Skip to main content Skip to search
""

STEM for Yeshiva University Undergraduates

YU faculty welcome undergraduates to join them at the cutting edge of scientific discovery!

Biology

Athulaprabha Murthi

Our current research focuses on understanding the diversity of microorganisms in heritage probiotics such as yogurt, kombucha, and miso. We use Next Gen Sequencing techniques to identify the microbial community in the probiotics. Further studies will evaluate the effect of such heritage probiotics on human health.

Another project in collaboration with Alyssa Schuck (Stern College) evaluates the changes in diversity of soil microorganisms around the Yeshiva University campus especially between the Washington Heights and Midtown campuses. The main objective is to study the diversity of soil microbiome, the effect of pollution, human activity, and seasonal changes.
Learn more about Athulaprabha Murthi

Athulaprabha Murthi

Alyssa Schuck

Our research focuses on elucidating the effects of nutraceuticals, natural products with pharmaceutical effects, on oral carcinoma cells. We study the anti-proliferative and anti-migratory effects of properties of nutraceuticals, including apple extract, using various cell culture and molecular biological techniques. 
Learn more about Alyssa Schuck

Alyssa Schuck

Josefa Steinhauer

iPLA2-VIA (also known as PLA2G6 and PARK14) is associated with neurodegenerative diseases in humans, including Parkinson’s disease. iPLA2-VIA mutant Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies show age-dependent loss of motor ability, consistent with analogous functions in the insect model. iPLA2-VIA mutant flies also show defects in female fertility, with strikingly similar effects in germ cells and neurons. We are investigating how this gene protects both neurons and germ cells from death.  Our results suggest important mitochondria-related functions. We also are investigating whether specific neuronal sub-types and other cell types are sensitive to its loss during aging.  Our work is helping to shed light on the mechanisms underpinning human neurodegenerative disease.

The Steinhauer lab is powered by undergraduates. The genetic and molecular approaches used are ideally suited for students of many different levels, and the research provides students with an immersive experience in the scientific process.  Our recent publication in the open access journal PLOS One includes nine current and former YU undergraduate co-authors. Additionally, students enrolled in YC’s undergraduate Genetics course contribute to this research via our semester-long Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) in the lab section of the course. 
Learn more about Josefa Steinhauer

Josefa Steinhauer

Margarita Vigodner

Our research is in the field of germ cell biology, spermatogenesis, male fertility, and reproductive health. Our group is now focused on the characterization of the role of novel small proteins known as SUMO (small-ubiquitin-related modifiers) in testicular cells. Sumoylation, a covalent modification by SUMO proteins, has emerged as a critical regulatory event in cell function and is essential for developmental processes such as reproduction. Recent findings from our laboratory suggest diverse and potentially multiple roles of SUMO in testicular function and spermatogenesis. We have identified targets of sumoylation in testicular cells and sperm and now focus on characterization of specific targets and on the crosstalk between sumoylation and phosphorylation. Different parts of this project are conducted by undergraduate students who gain meaningful research experience in several aspects of cell and developmental biology. Undergraduates trained in our laboratory present their work at local and national meetings, and their findings result in co-authorships of peer-reviewed papers. Learn more about Margarita Vigodner

Margarita Vigodner

James Camara

Our lab focuses on the organometallic catalysis of reactions important to alternative energy. Our current work aims to study and develop new transmetallation reactions relevant to alternative liquid fuel technologies and is supported by the Petroleum Research Fund. 
Learn more about James Camara

James Camara

Irena Catrina

My current research focuses on the development of in vitro assays to facilitate fast and easy design of efficient probes that allow the study of RNA-RNA and RNA-protein interactions that are essential for organism development.  Our laboratory has generated the TFOFinder program, an extension of PinMol, designed to predict structured RNA regions that can form triple helices with triple helix forming oligonucleotides (TFO).  We are using this program to conduct a fruit fly transcriptome-wide analysis to determine the prevalence of sequences that are predicted to form a triple helix, which can then be used as detection methods to visualize RNA targets of interest and to explore RNA structure in vivo. We are also conducting an analysis to develop inhibitors for the HIV-1 Rev protein, a small, regulatory viral protein that is responsible for the export of genomic RNA from the nucleus into the cytoplasm, an event essential for packaging of full-length viral RNA into new virion particles in HIV-1 viral replication. We have developed a new assay for fast analysis of Rev function using a fluorescently labeled RNA aptamer, a short, structured RNA specifically recognized by the Rev protein. Moreover, we have designed TFO probes that are expected to impair HIV-1 Rev synthesis, which will abolish viral replication. 
Learn more about Irena Catrina.

Irena Catrina

Ran Drori

The main focus of the Drori lab is crystal growth in the presence of different additives, with an ultimate goal of developing new ways to control crystal growth. Specifically, we are studying crystals comprising water, such as ice and gas hydrates. We use natural molecules such as ice-binding proteins (IBPs), or antifreeze proteins (AFPs), which are able to inhibit ice growth and to protect various organisms from freezing injury. 

We are applying our knowledge in an effort to limit freezing damages to frozen food products, and to minimize food waste.
Learn more about Ran Drori.

Ran Drori

Raj Viswanathani

A thorough knowledge of PPI is an important first step towards understanding the molecular mechanisms of many cellular processes. Identifying the regions of the protein that are involved in these PPI, referred to as the interface residues, is crucial to designing therapeutic intervention. Experimental determination of these interface residues is often difficult as it requires the crystallization and structural characterization of the protein complexes. Instead of these time consuming, expensive, and sometimes even impossible, procedures, computational methods are being developed to effectively identify interface residues. Some of the existing computational methods use information about the sequence of amino acids that make up a protein, while other methods use three-dimensional structural information. Both types of methods rely on information of known PPI, based on the experimental determination of the three-dimensional structures of crystallized complexes, and use this to make predictions on a new protein. 

Our focus has been to integrate some of the existing methods and develop a meta-method that will take advantage of both sequence and structural information. We have recently developed one such meta-method, trained and tested on a set of 240 non-redundant proteins. This meta-method outperforms the existing methods by all statistical measures. We are currently applying this methodology on a set of antigens to predict the interface residues in antigens, referred to as antigen epitopes. This is of major current interest as this could eventually lead to better development of vaccines and other therapeutics.   
Learn more about Raj Viswanathani.

Raj Viswanathani
Mathematics

Peter Nandori

We study chaos in a mathematically rigorous manner. Chaos appears in many different scales and forms in the word surrounding us, for example in a standard billiard game or in statistical mechanics, such as in microscopic interacting systems. In a recent project we proved that chaos is strongly present in infinite curved billiard tables with long channels and sharp corners. In another recent project, we numerically studied weak chaos in multidimensional billiard tables with flat boundary. For theoretical reasons, it is important to understand partial chaos, that is to study systems that are chaotic in some sense but regular in some other sense. Some of our recent results solved a long-standing conjecture in this area.

There are several exciting problems to explore in future projects. One ambitious project is to contribute to the derivation of continuous equations of physics, such as the heat equation, from underlying microscopic principles, which is a main open problem is statistical mechanics. Some other future projects are related to the application of chaos theory to the dynamics of financial markets. 
Learn more about Peter Nandori.

""

Pablo Roldan

My research is in the area of Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems, more specifically Hamiltonian systems. The approach is both rigorous and numeric, with special attention to applications.  One current project studies "critical transitions," observed in an astonishingly diverse set of applications from ecosystems and climate change to medicine and finance.  In these transitions, dynamical systems with slowly varying parameters transition to far-away attractors.  I apply mathematical theories to the detection of early warning signals of an impending critical transition in "noisy" systems, such as those coming from finance. Another project, undertaken with support of the Provost's Faculty Research Fund, studies a solution to the problem of predicting close approaches of near-earth objects, comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood.  A third projects studies the statistics of Arnold's diffusion, a sample ordinary differential equation that exhibits global instabilities.
Learn more about Pablo Roldan

Pablo Roldan
Physics

Gabriel Cwilich

Our group has been doing research in the modern field of complex networks, which can model how interactions between many individual agents affect behavior of the greater whole.  Our group has studied the stability and resilience of electrical power grids, when some of their links are destroyed by random failure or planned attacks, and the cascades of failures that lead to disintegration of networks, and strategies to protect them. More recently we have worked on the effect of traffic jams in transportation networks. We have studied these problems through theoretical and computational approaches. More than half a dozen of honors thesis come out of student research in our group in the last few years  and as many Yeshiva University Kressel scholars.
Learn more about Gabriel Cwilich. 

Gabriel Cwilich

Fredy Zypman

Research in the Zypman laboratory is mostly theoretical-computational and focuses on four areas: (1) Uncertainty of quantum states- Searching for quantum states under a variety of energy potentials that reduce quantum uncertainties as gauged via Heisenberg measures and via quantum entropies; (2) Mechanical properties of cells- Unlike rubber, which strains passively under strain, cells modify their stiffness depending on the applied stress. This is an evolutionary quality developed to adapt to the changing environment. We develop strain shapes to model red and white cells, compute their strain/stress relations and compare with experimental results; (3) Capacitance of microstrips- Tiny antennas are ubiquitous in current communication technologies, including the smart phones that we all carry. Advancing our understanding of these antennas is vital for improving their reception and emission, as well as for other design innovations, because these antennas need to be as flat as possible. This research focuses on new mathematical expressions for the capacitance of these geometry-restricted antennas; (4) Force interactions between charged particles and atomic force microscopy (AFM) sensors- In this research we consider the problem of finding charge on samples from knowledge (from experiments) of forces on the AFM sensor.  We develop algorithms to invert this information and ultimately convert it into charge values. Charge information is necessary, as it introduces artifacts in the force-topography reconstruction algorithms. As importantly, electric charge knowledge has an intrinsic relevance as it controls a large number of biological and chemical processes. 
Learn more about Fredy Zypman.

Fredy Zypman
Skip past mobile menu to footer