Mykel Barrett

The RICC — Psychology Professor Dr. Adriana Espinosa’s ARHAMP lab investigates various aspects of socioeconomic inequality. Efforts include: assessing trends in mental health incidence and the prevalence of maladaptive coping behaviors in City College students; how the lack of access to treatment for Triple Negative Breast Cancer widens pre-existing disparities in healthcare that disproportionately affect Black and Latnix women; and developing strategies to increase the retention of BIPOC matriculants to CCNY STEM disciplines.

The RICC — The Colin Powell School’s (CPS’) Dean, Andrew Rich, speaks towards the interconnectivity of social science fields, insinuating that true erudition and research bullseyes lie at the intersections of different disciplines. The CPS offers a range of opportunities to involve students in such work, most notably its abundance of fellowship programs. These opportunities help equip students with the skills needed rigorously and systematically characterize the world around them. Understanding the policy implications of their work additionally helps galvanize them into action, especially since many CCNY students hail from underrepresented backgrounds.

The RICC — Dr. Marta Bengoa, CCNY’s first female Full Professor of Economics, investigates how migration patterns in China affect its economy and even drives health inequalities. She additionally performs econometrics research in Latin America, and in South Africa. Dr. Bengoa hopes that government organizations can help lessen inequality by basing their policy development strategies on the objective reality elucidated by data science.

The RICC — The TREAT lab, led by Dr. Teresa Lopez-Castro, marches on the frontlines against Harlem and the Bronx’s deadly opioid overdose crisis. Formed from an eclectic pool of diversely-specialized computer scientists, physicians, and public health specialists, the TREAT lab dissects the anatomy of the addiction and mental health care systems with the intent of improving the experience of people who suffer from mental health and drug use disorders. The significance of this type of work is underscored more so now than ever by the deadly COVID-19 pandemic that disproportionately impacts BIPOC communities.

The Campus — Mykel Barrett dives into this two-part series sharing his experiences as a black student pursuing the sciences, along with a discussion with Dr. Karen Hubbard and Dr. Osceola Whitney, two black professors of Biology at The City College of New York

The Campus — The Campus' Mykel Barrett dives into this two-part series sharing his experiences as a black student pursuing the sciences, along with a discussion with Dr. Karen Hubbard and Dr. Osceola Whitney, the only two black biology professors in CCNY

City Limits — This story was produced as part of the City Limits Accountability Reporting Initiative for Youth (CLARIFY) program. Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, a typical school day for Alicia Oh, a second year drama student at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, involved a lot more people - and a lot fewer screens.

City Limits — This story was produced through the City Limits Accountability Reporting Initiative For Youth (CLARIFY ), City Limits' paid training program for aspiring public-interest journalists. In August of 2017, Greg Keller was riding his bike in Lower Manhattan when he was struck from behind mid-block by the driver of a car that had been tailgating him, ramming his back wheel before driving off, he says.

City Limits — Forcing cops to attend hearings? Letting victims be part of the process? Reforming the law itself? We asked experts and advocates to weigh in on how to fix flaws in the city's 'failure to yield' law exposed by a City Limits investigation.

thericc.com — Cybernetic biological augmentation, an idea popularized by DC Comics and Bungie Inc., is no longer an unobtainable goal, relegated only to the realm of science fiction. Step-by-step, Mechanical Engineering Professor Hao Su, walks us into the robotic future.

thericc.com — The members of The Grove School of Engineering’s Combustion and Catalysis Lab actively strive to produce innovative solutions to our nation’s waste and energy problems. The lab additionally explores energy conversion strategies that do not involve combustion, like high-temperature gasification and pyrolysis.

thericc.com — Pathogens and hosts engage in a constant, ancient, evolutionary duel. The director of City College’s Center for Information, Networking and Telecommunications (CINT), Professor Tarek Saadawi, draws inspiration from the field of immunology to fuel his innovative engine. “Why not observe what the human body does to detect pathogens, and build it inside the computer?” “Intrusion detection systems, is our main area of research,” he says. These systems work by ‘sitting’ behind firewalls, and inspecting every data packet that passes through. Built with sophisticated statistical intelligence algorithms, they are able to study activity patterns and develop conceptions of what is normal. If abnormal traffic is sensed, a flag is raised, relaying to other components of the system that an unwanted invader has made it past the network’s firewall — just like how our immune cell sentinels are able to sense nonself antigens and use cytokines to notify others that foreign matter has made it past the body’s lines of defense.

thericc.com — Mankind’s first computer, the abacus, appeared approximately 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Earlier methods likely involved manipulating similarly-patterned rows of stones in the dirt to perform calculations. We’ve went from these primitive devices to mechanical ones, and then advances in physics and engineering led to the development of electronics and eventually memory chips. Intel’s Andy Grove, whom City College’s School of Engineering is named after, catalyzed the shift towards the microprocessor, and finally, today, City College’s Dr. Alexander Khanikaev is contributing to the corpus of knowledge that will help spur the quantum revolution. “Many people believe [photonics] will be [...] the next field for [the] quantum revolution because it enables some quantum phenomena which are not possible or hard to achieve in different type of quantum systems.” Condensed matter physicist, Dr. Khanikaev, leader of the Laboratory for Advanced Electromagnetics and Photonics, located in CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) and collaborators at Russia’s ITMO University, work passionately to answer the question: How can we structure materials to develop more efficient means of storing and transmitting data? They explore the theoretical principles behind engineering photonic nanomaterials and assesses their practicality through experimentation.

NCUR 2021 | Council on Undergraduate Research — A proof-of-concept project showing that transcriptional output can be controlled by introducing point mutations in cis-regulatory DNA. The mutations change the intermolecular forces acting between transcription factor (TF) and DNA, which alters TF-DNA binding affinity, ultimately altering gene expression. These properties can be exploited in gene therapies to modulate transcription to fall within desired, precisely-defined windows. Phylogenetic footprinting can be used to determine where single nucleotide variations like the ones described herein have contributed to phenotypic evolution.