigrant Youth in Philadelphia”

This project centers around students’ experiences in an after-school program for Latine high school students in a South Philadelphia community-based organization. Students work with individual college-age mentors and participate in interactive workshops that focus on the interests of students, with topics spanning postsecondary readiness, socioemotional life skills, health and wellbeing, and social justice issues. This project also aims to understand how community-based organizations identify issues in their community, and in turn, design and implement programs addressing those issues and needs. Due to my history with the organization, I approached this project through a participatory action research model collaborating with the Adolescent Program Supervisor as I wished this project to primarily serve the organization for the development of their programming. The findings reveal that exposure to the multiplicity of Latine identities in this after-school program has allowed students to manage their often conflicting identities in their own process of self-development.

Natalie Chai Fraser, Medical Anthropology

“Left Out in the Cold: Care, Neglect, and Homelessness in Anchorage, Alaska”

Anchorage, Alaska closed all low-barrier homeless shelters in the Summer of 2022 and 2023, leaving many people to camp, unsheltered, throughout the city. My thesis compares how mutual aid volunteers, nonprofit employees, and policymakers react to this withdrawal of services. How is care enacted in the context of urban life, specifically in regards to homelessness? How does mutual aid work challenge dominant assumptions about our responsibilities to each other? With Anchorage, Alaska as a case study, I argue that mutual aid volunteers mobilize care to challenge state neglect of unhoused people and imagine different, better futures.

Nicolas-Bilal Urick,  Peace & Conflict Studies and Arabic Studies

“Tilling the National Dream: Romantic Migration and an Arab-American Nahda”

“The Pan-Arabist Trough: Romantic Migration and an Arab-American Nahda” investigates the intellectual history of Arab collaboration with literary trends in the “West” at the turn of the twentieth century. The project pays particular attention to the keen fusion of pre-Islamic Arabic literary traditions and the Romantic and Transcendentalist gestures gaining purchase in their United States homes. The exploration refers to literature and literary theory from writers of the Mahjar, or émigre, movement of Arab writers in New York City’s “Little Syria” writing concurrently with Nahda, or Renaissance, authors primarily in Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon. I suggest that the early Arab-American literati made vital, though oft-neglected, contributions to the contemporary written innovations in their multipolar homes. “The Pan-Arabist Trough” constitutes an essential locus of study at a time in which Arab relationships to their “American” identities experience historical precarity. 

Nora Sweeney, Peace & Conflict Studies

“Watch Your Words: Reframing Abortion Access as Social Conflict”

In our social world, the way we talk about things matters. Our construction of the social factors that influence us affects how we perceive them and what we can do about them. The United States fosters intense domestic hostility and hatred, often manifest through problems considered “social justice issues.” A liberal framing of “social justice” related to individual injustice negatively affects and limits how we think about resolving these conflicts. Using reproductive justice in the United States as a case study, my thesis argues for reframing “social justice” as “social conflict” to allow for new possibilities for resolution.

Richard Garcia, Biology

“Exploring the Role of Cell Signaling in Proportional Heart Growth”

Organs grow through controlled cell division. These cellular activities are regulated through cell communication, sending and receiving molecules, in a process called cell signaling. Wnt is a conserved cell signal with numerous developmental roles including either increasing or inhibiting cell division, in a species-specific manner. However, Wnt contributions to organ growth have yet to be fully characterized. We investigated how Wnt signaling affects heart growth in Ciona robusta (a marine invertebrate with conserved developmental mechanisms to vertebrates). Ciona juvenile heart growth is driven by a distinctive group of cardiac progenitor cells known as the undifferentiated line (UL) which are thought to divide and give rise to the different cell types found in the Ciona heart. I performed multiple drug trials in which I activated or suppressed WNT. Surprisingly, there were more dividing cells when I blocked Wnt, but a decrease when I blocked Wnt. My findings suggest the WNT pathway plays an inhibitory role in cell division during heart growth.

Sneha Kumar, History and Global Studies

“Solidarity, Statelessness, Strangers: Diasporic South Asian Anti-Colonial Movements”

In the past, scholarship about the diasporic South Asian anti-colonial movements have discussed their surroundings, members, and actions throughout the early 20th century. This thesis analyzes two organizations- the Ghadar Party and the India League of America- under their respective unique framework of alliances, before comparing them under a framework of gendered transnational refraction. Examining the organizations in this way reveals how diasporic South Asian anti-colonial movements were shaped by notions of alliances, gender, and refractions.

Xingyu Dong, Computer Science and Economics

“Algorithmically Generated Visual Design (AlgoArt)”

The AlgoArt project is a Computational Art research that combines artistic inspirations with computer science algorithms to create distinctive digital art pieces. Focusing on 2D graphic designs, we have developed several drawing algorithms that repetitively generate specific patterns, ranging from simple lines and dots to more complex geometric shapes, to overlay or combine to form an image. Each algorithm includes dozens of adjustable parameters that alter the generation process from different aspects, allowing us to acquire countless fun and unique images. To share our generated art, we have also established a website (algoart.org) where people can create their own images using our algorithms and look through the community collections. Our research aims to reveal the uniqueness of algorithm-based generated art and the exciting artworks our algorithms can create. We welcome everyone interested in computational arts to provide valuable artistic insights or help us develop their own fascinating algorithms.