Yapic Lab Electronics Projects

I worked for Nilay Yapici at Cornell University’s department of Neurobehavior. My work supported the groups experiments studying the feeding and mating behavior of fruit flies. For this work I used KiCAD to design the electronics for a CCD experiment that measures the amount of fluid a fruit fly has consumed. I designed a 3D model to house the electronics and hold the experiment’ s fluid detection system. And finally, I also programed a graphical user interface in python that runs the experiment in real time and extracts and processes the data. The photos below show my work, what I built, and a little bit about how this works.

Cosmology Project

My senior thesis work at Haverford College focused on early universe physics and the dynamics of cosmic inflation. Our research question asked if the Higgs Boson could possibly have been the particle that caused cosmic inflation, a period of rapid expansion after the big bang. For this work I did a combination of theoretical research and computational modeling. The computational elements of this project consisted of solving non-linear coupled DEQ’s in python and testing our results against known cosmological constraints for our universe. Meanwhile this project challenged me to develop a deep understanding of High Energy physics, the Higgs mechanism, and General Relativity. At the conclusion of working on this project, I presented my work at a Cosmology Workshop at MIT’s theoretical physics center to the leading experts in the field of cosmic inflation.