Each spring, many Brown students choose to make their time in Providence a year-long affair, staying over the summer to work with a professor on an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award.
Commonly known as UTRAs, these university grants allow students across disciplines to collaborate with faculty on research or course development. From investigating computational neuroscience to nanofluidics, Brown students beat the summer heat in the lab.
The Herald spoke with three students who recently completed their summer UTRAs to get a sense of what it is like to spend months trying to unearth scientific secrets.
Torsten Ullrich ’25: On recording the inside of the human brain
Torsten Ullrich ’25 is no stranger to computational neuroscience.
This summer, he continued his work in the Asaad Lab and the Lee Lab, investigating essential tremor — a neurological condition that causes rhythmic shaking — and its relationship to patients’ sense of timing.
When a patient undergoes an implant operation for essential tremor, the intention is deep brain stimulation (a therapeutic treatment to reduce the condition) or epilepsy monitoring. But this procedure also presents the “unique opportunity” to obtain data directly from the inside of their brain, according to Ullrich.
The Asaad Lab, which operates in Rhode Island Hospital, is looking at new ways to leverage this dataset.
“Because of the structures that are involved in this area and what they're connected to,” — namely, the cerebellum — “we thought the timing could be something that we could see here,” Ullrich explained.
The procedure is performed while the patient is awake, allowing the lab to collect data from the patient’s brain while they are performing a task that tests their timing. This helps researchers understand whether essential tremor patients have a sense of timing that is “typical” compared to control groups.
“While these patients are receiving a surgery, they are playing a game while we record from inside their head,” Ullrich said. “In this case, ... they have to estimate a time interval. It's a very simple task where they're just trying to replicate a time that we give them, and then we want to see whether anything in the brain is reflecting that process,” Ullrich said.
A significant portion of Ullrich’s work consisted of processing the data from these experiments.
When he first arrived at Brown, Ullrich planned to study neuroscience or biology on a pre-med path, but exploring computer science and his research led him to an independent concentration in computational neuroscience.
This summer, Ullrich has used his computational neuroscience foundation to process the data from inside the brain.
“I've been ... trying to convert the signal of the brainwaves into understanding when specific neurons — single units inside the brain — are firing,” Ullrich said. “And so we're hoping that maybe we can see some sort of pattern in that that we wouldn't see from just the raw data.”
Thor Burkhardt ’26: Nanopores — tiny but powerful
Thor Burkhardt ’26 has been thinking on the scale of “maybe 100 hydrogen atoms across.”
This summer in the Kuehne Lab, he investigated the physics of fluids as they move through nanopores, extremely small channels found in both cells and inorganic materials. Burkhardt constructed and tested nanopore technology, with applications ranging from genome sequencing to energy conservation.
Nanopores are everywhere, such as selective ion channels in our cell membranes, but this summer Burkhardt synthetically built nanopores from graphene, a 2D carbon material.
“Looking through a microscope and playing with thermoplastic,” Burkhardt was able to “sandwich” two layers of graphene together into a channel that fluid could run through.
After the nanopore is physically constructed, fluids can be run through it, usually including ions traveling via a concentration gradient to create electric currents. Measuring this electric current can be used for genome-sequencing, for instance, by running a single strand of DNA through the nanopore.
Using nanopore technology is the difference between genome-sequencing taking “a matter of weeks” compared to the 13 years that the process took the Human Genome Project. But there’s still room for “a lot of improvement,” according to Burkhardt.
“We're really curious about trying to make some of those sorts of devices more efficient,” Burkhardt said.
Another application for nanopores is harvesting energy from osmotic gradients — harnessing the energy from a salt’s tendency to flow from high to low concentrations.
“If you actually want to get some energy out of this, you can put (the nanopore) somewhere where there's already a concentration gradient, like in a desalination plant,” Burkhardt said. “Desalination plants use a lot of energy, and they're critical for a few 100 million people for their clean drinking water.”
Nanopores could help recover a percentage of this energy used by desalination plants, he explained.
Burkhardt, who previously studied physics with a mainly theoretical perspective, enjoyed the opportunity to use his theoretical background this summer. But collaboration with fellow lab members taught him it is not always best to get caught up trying to find a nearly perfect theoretical model.
“Going into this, I was armed, maybe foolishly, with a lot of math and maybe not enough intuition.” Burkhardt said. “Sometimes simplicity, even if it's not precise, can be better.”
Salena Zhu ’27: Uncovering the secrets of osteoarthritis
Pre-med hopeful Salena Zhu ’27 completed an UTRA with the Chen Lab at the Warren Alpert Medical School, working to discover the underlying genetic workings of sex differences in the onset of osteoarthritis (OA). An age-related bone degenerative disease, OA is more common in women than men, but as of yet, “no one really knows exactly why,” Zhu said.
Zhu’s work this summer focused on proinflammatory markers — substances such as cytokines that indicate inflammation in the body. To induce an early onset of OA model mice, the lab increased specific expression of a stress-responsive gene called microRNA-365.
So far, Zhu’s project compared mice with OA versus control and male versus female, studying how OA developed over the course of three to seven months.
Female mice tended to increase their expression of the proinflammatory markers interleukin six and matrix metalloproteinase 13, which are released by an inflamed joint.
Zhu’s lab also performed safranin staining, which measures the severity of OA by evaluating the concentration of cartilage in the knee joint, on the mice’s knee tissue. They found a more “significant increase” in the severity of OA in females at seven versus three months than their male counterparts.
As microRNA-365 is a stress-responsive gene, the sex dimorphism — that is, the differences between sexes within the same species — could come from how males and females physically and genetically respond to stress differently. Understanding these differences, Zhu said, would allow medical professionals to develop more “sex-specific” treatments.
Zhu conducted microRNA research in high school, which nurtured her interest in microbiology. This summer, she continued to enjoy the consistency of her “pretty typical microRNA workflow,” which included homogenizing and extracting RNA from the mice samples and performing polymerase chain reactions, or PCR.
For Zhu, the most rewarding part was “being able to really see the fruits of your work after you've been working on something for weeks, (when) you finally get the data, and there's actually significant value and significant results.”
