Hi y’all! My name is Shanen and I am from the deep, deep South… of the globe. I was born and raised in Mauritius, a small island off the coast of Madagascar, once home to the now-extinct Dodo bird.
Shanen Ganapathee is a senior who wishes to be ‘a historian of the brain’
The reason I’m at Duke has to do with a desire to do what I love most — exploring art, science and their intersection. You will often find me writing prose; inspired by lessons in neuroanatomy and casting a DNA strand as the main character in my short story.
I’m excited about Africa, and the future of higher education and research on the continent. I believe in ideas, especially when they are big and bold. I’m a dreamer, an idealist but some might call me naive. I am deeply passionate about research but above all how it is made accessible to a wide audience.
I am currently a senior pursuing a Program II in Human Cognitive Evolution, a major I designed in my sophomore year with the help of my advisor, Dr. Leonard White, whom I had to luck to meet through the Neurohumanities Program in Paris.
This semester, I am working on a thesis project under the guidance of Dr. Greg Wray, inspired by an independent study I did under Dr. Steven Churchill, where we examined the difference in early human and Neandertal cognition and behavior. I am interested in using ancient DNA genomics to answer the age-old question: what makes us human? My claim is that the advent of artistic ventures truly shaped the beginning of behavioral modernity. In a sense, I want to be a historian of the brain.
My first exposure to the world of genomics was through the FOCUS program — Genome in our Lives — my freshman fall. Ever since, I have been fascinated by what the human genome can teach us. It is a window into our collective pasts as much as it informs us about our present and future. I am particularly intrigued by how the forces of evolution have shaped us to become the species we are.
I am excited about joining the Duke Research blog and sharing some great science with you all.
Hi! My name is Lola Sanchez-Carrion and I am currently a sophomore at Duke pursuing a double major in Biology and Global Health. I was born in New York, and raised between Miami and Lima, Peru. It was in Lima that I developed a passion for global health, and a strong understanding of the implications scientific research can have on communities like the one I lived in.
New Blogger Lola Sanchez-Carrion is a sophomore in pre-med.
Throughout high school, I did volunteer work with “TECHO,” an NGO that works towards mitigating poverty by building emergency relief homes, improving health systems, and encouraging political advocacy in developing regions of South America. By working with this organization and interacting with communities on a personal level, I began taking greater notice of global health issues and the need to address them.
I was so moved by my experiences with TECHO that I wrote an article about it for an online publication for international schools, and in doing so another interest emerged: a desire to write about all things health/science-related. I wrote for my high school’s “Environmental Science Blog,” a medium through which student writers showcased conferences and events taking place on campus and around Lima regarding environmental activism. I organized a conference on climate change at my high school to instigate conversations on scientific topics relevant to those of my generation. I realized the power that one’s words, written and verbal, had on teaching and inspiring others, particularly those outside the realms of the “scientific community.”
I am currently on the pre-med track at Duke, but am still very much open to the idea of following a scientific career that does not entail pursuing a medical degree. My courses in Global Health, particularly classes taught by Dr. Broverman and Dr. Whetten, have allowed me to recognized the infinite opportunities that exist through research at Duke, and how tangible the impact from research really is.
I hope that by writing for the Duke Research Blog, I will get to experience this research hands-on, meet the interesting students and faculty behind the cutting-edge work, and share it with other members of the Duke community so that they too can experience that impact.
Apart from my work with the Duke Research Blog, I am a tour guide on campus and am a member of Duke’s WISER Club, an organization that works towards empowering and educating women in rural Kenya.
Hi everyone! My name is Meg Shieh, and I’m currently a Duke froshling. Where I come from cannot be answered in the standard 5-second or two- to three-word answer: I was born and raised in La Verne, California for almost thirteen years. The summer before 9th grade, my family and I moved to Kaohsiung, Taiwan; I’ve lived there for the past four years.
In Taiwan, I met my high school IB HL Chemistry teacher and Science Club advisor, Dr. Marilou Gallos. She was my greatest mentor in high school and piqued my interest in the sciences. I was the Science Club President, so I spent most of my time in her lab researching and conducting test drives on projects for members to complete. My school was also undergoing Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) at the time. I was made the sole student representative on our LEED Committee, so I was privy to the inner workings of the certification and construction processes. Besides giving school tours regarding LEED certification to visitors, I also wrote and published my first article on the USGBC website.
Resting by a river in the Qilian Mountains
The summer before senior year, my IB HL Biology teacher, Mr. Robert Oddo, took me and eleven of my classmates to China on an Operation Wallacea research expedition. On our first day in the Qilian Mountains, my group was selected to go up into the mountains. We woke up at 5 AM and needed to be at the top of the mountains by 7 AM in order to observe blue sheep or bharal. I had never hiked before, much less climbed to the top of a mountain at more than 3,200 km above sea level. Based on the confusion amongst the guides, I surmised that they had never been up mountains in this area before. We ended up following the extremely narrow goat paths.Once we reached the top, I sunk to the ground and observed the blue sheep skull a ways down and blue sheep excrement. We were too late. For the rest of the trip, I measured the size of a mouse, made bait, set small mammal traps, performed mist netting, and held birds in my hand. I realized that field research is something to look into.
My current interests lie in Chemistry and Biology, but I’m also interested in Psychology and Russian. I hope to be involved in enthralling research here at Duke, so I’m always on the lookout for opportunities!
Outside of academics, I enjoy reading murder-mystery novels, hanging out with friends, and basking in the lit-ness of the Brown Common Room. I love acting as an Admissions Ambassador and being a part of Club Figure Skating and Best Buddies.
I am so excited to be on the Research Blog Team and cannot wait to attend events, interview researchers, and share stories with all of you!
A group of students has teamed up with Duke Parking and Transportation to explore how data analysis and visualization can help make parking on campus a breeze.
As part of the Information Initiative’s Data+ program, students Mitchell Parekh (’19) and Morton Mo (’19) along with IIT student Nikhil Tank (’17), spent 10 weeks over the summer poring over parking data collected at 42 of Duke’s permitted lots.
Under the mentorship of graduate student Nicolas-Aldebrando Benelli, they identified common parking patterns across the campus, with the goal of creating a “redirection” tool that could help Duke students and employees figure out the best place to park if their preferred lot is full.
To understand parking patterns at Duke, the team created “activity” maps, where each circle represents one of Duke’s parking lots. The size of the circle indicates the size of the lot, and the color of the circle indicates how many people entered and exited the lot within a given hour.
“We envision a mobile app where, before you head out for work, you could check your lot on your phone,” Mo said, speaking with Parekh at the Sept. 23 Visualization Friday Forum. “And if the lot is full, it would give you a pass for an alternate lot.”
Starting with parking data gathered in Fall 2013, which logged permit holders “swiping” in and out from each lot, they set out to map some basic parking habits at Duke, including how full each lot is, when people usually arrive, and how long they stay.
However, the data weren’t always very agreeable, Mo said.
“One of the things we got was a historical occupancy count, which is exactly what we wanted – the number of cars in the facility at a given time – but we were seeing negative numbers,” said Mo. “So we figured that table might not be as trustworthy as we expected it to be.”
Other unexpected features, such as “passback,” which occurs when two cars enter or exit under the same pass, also created challenges with interpreting the data.
However, with some careful approximations, the team was able to estimate the occupancy of lot on campus at different times throughout an average weekday.
They then built an interactive, Matlab-based tool that would suggest up to three alternative parking locations based on the users’ location and travel time plus the utilization and physical capacity of each lot.
“Duke Parking is really happy with the interface that we built, and they want us to keep working on it,” Parekh said.
“The data team worked hard on real world challenges, and provided thoughtful insights to those challenges,” said Kyle Cavanaugh, Vice President of Administration at Duke. “The team was terrific to work with and we look forward to future collaboration.”
Hectic class schedules allowing, the team hopes to continue developing their application into a more user-friendly tool. You can watch a recording of Mo and Parekh’s Sept. 23 presentation here.
The team's algorithm recommends up to three alternative lots if a commuter's preferred lot is full. In this video, suggested alternatives to the blue lot are updated throughout the day to reflect changing traffic and parking patterns. Video courtesy of Nikhil Tank.
Duke evolutionary anthropology professor Brian Hare studies what goes on in the minds of animals.
Duke professor Brian Hare remembers his first flopped experiment. While an undergraduate at Emory in the late 1990s, he spent a week at the Duke Lemur Center waving bananas at lemurs. He was trying to see if they, like other primates, possess an important social skill. If a lemur spots a piece of food, or a predator, can other lemurs follow his gaze to spot it too?
First he needed the lemurs to notice him. If he could get one lemur to look at him, he could figure out if other lemurs then turn around and look too. In similar experiments with monkeys and chimps, oranges had done the trick.
“But I couldn’t get their attention,” Hare said. “It failed miserably.”
Hare was among more than 200 people from 25 states and multiple countries who converged in Durham this week for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Duke Lemur Center, Sept. 21-23, 2016.
Humans look to subtle movements in faces and eyes for clues to what others are thinking, Hare told a crowd assembled at a two-day research symposium held in conjunction with the event.
If someone quickly glances down at your name tag, for example, you can guess just from that eye movement that they can’t recall your name.
We develop this skill as infants. Most kids start to follow the gaze of others by the age of two. A lack of interest in gaze-following is considered an early sign of autism.
Arizona State University graduate student Joel Bray got hooked on lemurs while working as an undergraduate research assistant in the Hare lab.
“Gaze-following suggests that kids are starting to think about the thoughts of others,” Hare said. “And using where others look to try to understand what they want or what they know.”
In 1998 Hare and researchers Michael Tomasello and Josep Call published a study showing that chimpanzees and multiple species of monkeys are able to look where others are looking. But at the time not much was known about cognition in lemurs.
“When you study dogs you just say, ‘sit, stay,’ and they’re happy to play along,” Hare said. Working at the Duke Lemur Center, eventually his students discovered the secret to making these tree-dwelling animals feel at home: “Lemurs like to be off the ground,” Hare said. “We figured out that if we just let them solve problems on tables, they’re happy to participate.”
Studies have since shown that multiple lemur species are able to follow the gaze of other lemurs. “Lemurs have gone from ignored to adored in cognitive research,” Hare said.
Ring-tailed lemurs are among several lemur species known to follow the gaze of other lemurs. The ability to look where others are looking is considered a key step towards understanding what others see, know, or might do. Photo by David Haring, Duke Lemur Center.
We like to think of our brains as the ultimate commanders-in-chief, dictating each and every heartbeat and muscle twitch within our bodies.
But our loopy insides may have a lot more say than we realize.
Healthy mucosal cells in the human stomach, magnified. (credit: Nephron)
“Not only does the brain send information to the gut, but the gut sends information to the brain,” said Michael Gershon, professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia University. “And much of that we don’t yet understand.”
Gershon was one of nearly 200 scientists gathered at Duke last Friday for Gastronauts, a symposium exploring how our twisty, slimy guts and our twisty, slimy brains communicate with each other. By decoding the cellular and molecular messaging behind this gut-brain chatter, these researchers hope to gain insight into a wide array of modern health challenges, from obesity to Alzheimer’s.
Nearly 200 scientists gathered in the Trent Semans Great Hall Sept. 9 for Gastronauts, sponsored by the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.
Even if you sever all nerve connections between the brain and the gut, Gershon explained, your digestive tract will still carry on all that squeezing and acid-secreting necessary to digest food. The gut’s ability to ‘direct its own traffic’ led Gershon to dub the gut’s nervous system our “Second Brain.”
“The brain in the head deals with the finer things in life like religion, poetry, politics, while the brain in the gut deals with the messy, dirty, disgusting business of digestion,” Gershon said.
Our head brain and our gut brain talk to each other via long nerve fibers, such as a bundle of nerve cells called the vagus nerve that links the central nervous system to our abdominal organs, or via chemical signals, such as the neurotransmitter serotonin. Talks throughout the day delved into different aspects of these interactions – from how eating sugar can change our perception of taste to how the make-up of our gut microbiome might influence neural connectivity in the brain.
Our twisty loopy intestines can operate independently of our brains.
Duke professor Warren Grill presented his latest research on electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve. In projects led by graduate student Nikki Pelot and senior Eric Musselman, his group is building computer models to simulate the effects of electrical pulses on individual nerve cells within the vagus. These models might allow researchers to design devices to specifically block electrical signals going to the gut, a treatment that has been shown to help with obesity, Grill said.
And though we may think of the gut as the second brain, we should all remember that it came first, Duke professor Diego Bohórquez reminded the audience in the opening remarks.
“I like to say the gut is actually the first brain,” said Bohórquez. “If you go back to seafloor organisms, that was the first nervous system that was assembled.”
The result was a collection of maps and tables indicating whether various neighborhoods in each city had gentrified or not, based on changes in home values and other factors from 1990 to the present.
Soon Durham residents, business owners, policy wonks and others will have easy access to similar information about their neighborhoods too, thanks to planned updates to a web-based mapping tool called Durham Neighborhood Compass.
Two Duke students are part of the effort. For ten weeks this summer, undergraduates Anna Vivian and Vinai Oddiraju worked with Neighborhood Compass Project Manager John Killeen and Duke economics Ph.D. student Olga Kozlova to explore real-world data on Durham’s changing neighborhoods as part of a summer research program called Data+.
As a first step, they looked at recent trends in the housing market and business development.
Durham real estate and businesses are booming. A student mapping project aims to identify the neighborhoods at risk of pricing longtime residents out. Photo by Mark Moz.
Call it gentrification. Call it revitalization. Whatever you call it, there’s no denying that trendy restaurants, hotels and high-end coffee shops are popping up across Durham, and home values are on the rise.
Integrating data from the Secretary of State, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and local home sales, the team analyzed data for all houses sold in Durham between 2010 and 2015, including list and sale prices, days on the market, and owner demographics such as race and income.
They also looked at indicators of business development, such as the number of business openings and closings per square mile.
A senior double majoring in physics and art history, Vivian brought her GIS mapping skills to the project. Junior statistics major Oddiraju brought his know-how with computer programming languages.
To come up with averages for each neighborhood or Census block group, they first converted every street address in their dataset into latitude and longitude coordinates on a map, using a process called geocoding. The team then created city-wide maps of the data using GIS mapping software.
One of their maps shows the average listing price of homes for sale between 2014 and 2015, when housing prices in the area around Duke University’s East Campus between Broad Street and Buchanan Boulevard went up by $40,000 in a single year, the biggest spike in the city
Duke students are developing a web app that allows users to see the number of new businesses that have been opening across Durham. The data will appear in future updates to a web-based mapping tool called Durham Neighborhood Compass.
They also used a programming language called “R” to build an interactive web app that enables users to zoom in on specific neighborhoods and see the number of new businesses that opened, compare a given neighborhood to the average for Durham county as a whole, or toggle between years to see how things changed over time.
The Durham Neighborhood Compass launched in 2014. The tool uses data from local government, the Census Bureau and other state and federal agencies to monitor nearly 50 indicators related to quality of life and access to services.
When it comes to gentrification, users can already track neighborhood-by-neighborhood changes in race, household income, and the percentage of households that are paying 30 percent or more of their income for housing — more than many people can afford.
Vivian and Oddiraju expect the scripts and methods they developed will be implemented in future updates to the tool.
When they do, the team hopes users will be able to compare the average initial asking price to the final sale price to identify neighborhoods where bidding has been the highest, or see how fast properties sell once they go on the market — good indicators of how hot they are.
Visitors will also be able to compare the median income of people buying into a neighborhood to that of the people that already live there. This will help identify neighborhoods that are at risk of pricing out residents, especially renters, who have called the city home.
Vivian and Oddiraju were among more than 60 students who shared preliminary results of their work at a poster session on Friday, July 29 in Gross Hall.
Vivian plans to continue working on the project this fall, when she hopes to comb through additional data sets they didn’t get to this summer.
“One that I’m excited about is the data on applications for renovation permits and historic tax credits,” Vivian said.
She also hopes to further develop the web app to make it possible to look at multiple variables at once. “If sale prices are rising in areas where people have also filed lots of remodeling permits, for example, that could mean that they’re flipping those houses,” Vivian said.
Data+ is sponsored by the Information Initiative at Duke, the Social Sciences Research Institute and Bass Connections. Additional funding was provided by the National Science Foundation via a grant to the departments of mathematics and statistical science.
Writing by Robin Smith; video by Sarah Spencer and Ashlyn Nuckols
For particle physicists, “expect the unexpected” is more than just a catchy tagline.
Duke scientists on the Large Hadron Collider’s (LHC’s) ATLAS collaboration are on the hunt for hints of the unexpected: new, undiscovered particles or forces that could point to theories beyond the remarkably accurate, yet clearly incomplete, Standard Model of physics.
The Duke physics team at CERN this summer, gathered in front of a model of one of the LHC’s superconducting electromagnets. (Left to right: Ifeanyi Achu, Emily Stump, Elisa Zhang, Hannah Glaser, Wei Tang, Spencer Griswold, Andrea Bocci, Minyu Feng, Shu Li and Al Goshaw).
But the tsunami of new data coming out of the LHC’s current run, which began May of this year, has yet to provide any promising clues. Notably, at the ICHEP conference in Chicago, ATLAS collaboration members presented new results showing that an intriguing “bump” observed in 2015 data — speculated to be the first evidence of a completely new particle six times the mass of the Higgs — was likely just a statistical fluctuation in the data.
“It was quite amazing,” said Duke physics professor Al Goshaw, a member of the ATLAS collaboration. “With this new data there should have been a very clear signal, and there is nothing. It’s just absolutely gone.”
Goshaw has spent much of the summer at CERN, leading a team of undergraduate and graduate scientists crunching the numbers on the new data. Undeterred by the results presented in Chicago, he says the Duke team is still hard at work searching for other massive new particles.
“Our plan is to take the full data set collected in 2016 and extend the search for a new force-carrying particle up to much higher energies,” Goshaw said. “The search will go up to about 25 times the mass of the top quark or 35 times the mass of the Higgs.” They aim to have the results of this analysis ready by early 2017.
Why all the interest in tracking down these massive new particles?
Particle and energy spray recorded following a high-energy proton-proton collision event at the LHC in May. (Credit: CERN)
Goshaw says there are a myriad of alternative theories to the standard model, so many that trying to test specific predictions of individual models would be prohibitively time-consuming.
“But there is one prediction which they almost all make, and that is that there should be additional massive particles beyond those contained in the standard model,” Goshaw said. “So a generic way to search is to look for the new forces which are indicated by a force carrier, a massive new particle.”
The new data, collected at higher energies than the 2010-2012 run and with higher “brightness” or luminosity than the 2015 run, gives physicists the best chance yet of spotting an elusive new particle.
However, it’s not always looking at a plot and looking for a little bump, Goshaw says. Physicists, including the Duke team, are also utilizing the new data to perform highly precise tests of the standard model.
“The precision tests are really trying to find cracks in the standard model,” Goshaw said. “There could be particles that are so massive that we cannot detect them, but they may appear as subtle deviations in standard model predictions.”
But for now, the tried-and-true still holds. “It is quite extraordinary that, with these beautiful tests, everything is still described by the standard model,” Goshaw said.
For physics student Hannah Glaser, taking off for a summer of hands-on research at the world’s largest particle collider is both exciting and terrifying.
But, Glaser says, joining the thousands of scientist at work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) also feels a lot like going home.
“It’s such a huge relief to finally be in a group of people who who are interested in the same exact kind of problems that you are,” said Glaser, a rising junior at Virginia Tech. “It really is just this ridiculous nerdy feeling when you finally meet a group of people who have the same obsession with math and science.”
Undergraduate physicists embarking for a summer at the LHC, posed in front of a map of CERN and neighboring town St. Genis hand-drawn by physics professor Al Goshaw. From left: Wei Tang (Duke), Ifeanyi Achu (Southern Methodist University), Spencer Griswold (Clarkson University), Elisa Zhang (Duke), Emily Stump (Williams College) and Hannah Glaser (Virginia Tech).
Glaser is among six undergraduates — two from Duke and four from other institutions — who will be working alongside Duke scientists at the LHC’s ATLAS experiment this summer. Each will tackle a bite-sized piece of the immense particle physics project, primarily by helping to analyze the massive amounts of data generated by the collider.
“Just going to CERN will be a mind-blowing experience,” said Ifeanyi Achu, a junior at Southern Methodist University, at an orientation event at Duke last week. “I’m looking forward to getting a window into what life could be like as a physics researcher.”
Before setting off for CERN, the group spent the month of June with other REU students on Duke’s campus, learning the basics of quantum mechanics and Root, a software platform used CERN and other particle accelerators around the world.
In addition to grappling with complex physics, the students also had to prepare for the more practical aspects of spending six weeks abroad – like the fact that they will be living in the French town of St. Genis while working in Switzerland, requiring that they regularly cross the border and navigate among two or more currencies and languages.
However, the thrill of spending time with some of the world’s biggest experiments should make the travel anxiety worth it.
Duke student Wei Tang hopes to get a picture with a giant LHC detector while working at CERN this summer. (Credit: CERN)
“I’m definitely looking forward to taking a picture with a giant detector,” said Wei Tang, a Duke junior majoring in physics and computer science.
As members of the ATLAS experiment, The Duke high-energy physics team hopes to spot particles or forces not predicted by the Standard Model of physics, the theoretical framework that currently forms the basis of our physical understanding of the universe. New particles or forces could provide clues to solving some of the mysteries that remain in physics, such as what is the nature of dark matter.
“This is probably the most exciting year for the LHC,” said Duke physicist Al Goshaw, who will be onsite advising the students for part of the summer. “Data taken in this run really offers an extraordinary opportunity to look for physics beyond the standard model because it is the first time the LHC is operating at its full potential. It really could be the discovery run, and we are excited to be involved in that.”
But even if new discoveries aren’t made this summer, the students are still thrilled to be a part of the experiment.
“To know that you have done just a tiny bit of science at CERN – it’s just a dream come true for anyone interested in particle physics,” Glaser said.
The scratch was deep, two feet long, and spattered with paint flecks. Another vehicle had clearly grazed the side of Duke graduate student Jin Yu’s silver Honda Accord.
But the culprit had left no note, no phone number, and no insurance information.
Duke graduate student Jin Yu used laser-based imaging to confirm the source of a large scratch on the side of her car. Paint samples from an undamaged area on her Honda Accord (top left) and a suspected vehicle (top right) gave her the unique pump-probe microscopy signatures of the pigments on each car. The damaged areas of the Honda (bottom left) and the suspected vehicle on right (bottom right) show pigment signatures from both vehicles.
The timing of the accident, the location of the scratch, and the color of the foreign paint all pointed to a likely suspect: another vehicle in her apartment complex parking lot, also sporting a fresh gash.
She had a solid lead, but Yu wasn’t quite satisfied. The chemistry student wanted to make sure her case was rock-solid.
“I wanted to show them some scientific evidence,” Yu said.
And lucky for her, she had just the tools to do that.
As a researcher in the Warren Warren lab, Yu spends her days as scientific sleuth, investigating how a laser-based tool called pump-probe microscopy can be used to differentiate between individual pigments of paint, even if they appear identical to the human eye.
The team is developing the technique as a way for art historians and conservators peer under the surface of priceless paintings, without causing damage to the artwork. But Yu thought there was no reason the technique couldn’t be used for forensics, too.
“The idea popped into my mind — car paint is made up of pigments, just like paintings,” Yu said. “So, if I can compare the pigments remaining on my car with the suspected car, and they match up, that would be a pretty nice clue for finding the suspected car.”
Using a clean set of eyebrow tweezers, Yu carefully gathered small flecks of paint from her car and from the suspected vehicle and sealed them up inside individual Ziploc bags. She collected samples both from the scratched up areas, where the paint was mixed, and from undamaged areas on both cars.
She left a note on the car, citing the preliminary evidence and stating her plan to test the paint samples. Then, back at the lab, she examined all four samples with the pump-probe microscope. Unlike a standard optical microscope, this device illuminates each sample with a precisely timed series of laser pulses; each pigment absorbs and then re-emits this laser light in a slightly different pattern depending on its chemical structure, creating a unique signature.
After finding the gash on her Accord (top left), Yu left a note (top right) on the car that she suspected of having caused the accident. Under an optical microscope, samples from damaged areas on the cars show evidence of the same two kinds of paint (bottom). Yu used pump-probe microscopy to confirm that the pigments in the paint samples matched.
The samples from the undamaged areas gave her the characteristic pigment signatures from both of the two vehicles.
She then looked at the paint samples taken from the scratched areas. She found clear evidence of paint pigment from the suspected car on her Honda, and clear evidence of paint pigment from her Honda on the suspected car. This was like DNA evidence, of the automotive variety.
Fortunately, the owner of the suspect vehicle contacted Yu to confess and pay to have her car fixed, without demanding the results of the paint analysis. “But it was reassuring to have some scientific evidence in case she denied the accident,” Yu said.
Yu says she had no interest in forensic science when she started the investigation, but the experience has certainly piqued her curiosity.
“I had never imagined that I can use pump-probe microscopy for forensic science before this car accident happened,” Yu said. “But I think it shows some interesting possibilities.”
Post by Robin A. Smith
