Bright mind

Wolf Cukier garnered national media attention for finding a new planet during a high school internship at NASA. He has continued his streak of discoveries as a Princeton undergraduate. Continue Reading →

Soaking up the sun

Across our solar system, supersonic winds of charged particles from the sun blow at a million miles per hour. These winds form a protective bubble around our entire solar system that shields us from galactic Continue Reading →

Lasting impacts from early-life stress

Christabel Mclain, Class of 2021, explored whether cells in the brain’s reward centers that respond to early life stress can be reactivated by stress in adulthood, contributing to depression. Continue Reading →

Antarctic sea ice retreat spurs plankton blooms

Lauren von Berg, Class of 2020, is first author of a peer-reviewed paper studying the role of Antarctic sea ice in regulating the growth of the tiny algae known as phytoplankton. Continue Reading →

Not JUST data

Ruha Benjamin, associate professor of African American studies, created the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab to explore how data are misinterpreted or intentionally twisted through stories and narratives. Continue Reading →

Fragile Fragments: Marina Rustow unpacks daily life in medieval Egypt

Documents hidden for centuries in a Cairo synagogue storeroom help Rustow piece together the past. Continue Reading →

Motion-capture technology assists in neuroscience studies

A new technology can automatically track animals’ body parts in video to measure the behavior of animals. Continue Reading →

Finding the Lost Generation

A new interactive website provides scholars and the public with insights into the Lost Generation, a group of writers and artists that came of age during World War I. Continue Reading →

Breaking new ground: Lauren Auyeung

Inspired by the physical virtuosity of hip-hop and urban dance, Auyeung seeks to investigate the movement vocabularies of hip-hop in abstracted form. Continue Reading →

Exploring free speech and corporate power: Sydney Jordan

Jordan found inspiration for her thesis from a course on free speech in the internet age. Continue Reading →

‘Fever’ and its meanings in English literature: Annabel Barry

Barry’s thesis addresses the contradictions in Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist philosophy. Continue Reading →

Fracking and public health: Benjamin Jacobson

Jacobson studied whether fracking affects the health of children. Continue Reading →

From Math to Meaning. Artificial intelligence blends algorithms and applications

By Kevin McElwee Artificial intelligence is already a part of everyday life. It helps us answer questions like “Is this email spam?” It identifies friends in online photographs, selects news stories based on our politics Continue Reading →

Eviction Lab examines the intersection of poverty and housing

By Liz Fuller-Wright How many Americans are forced to leave their homes each year? When Matthew Desmond began investigating evictions in America, it was impossible to answer that question. “Imagine if we didn’t know how Continue Reading →

Engine of cosmic evolution: Eve Ostriker looks under the hood

By Catherine Zandonella Outside Eve Ostriker’s office door stretches the universe, dotted with orange galaxies against the black backdrop of space. The mural lines the hallway in Princeton’s astrophysical sciences building, where it inspires Ostriker Continue Reading →

An overdue spotlight on an avant-garde playwright

By Steve Runk A symposium and performances held in April 2018 at Princeton focused an overdue spotlight on one of the most influential but perhaps least-known American theater-makers of the 20th century, María Irene Fornés. Continue Reading →

When driverless ride-hailing services come to a curb near you

By Kevin McElwee When requesting a ride-hailing service, you may soon notice something missing: the driver. Fleets of autonomous electric vehicles could someday replace human-powered ride-sharing. Programming obstacles still stand in the way of this Continue Reading →

Campus as Lab: Tracking campus ecology

By Kevin McElwee Artemis Eyster spends more time than most students on the wooded paths near campus where Albert Einstein once cleared his mind. The Class of 2019 undergraduate, named after the Greek goddess of Continue Reading →

Princeton project explores past ties to slavery

By Catherine Zandonella “TO BE SOLD AT PUBLIC VENUE on the 19th of August next all the personal effects of Revd. Dr. Samuel Finley, consisting of two Negro women, a Negro man, and three Negro children, Continue Reading →

New journal highlights student research

By Yasemin Saplakoglu This spring marked the debut of the Princeton Undergraduate Research Journal, a peer-reviewed publication where students can publish original research findings. “The entire goal of research is to communicate new discoveries to Continue Reading →

Probing the genetic basis for dog-human relationships

By Pooja Makhijani A new study has identified genetic changes that are linked to dogs’ human-directed social behaviors and suggests there is a common underlying genetic basis for hyper-social behavior in both dogs and humans. Continue Reading →

How cancer stem cells evade the immune system

By Yasemin Saplakoglu When Daniel D. Liu first encountered the world of research, he saw giants in white lab coats shaking flasks and squirting liquids into small vials. He was 4 years old, and his Continue Reading →

Historian and neuroscientist team up for podcast

By Yasemin Saplakoglu When history professor Julian Zelizer and neuroscientist Sam Wang started the podcast Politics and Polls prior to last year’s presidential election, they never dreamed it would still be going a year later. Continue Reading →

Students create exotic state of matter

By Bennett McIntosh IN THE SUMMER OF 2015, Princeton students Joseph Scherrer and Adam Bowman experienced something few undergraduates can claim: they built, from scratch, a laser system capable of coaxing lithium atoms into a Continue Reading →

Princeton Research Day highlights student and early-career work

Watch the video MORE THAN 150 undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers presented their work at the first Princeton Research Day held May 5, 2016. The event highlighted research from the natural sciences, engineering, social Continue Reading →

Exploring the emergence of Cuban consumerism

DENNISSE CALLE FOUND THE TOPIC for her senior thesis along a Havana street in the back of a stall that sells pirated movies and music. Cubans pay the equivalent of a few dollars, insert a Continue Reading →

Engineering health solutions for all

Hundreds of women die every day due to excessive bleeding after childbirth, but this can be prevented by an injection of the hormone oxytocin, which stimulates uterine contractions that reduce bleeding. Yet oxytocin must be Continue Reading →

Computer chip for point-of-care diagnosis

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Kaushik Sengupta and his team are developing a computer chip-based diagnostic system, which rests comfortably on a fingertip but contains hundreds of different sensors for simultaneous detection of disease-causing agents. Continue Reading →

Student identifies difference between the dinosaur sexes

THE DISCOVERY OF A SINGLE ANATOMICAL DIFFERENCE between males and females of a species of Stegosaurus provides some of the most conclusive evidence that some dinosaurs looked different based on sex, according to research published Continue Reading →

Hero explores Vietnam War experiences

FOR HIS SENIOR THESIS, Eamon Foley combined indie rock music, dance, aerial choreography and ethnographic research to create an original theater-dance piece titled Hero, which tells the story of a young man transformed by his Continue Reading →

New chemistry aids drug development

DRUG DEVELOPMENT OFTEN INVOLVES modifying the chemical structure to get the right combination of properties, such as stability and activity. Working in the laboratory of John Groves, the Hugh Stott Taylor Chair of Chemistry, undergraduate Continue Reading →

Listening in on bacterial communications

BACTERIA SPEAK TO ONE ANOTHER using a soundless language known as quorum sensing. In a step toward translating bacterial communications, researchers have revealed the structure and biosynthesis of streptide, a signaling molecule involved in the Continue Reading →

Ashes, images and the survival of democracy

Ashes, images and the survival of democracy: Nathan Arrington searches for meaning in ancient Athens’ public cemetery By Catherine Zandonella IT’S AN OVERCAST AND WINDY DAY, cold for June, but a strawberry stand across the Continue Reading →

Computer visions: A selection of research projects in Computer Science

Princeton’s Department of Computer Science has strong groups in theory, networks/systems, graphics/vision, programming languages, security/policy, machine learning, and computational biology. Find out what the researchers have been up to lately in these stories: Armchair victory: Computers Continue Reading →

A RISKY PROPOSITION: Has global interdependence made us vulnerable?

RISK IS EVERYWHERE. There’s a risk, for example, that volcanic ash will damage aircraft engines. So when a volcano erupted in Iceland in April 2010, concerns about the plume of volcanic ash disrupted air travel Continue Reading →

Math and music spark student’s research interests

WHILE PRINCETON SENIOR Alexander Iriza, of Astoria, New York, credits his parents for sparking his interest in math — his mother gave him math workbooks when he was a toddler — that was merely “a Continue Reading →

Emotional map illuminates an iconic rock song

IN A TYPICAL ROCK SONG, a few chords and a simple rhythm form the foundation for catchy lyrics that carry the listener along for three or four minutes. Expand these elements into a 20-minute song, Continue Reading →

Laser device may end pin pricks, improve health for diabetics

PRINCETON RESEARCHERS have developed a way to use a laser to measure people’s blood sugar, and, with more work to shrink the laser system to a portable size, the technique could allow diabetics to check Continue Reading →