Dr. Matt Thimgan, associate professor of biology, will present on his sabbatical this past semester. 

For the human work:  He will present information on his data collection effort to validate the sleep and wakefulness classification algorithm we call WACSAW, the Wasserstein Algorithm for Classifying Sleep And Wakefulness. While it performs quite well compared to subject logs, WACSAW needs to be validated against the gold-standard, polysomnography.  He will also talk about some salivary and chemical biomarker data we have identified from saliva.

Drosophila work: Testing was done on a hypothesis that flies predicted to be short-lived would exhibit increased radical oxygen species. I will present the novel method I learned to determine the tissue location of oxidative stress using the confocal microscope.  The results from these experiments support an alteration to our hypothesis but also a way to test the new hypothesis.