Santa Clara University

In January 2006 the Office of Fellowships announced the inauguration of two Provost Junior Research Fellowships for highly qualified rising juniors with promising research agendas. These summer research fellowships are intended to provide opportunities for significant independent research for students who wish to pursue graduate study and major nominated fellowships like the Marshall, Fulbright, Goldwater, Carnegie, or Truman.

Victor Quintanar-Zilinskas

Noelle Lopez

In March it was announced that one of this year's fellowships would be awarded to Victor Quintanar-Zilinskas, a Biology major, for his computational investigation of variability in ion channel currents across neuron membranes in response to ostensibly the same stimulus, using the Hodgkin-Huxley model and a channel conductance model Dr. Birmingham developed.  Victor reflects on the project experience and its best features:
“The computational biology experience is unique, and it opens up a range of data collection possibilities that allow us to see both the forest and the trees.  The model gives us control of every ion channel in it, so accounting for the effects of each of them gives us information that can be generalized to most neurons, and make inferences concerning, say, pharmacology.  Computational science gives one a very much useful degree of control and flexibility.  From the in-depth study of the part, the whole is revealed.  I am thrilled to be working with Dr. Birmingham, who is a great project mentor and a great person.  This project also taught me all the programming I know.  I also thank Mr. Osberg and the fellowships office for their support of this research.”

The research I have done up to this point has been foundational to the writing I will begin this fall. It has consisted mainly in familiarizing myself with some of the various issues within the broad field of meta-ethics, such as cognitivist and non-cognitivist approaches to morality, moral relativism, and moral realism. I believe the moral realist’s distinction between naturalistic and non-naturalistic approaches to moral metaphysics will be especially relevant for future writing, in which I hope to comment on appeals to supernaturalism as a basis for morality.