2023 Image of Research Winners & Honorable Mentions

East Facade

Name: Kristy Ulrich Papczun
Program: Curriculum Studies
Division: BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Description: My research aims to historicize school sites where schools have been closed and reopened. I work to restory the narratives I find in the archives and gather from community members with collective remembering strategies. Using a critical perspective, this work honors and examines the “absent-presence” (Ferguson & Nichols, 2021; Gordon, 2008) of closed schools in Chicago. This site image shows a school building that used to be a neighborhood school for the surrounding public housing in Cabrini-Green until it was closed in 2009 and reopened as a selective enrollment school. The large green lawns adjacent to the school serve as scars where the public housing towers once stood, but only if one knows the site’s history. The benign nature of this photograph betrays the contested history of the site that I argue is masked over when schools are closed. Noting the unsettling symmetry and lacking any distinct identifiers, this image could stand in to represent any of the hundreds of neighborhood schools in Chicago that have been closed. Throughout my research, I use the methodology of portraiture, including images like this, to have conversations about school closings as a way to reconsider how the past is always present.

Verdun Battlefield

Name: Haylie Van Den Berghe
Program: French and Francophone Studies
Division: FINE ARTS AND HUMANITIES

Description: My graduate research focuses on reactions to World War I in French literature, examining nationalism/patriotism, disillusionment, trauma of soldiers, and lasting effects on French society. In June of 2022, I spent a week visiting various WWI battle sites and museums in France to supplement my research. The image I’m submitting depicts a battle site in Verdun, France, which was the longest battle and one of the bloodiest of WWI. I am seen emerging from a military bunker, which is completely defaced by the countless shell craters, creating an eerie moonscape of what was once flat forested ground. To me, this image represents the reactions to and the aftermath of WWI—this war completely changed the world, creating a stark opening to the 20th century, leaving behind the idyllic past of the 19th century.

living

Name: Mushaine Shih
Program: Biological Sciences
Division: LIFE SCIENCES

Description: The increased number of the aging human population gives rise to increased disease susceptibility. A significant focus of our research is to uncover mechanisms that regulate the aging process in neurons. Recent findings of neurodegeneration highlighted the importance of post-transcriptional gene regulation, including those controlled by RNA binding proteins (RBPs). Because RBPs are critical regulators of gene expressions in the nervous system, we seek to understand the role of conserved RBPs in maintaining neuronal structural integrity in adult Caenorhabditis elegans. The transparency of the animal’s body enables us to perform live imaging to visualize the gene activity. I fluorescently tagged one of the conserved RBPs we found to play critical roles in neurodegeneration using the CRISPR technique, allowing us to perform quantitative analysis under different mutant backgrounds. The image displays RBP expression in the head neurons and spindle-shaped muscle cells wrapped around the body. With this application, we aim to elucidate mechanisms by which RBP controls age-related neurodegeneration and could provide novel mechanistic insights into the regulatory process of neurodegeneration that has not been characterized before.

Immunological boot camp: firing up antitumor immunity

Name: Dahee Jung
Program: Pharmaceutical Sciences
Division: LIFE SCIENCES

Description: In the past few decades, researchers have discovered that each individual’s tumor has unique antigen; therefore, to effectively combat cancer, treatments need to be highly personalized. Cancer cells have specific targets called neoantigens that are only found in tumor cells due to mutations. By identifying neoantigens from a patient’s tumor, it is possible to create personalized neoantigen peptide cancer vaccines that educate the immune system to attack cancer cells. However, it’s been a challenge to effectively deliver the peptides to immune cells and evoke sufficient immune reactions. To address this, I am developing an antibody-based vaccine carrier that can efficiently deliver peptides to specific immune cells while evoking enough immune responses in lymph nodes, which are a hub for immunity. By using an agonistic CD40 antibody, I aim to target and activate dendritic cells in the lymph node. This image represents the dye-conjugated CD40 antibody distribution in the mouse lymph node after the subcutaneous injection. We observed that the s.c. injected CD40 antibody (Green) rapidly moves into the nearest lymph node and binds to dendritic cells (Red). Further, we will load the antigenic peptide to the CD40 antibody carrier to test the cancer vaccine efficiency.

Visualizing Bubbles Within a Rayleigh Bénard Convection

Name: Hal Brynteson, Abbas Moradi Bilondi
Program: Computer Science
Division: ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Description:

The Rayleigh Bénard convection, where a fluid is heated from below and cooled from above, is an important mechanism of mass and heat transfer in nature and in numerous industrial applications. One can cite geophysics, astrophysics, meteorology, heat exchangers, multilayer walls in buildings and cooling of electronic components for example. In the present work, by considering bubbles inside the fluid flow, we aim to investigate the effects of the presence of bubbles on the heat transfer rate. In this visualization, bubbles are shown in between the shifting temperatures, rendered as a volume. Fluid simulation by Abbas Moradi Bilondi and visualization by Hal Brynteson.

Bursting into Life

Name: Yahya Najjar
Program: Biological Sciences
Division: LIFE SCIENCES

Description: A 2-day-old leaf of an Arabidopsis thaliana (Thale cress) plant, grown in total darkness, was imaged after its initial emergence. When a plant is ready to emerge from the soil, water is absorbed into the seed. This expands the seed and helps the young leaves to push through the soil toward the surface. Young leaves fight their way out of the seed, bursting through the seams, desperately chasing the source of light. Due to this initial expansion, what is left is a beautiful shimmering and fiery seed coat. This image was captured using a Zeiss deconvoluting microscope (Observer Z.1 Excite 120LED). UV, blue-green, and orange-red LEDs were directed at the live leaf for less than a second, fluorescence was captured, then data were merged to obtain the final image. Shown is the transition layer that contains pigments (green), the newly made premature cells (green-red), and nuclei (blue).

A nanoneedle floral bloom

Name: Arani Mukhopadhyay, Anish Pal, Constantine M. Megaridis
Program: Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Division: ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Description: As electronic devices get smaller and faster, which requires them to perform at ever growing power inputs, they develop hot spots which are very difficult to cool. Novel wick-free vapor chambers developed in our lab (MNFTL) at UIC work as efficient heat spreaders that can effectively cool high-power electronic devices. Our vapor chambers often incorporate intricate microstructures with hierarchical roughness (as seen here, nanoneedles growing on micro-hills), that leads to manifold increase of surface area from which water can evaporate easily, thereby cooling down such devices and ensuring better device performance.

Disabled Nurses: Assets, Not Burdens

Name: Sabrina Ali Jamal-Eddine, Ja’van Carr
Program: Nursing
Division: LIFE SCIENCES

Description: Image description: A brown woman with long brown curly hair, blue scrubs, and a white post-surgical TLSO back brace smiles with her stethoscope pressed against an extended white arm wearing a black blood pressure cuff. This interdisciplinary health humanities research explores ableism experienced by disabled undergraduate nursing students across the United States while simultaneously challenging the ethical dilemma nursing faculty perceive in admitting disabled students to the profession. Despite the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), disabled nursing students across the United States disproportionately face discriminatory, systemic, institutional exclusion from Bachelor of Science in Nursing programs as they remain unrecruited, unadmitted, unenrolled, and unretained. As a profession, nursing offers inherently accommodating career pathways such as telehealth, administrative, informatics, outpatient, and research-based nursing. Additionally, disabled nursing students and nurses bring disability-concordance as well as ‘crip wisdom,’ or the knowledge and skills associated with being disabled, which are very useful to patient care. Disabled nurses are assets, not burdens to the nursing profession. This image of a disabled Arab Registered Nurse wearing an assistive device while providing patient care seeks to disrupt the harmful patient-provider dichotomy while illustrating that disabled healthcare providers exist. Image of Sabrina Jamal-Eddine shot by photographer Ja’van Carr.

Where the Inkas Met the Ocean

Name: Rosa Varillas
Program: Anthropology
Division: BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Description: My research is focused on studying the Inka occupation of the coast of Peru and their interactions with the pre-existing groups in the area. To begin my investigation, I utilized drone photography to map out the archaeological site of Puerto Inka, which is thought to be one of the earliest Inka coastal sites with a road connecting it directly to the Cuzco capital. By analyzing these images, I hope to identify any unique features of the site that could shed light on the Inka’s presence in the region, such as architectural styles, construction methods, or utilization of space.