This post was updated Aug. 18 at 11:50 p.m.

Dozens of UCLA students were honored for their faculty-mentored research efforts during the 2024 Undergraduate Research Week in May.

During the week, honorees received the Dean’s Prize for Excellence in Research and Creative Inquiry, which celebrates undergraduates from all disciplines for their research and creativity with a monetary prize.

Ava Asmani, a recent electrical engineering graduate and rising doctoral student, conducted research for the last three years in MATLAB and C++ programming languages to optimize voltages for device memory storage using information theory. For this, Asmani received the Dean’s Prize.

Asmani said she began her research in the summer of 2021 under Professor Richard Wesel in UCLA’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program. She added that conducting research in a lab and presenting her work at the end of the summer inspired her to continue this research throughout her undergraduate education.

Asmani added that she also joined the Clare Boothe Luce Scholars Program, which is dedicated to financially supporting undergraduate women in the physical sciences and engineering in their research. She said that after joining this program, her professor encouraged her to join a different project, which focused on maximizing memory storage by optimizing the voltages and read thresholds being used on flash devices that degrade over time.

Alannah Linden, an atmospheric and oceanic sciences/mathematics alumnus, said she centered her research project around measuring pigment composition in plants using a spectrometer. She said she worked in Professor Jochen Stutz’s lab before she graduated, deciding to wait until her sophomore year to pursue undergraduate research to allow her to learn foundational skills first.

Linden said she aimed to study how a plant’s pigments react to stressful conditions in the hopes of figuring out how climate change impacts vegetation on a deeper level.

“Pigments in plants are really indicative of how a plant is operating,” she said. “Every pigment has a use for a plant and its health, so monitoring how this changes and knowing what the expected composition is, is really important to being able to know how a plant is doing under stress conditions.”

Asmani said she will continue working under Wesel as she plans to pursue her doctoral degree in electrical engineering at UCLA.

“I feel like my area of research is extremely abstract and not entirely intuitive, and so it’s always been a big goal of mine to try and formulate my research in a way that people will understand,” Asmani added.

When it came to presenting his results, biochemistry alumnus Jeff Qu said he wanted to make sure that his research was presented clearly and effectively.

“Presenting research is more like telling a good story to make your research sound not only good to you, but also to everybody else,” he added.

Qu said he worked to identify which proteins are most prone to misfolding and engineer therapeutic targets against them to prevent amyloid formation, the process by which certain protein fibers build up in the brain’s neurons – potentially leading to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Linden said her preparation process was similar to the way researchers write academic papers but with more background information and details about her purpose and results.

Dean’s Prize winners were told via email they had been selected for the prize. For recipients such as Qu, they were grateful to have been awarded the prize and worked with incredible research teams, he said.

“Everybody did lots of hard work, and I think everybody should get awarded,” he added.

Asmani has continued to present her results across the world, recently discussing her research at the International Symposium on Information Theory in July in Athens, Greece. She added that she will return to UCLA in the fall to start her doctoral degree.

Linden said she plans to join the Peace Corps, where she will work in the Philippines for coastal resource management – a role her undergraduate research has prepared her for.

Qu said he will be pursuing a doctoral degree in chemical biology and biophysics – in part because of his work in the laboratory.

“I really discovered I really liked what I’ve been doing, and I feel like my work is really valuable,” Qu added.

Asmani advised any undergraduate student hoping to pursue research to not rush into it, take classes and email professors in fields they are interested in before they seek out such opportunities.

“It’s important to start research when you feel like you have a solid background in the area that you’re going to be researching in,” she added. “It’s going to be so much more efficient for you to start when you feel like you actually have the adequate background information.”

Ultimately, Linden said it wasn’t so much the prize that mattered but the hard work that went into her research and presentation.

“I wouldn’t say I was expecting to receive it, because I know that it’s a very competitive award,” she added. “What I really wanted to do was present my research as best as I could and improve more in science communication.”