The Ant Hill

Body of work encompassing themes of family, childhood, and transition. The works included are oil paintings and ink drawings of family photos from multiple generations. There are several hundred small carpenter ant models that are displayed along with the 2D works trailing up to the ceiling into a smoke alarm and out of an outlet. The ants form a spiral at the center of the photos carrying and running under and over several of them. These are based on childhood memories I have intermingled with stories my parents have told from our time moving between various rentals while I was little and they were in school

Painting Punctum

In my work, I examine aspects of nostalgia, the longing for an imagined homeland, through the gaze of the child self. Using my own childhood photos as references for my paintings, I aim to make this profoundly personal desire relatable. In these photos, my child-self sits sullen-faced and offers a handful of crumpled flowers to their photographer (and, as photo becomes painting, to every viewer). I chose these references to examine the ways the inner self is not always reflected by the outer both in terms of emotional and gender expression, the gaze of the child, and the relationship between past and present self. My intent is not to tell my viewers what to think or feel about nostalgic desire but rather to cause them to think and feel. I connect this to essayist Roland Barthes’ definition of “punctum”: a “certain capacity to prick ones’ emotions,” one which is unexpected and does not follow a recognizable visual or symbolic system

The Match: An ILP Application

As CS majors, we are all intimately familiar with the struggles of course registration. In recent years, the Carleton CS department has attempted to mitigate the challenges posed by registration for classes in the department by adopting a method called the CS Match. This pre-registration process takes in a list from every participating student that contains a ranking of CS courses they would like to take and matches them to a single course using an adaptation of the Gale-Shapley algorithm. Given the complexity of the CS Match process, we sought to investigate another approach to solve this problem that can account for more factors. Hence, for our Comprehensive Exercise, we studied integer linear programming (ILP) and its application to the problem of matching students to classes

Butyrate’s Maintenance of Colonic Homeostasis via PPARγ Activation

The human colon is colonized by trillions of bacteria, characterized by a dominance of obligate anaerobic bacteria that require hypoxic conditions for survival (Silva et al. 2020, Rinninella et al. 2019, Litvak et al. 2018). Disruption of hypoxic conditions provides a competitive advantage for facultative anaerobic bacteria, which can grow both in the presence and absence of oxygen (André et al. 2021). Most life-threatening pathogenic bacteria are facultative anaerobes, and their abundance is a hallmark of dysbiosis in the colon (André et al. 2021). Their adaptability to variable oxygen concentrations creates a selective advantage for bacterial translocation and infection, whereby persistent disruption of the mucosal barrier is a predominant underlying cause of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs), such as Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) (André et al. 2021, Litvak et al. 2018, Nagpal et al. 2017, Kotas et al. 2015). Diagnosis of these diseases continues to increase in prevalence across the United States. Therefore, identifying molecules that protect against facultative anaerobes and support obligate anaerobic bacteria in the colon serves great importance in alleviating disease burden (Ye et al. 2020). Obligate anaerobes obtain energy through fermentation of undigested dietary carbohydrates, specifically resistant starches and dietary fibers not absorbed by the small intestine (Silva et al. 2020, Rinninella et al. 2019, Litvak et al. 2018). Butyrate, a four-carbon short-chain fatty acid (SCFA), is a byproduct of this fermentation process, serving as both the primary energy source for colon epithelial cells (colonocytes), and a key facilitator of the mutualistic relationship between a human host and the gut microbiome. Butyrate supports intestinal homeostasis through modulation of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARγ) signaling pathway. Downstream PPARγ signaling from butyrate provides maintenance of colonic hypoxic conditions, thereby promoting growth of obligate anaerobic bacteria, supporting intestinal barrier integrity, and downregulating inflammation through T cell differentiation. Butyrate drives a multilayer system of host defense mechanisms; therefore, its administration is at the forefront of treating chronic inflammatory diseases in the human colon

Home for the Holiday

This is a screenplay that centers around two lovers, and it tracks them throughout the 1980s

An Introduction to Algebraic Number Theory

This paper is a whirlwind introduction to the field of algebraic number theory culminating in discussion of Dirichlet’s unit theorem and the class number