Four Undergraduates Whose Research Studies Are Winning Acclaim

“I’m interested in what music does and not just what it says, for the possibilities embedded in the sensations sound produces,” said the Greensboro resident. “I gravitate toward understanding music as something that cannot be precisely translated, where there is something mysterious occurring that can only be experienced rather than explained.

“Taking ‘Southern Literature and Music’ in my freshman year introduced me to a method of interpretation that is closer to listening than reading and asked me to take sound more seriously -- to consider it as a way to understand life. I started to see how music had a kind of underworld, a place where a message is transmitted and understood through the process of feeling.”

There’s a long tradition of critics attempting to find deeper meanings of literature; Santanam is interested in exploring how music similarly provokes understandings and feelings that are “hidden under the surface” that engage both the mind and body, or rational and intuitive ways of understanding.

In an independent study project on modern Black theater, she worked with professor Taylor Black on Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play,” showing how the play uses music to enhance the dialogue in a way that was socially and politically relevant. This study led to a longer scholarly article that she presented at three different academic conferences.

A Trinity Scholar and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Santanam credited the mentorship of professors Taylor Black, Priscilla Wald and other English and music faculty. After graduation, she hopes to earn a Ph.D. in English, continuing study into 20^th and 21st-century musical and literary texts.

Jorge Mato Frontela

Growing up in Cuba, Mato’s academic interests were inspired by watching his mother and others caring for cancer patients in a hospital. His journey to doing those studies at Duke had many turns.

In Cuba, Mato attended a STEM-focused school and studied biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Havana.  When the pandemic hit Cuba in 2020, university courses stopped. He spent the time learning English and researching cancer biology, arriving in North Carolina in 2021. After a year of study at Central Piedmont Community College, he transferred in fall 2023 to Duke.

Through it all, he excelled in research. One of his first steps at Duke was to join the lab of biologist Gustavo Silva to study a yeast gene called Rad6, which regulates many key cellular processes. In humans, this gene drives the UBE2A Deficiency Syndrome and plays important roles in hepatocellular carcinoma, leukemia and breast cancer.

In his cancer research, Mato has drawn on computing power to better understand the collection of factors that drives cancer growth.

“When looking at cancer as a multidimensional phenomenon, computational science and related fields such as biostatistics provide the tools necessary to work with the complex data coming from it. By mastering them, I could help unveil the hidden patterns underlying the biology of the cancer and plan effective strategies to treat it.

“What keeps me excited is finding patterns in apparently unintelligible data or systems. Cancer cells are alive; therefore, they cannot be just chaos,” Mato added. “There must be structure within that chaos, which keeps the cell going, and I am excited to find it.”

After graduation, Mato said he hopes to seek a Ph.D. or M.D.-Ph.D. degree in biomedical informatics.

Miguel Cohen Suarez

Organic chemistry captivated Cohen Suarez for its “beautiful” ability to capture the workings of the world at the tiniest, quantum scale and at larger, more sophisticated biological functions. That interest started in his native Iowa, where he watched the workings of an agricultural system that feeds much of the country and the world — but also depends on chemical processes that can damage the environment and human health.

“I wondered if a chemical education could lead me toward less damaging solutions while still producing enough food,” Cohen Suarez said. “Of course, agriculture represents one of many industrial-scale chemical consumers, all of which could benefit from more sustainable reactions. For the moment, I’m absorbing all the organic chemistry knowledge I can, hoping to address these issues with a suitable background in my future research.”

His experience in laboratories is already extensive, with summer work at Scripps Research in San Diego, Calif., and at Duke with chemistry professor Ross Widenhoefer (and this summer at Merck Laboratories). With Widenhoefer, Cohen Suarez is learning about cyclopropanes, hydrocarbons that are increasingly used by chemists to create more efficient reactions.

Part of his efforts are mechanistic – understanding what is happening in a chemical reaction. His goal is to design new chemical reactions that could lead to a “decreased carbon footprint” in large-scale agricultural and industrial processes.

While the mysteries and importance of chemical reactions attracted him to research, Cohen Suarez adds that being part of a community of learners keeps him motivated.

“From my high school chemistry teacher to my professors at Duke and every lab partner, classmate and mentor, I am lucky to be part of a supportive and collaborative community,” he said.

After graduating from Duke, Cohen Suarez plans to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry.

Fletch Rydell

At its best, computer engineering is meant to be as fun as solving a puzzle, said Rydell, a rising senior.

“By solving and automating common but tricky problems, I aim to make computer engineering more efficient for the world, more enjoyable for engineers, and more accessible to everyone,” he said.

At Duke, Rydell has already used his computer and math skills to create a variety of inventions. He also helped the Duke team finish high in the Putnam Competition, famously the most grueling math test for college students.  

The spark igniting his research at Duke was a computer architecture course with Pratt professor Daniel Sorin. Studying the computer components and understanding how they work together revealed to him the possibilities for problem-solving.

“A modern computer is one of the most complicated machines ever built, and that combined with computers’ large and growing importance to today’s world makes potentially improving their design exciting to me,” Rydell said.

The bulk of his undergraduate research with Sorin and other scholars involved shared memory, the feature that allows the database server processes to share information by coordinating access to pools of memory.

An example of a shared memory puzzle is when one calculation depends on getting results from another. Computer engineers work to ensure the different computer processes make the calculations in a consistentorder to ensure the right information is available when needed.

“What makes designing shared memory systems, coherence protocols, and consistency models fascinating is how they combine the usual system design considerations of computer architecture with some of the most interesting puzzles I’ve ever seen. Pretty much every week I run into a new scenario where it’s unclear how a system can or should behave, and this constant supply of tricky puzzles makes it impossible to lose interest in this problem.”

After graduation, Rydell plans on seeking a Ph.D. degree in computer science/

engineering, researching general solutions, automated tools and verification techniques for coherence, consistency and other problems in computer architecture.