What is it like for faculty members from underrepresented groups to do research, teach, and live in a liberal arts college setting? Doctoral students had the opportunity on April 8, 2019, to find out at the GSAS event, “Mentoring for a More Diverse Professoriate,” which was hosted by the Office of Academic Diversity and Inclusion in partnership with Liberal Arts Diversity Officers and C3 (Creating Connections Consortium). Students met faculty and administrators from Holy Cross, Trinity, and Williams Colleges. Whether they were approaching the job market or just planning ahead, this event was an excellent opportunity to learn and mingle.

“Different types of institutions require different applications materials,” noted participant Brittany Fox-Williams, PhD Candidate in Sociology, who is going on the job market this fall. “So this event was a way to get insider knowledge not only about the liberal arts application process but also regarding what would be expected of me as a professor at a liberal arts college.”

Sessions included panel discussions on Teaching and Scholarship at Liberal Arts Colleges, and also on Creating Your Pathway Now for the Faculty Career in Your Future. During lunch, students and faculty broke up into groups by discipline, and students also had the chance to schedule individual meetings with faculty to discuss their job materials.

Columbia GSAS students and faculty from liberal arts colleges on April 8, 2019, at the C3-LADO event held at Columbia GSAS

The GSAS Writing Studio is dedicated to supporting Arts and Sciences doctoral students who are in the process of writing the dissertation—but their advice for doctoral students is helpful for all writers, no matter what their project. After all, writing can often be a solitary process for anyone. Whether you are just starting your writing project, or are in the thick of it, or have a draft already in hand, you can always benefit from these helpful tips.

1. Flesh Out a New Idea: Are you about to get started on a new chapter or section? Are you turning a corner from research into writing? Team up with a writing partner to help you clarify the big ideas and the big stakes of your project. You don’t even need to have anything written down—often, just thinking out loud with someone gets the creative juices flowing.
2. Make a Writing Plan: We all feel overwhelmed and exhausted by projects sometimes, or struggle to balance writing with other obligations. Instead of tackling your writing project as one large task, break it down into smaller tasks and develop a writing plan that fits into your schedule.  
3. Give Yourself a Deadline: Help yourself meet writing goals by setting low-stakes deadlines along the way. Even if you don’t meet each deadline precisely, they help keep you on track.  
4. Zoom In or Zoom Out: Ask your writing partner to close-read your draft with an eye toward clarifying individual sentences or put the draft aside and ask them to help you map out a stronger argument structure — whatever will allow you to offer your readers the most compelling version of your work.
5. Help Your Writing Partner: Fair is fair — if you are asking a writing partner to review your work, then you need to do the same for them. The good news is that helping your writing partner will sharpen your own thinking and writing. Witnessing how another writer tackles their work will give you fresh ideas, both for strategy (how to set incremental deadlines) and language (using appropriate tone and style).

Dissertation-writers: Talking with smart, fellow writers can be useful at any stage of the writing process. It is a myth that you need to have finished a draft in order to take advantage of the GSAS Writing Studio’s one-on-one consultations.

Make an appointment for a forty-five-minute session with one of the Writing Studio’s trained consultants. The Studio’s interdisciplinary team of Writing Consultants can help you figure out how to respond productively to reader feedback, and they are ready to address your various writing questions.

The Writing Studio’s forty-five-minute, one-on-one consultations are available Monday through Friday, and take place in the Studio’s mezzanine space, 319M Lehman Library (view map), Room D.

Make an appointment here.

Cancellations must be made more than twenty-four hours in advance.

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Applied Mathematics
Zhai, Haowei. Designing of solid electrolytes for rechargeable solid-state batteries. Sponsor: Yuan Yang.

Applied Physics
Taylor, Jeffrey. Sputtered thin film diffusion barriers for ohmic contact to silicon by platinum electrodes. Sponsor: Simon Billinge.

Art History and Archaeology
Vigotti, Lorenzo. The origin of the Renaissance palace: Private architecture during the Florentine oligarchy, 1378-1432. Sponsor: Francesco Benelli.

Weintraub, Alex. Authoring art in nineteenth-century France, 1793-1902. Sponsor: Jonathan Crary.

Biological Sciences
Chen, Yaqiong. Identification of polyadenylated enhancer RNAs and investigation of RBBP6 isoform3 regulation mechanism. Sponsor: James Manley.

Biological Sciences
Fomin, Vitalay. C9orf72 protein functions and its implication in ALS. Sponsor: James Manley and Carol Prives.

Business
Carter, Ashli. Feeling good yet getting it wrong: Homogeneity boosts group members' positive experience at the cost of accuracy, thoroughness, and procedural fairness. Sponsor: Katherine Phillips.

Castelo, Noah. Blurring the line between human and machine: Marketing artificial intelligence. Sponsor: Bernd Schmitt.

Kanze, Dana. Three essays exploring motivational influences in entrepreneurship. Sponsor: Damon Phillips.

Kiguel, Andrea. Essays on asset pricing in emerging markets. Sponsor: Geert Bekaert.

Lee, Alice. Storytelling in social exchange: The impact of narratives and the role of identity in negotiations and markets. Sponsors: Daniel Ames and Adam Galinsky.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Fu, Ziao. Time-resolved Cryo-EM studies on translation. Sponsor: Joachim Frank.

Chemical Engineering
Davis, Jonathan. Membraneless electrolyzers for solar fuels production. Sponsor: Daniel Esposito.

Gomez, Elaine. Tandem reactions of carbon dioxide reduction and hydrocarbon transformation. Sponsor: Jingguang Chen.

Communications
Baykurt, Burcu. The city as data machine: Local governance in the age of big data. Sponsor: Michael Schudson.

Dutta, Preetam. Machine learning based user modeling for enterprise security and privacy risk mitigation. Sponsor: Salvatore Stolfo.

Earth and Environmental Engineering
Baideme, Matthew. Optimization of glycerol-driven engineered biological nitrogen removal processes to selectively achieve targeted reduction products. Sponsor: Kartik Chandran.

Zhou, Chengchuan. Enhanced extraction of alkaline metals and rare Earth elements from unconventional resources during carbon sequestration. Sponsor: Ah-Hyung Alissa Park.

Economics
Cotton, Christopher. Essays on macroeconomics. Sponsor: Michael Woodford.

Hu, Jiayin. Essays on banking and financial intermediation. Sponsor: Patrick Bolton.

Pham, Anh. Essays in international finance and banking. Sponsors: Richard Clarida and Jennifer La'O.

Singh, Anurag. Essays in international macroeconomics. Sponsor: Martin Uribe.

Zhang, Qing. Essays on the political economy of China. Sponsors: W. Bentley MacLeod and Suresh Naidu.

Zhong, Weijie. Essays on information acquisition. Sponsors: Yeon-Koo Che and Navin Kartik.

Electrical Engineering
Gultekin, San. Dynamic machine learning. Sponsor: John Paisley.

Lin, Nathan. Fiber-optic probe and bulk-optics spectral domain optical coherence tomography systems for in vivo cochlear mechanics measurements. Sponsors: Christine Hendon and Elizabeth Olson.

Lye, Theresa. Characterization and modeling of the human left atrium using optical coherence tomography. Sponsor: Christine Hendon.

Singh-Moon, Rajinder. Design and development of optical reflectance spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography catheters for myocardial tissue characterization. Sponsor: Christine Hendon.

Environmental Health Sciences
Heaney, Alexandra. Predicting under-5 diarrhea outbreaks in Botswana: Understanding the relationships between environmental variability and diarrhea transmission. Sponsor: Jeffrey Shaman.

History
Ferguson, Susanna. Tracing Tarbiya: Women, education, and childrearing in Lebanon and Egypt, 1860-1939. Sponsor: Rashid Khalidi.

Kressel, Daniel. Techicians of the spirit: Post-fascist technocratic authoritarianism in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, 1945-1988. Sponsor: Pablo Piccato.

Mulder, Nicholas. The economic weapon: Interwar internationalism and the rise of sanctions, 1914-1945. Sponsor: Mark Mazower.

Yee, Ethan. The burden of forgiveness: Franciscans' impact on penitential practices in the thirteenth century. Sponsor: Neslihan Senocak.

Italian
Chida, Nassime. Local power in Dante's Inferno. Sponsor: Teodolinda Barolini.

Mathematics
Cowan, Alexander. Fourier expansions for Eisenstein series twisted by modular symbols. Sponsor: Dorian Goldfeld.

Giorgi, Elena. Linear stability of Reissner-Nordstrom spacetime: The case of small charge. Sponsor: Mu-Tao Wang.

Ma, Qixiao. Brauer class over the Picard scheme of curves. Sponsor: Aise Johan de Jong.

Osinenko, Anton. The two-legged K-theoretic equivariant vertex. Sponsor: Andrei Okounkov.

Neurobiology and Behavior
Russo, Abigail. Understanding neural dynamics and geometry of population activity in motor cortices. Sponsor: Mark Churchland.

Operations Research
Sun, Xu. Staffing and scheduling to differentiate service in many-server service systems. Sponsor: Ward Whitt.

Zhang, Xiaopei. Periodic Little's law. Sponsor: Ward Whitt.

Pharmacology and Molecular Signaling
Mao, De Yu. Chloride intracellular channel (CLIC) proteins function to modulate Rac1 and RhoA downstream of endothelial G-protein coupled receptors signaling. Sponsor: Jan Kitajewski.

Philosophy
Blili Hamelin, Borhane. Topography of the splintered world: Hegel and the disagreements of right. Sponsor: Frederick Neuhouser.

Physics
Genty, Victor. The microbooNE search for anomalous electron neutrino appearance using image based data reconstruction. Sponsor: Michael Shaevitz.

Political Science
Cooperman, Alicia. Trading favors: Local politics and development in Brazil. Sponsor: Maria Victoria Murillo.

Psychology
Rossignac-Milon, Maya. Merged minds: Shared reality in interpersonal relationships. Sponsor: Tory Higgins.

Shu, Jocelyn. Social processes in the experience and regulation of emotions. Sponsor: Kevin Ochsner.

Turetsky, Kate. Stress, identity, and social connection among students: A social network approach to psychological intervention. Sponsor: Valerie Purdie-Vaughns.

Slavic Languages

Jensen, Robyn. Double exposure: Picturing the self in Russian emigre culture. Sponsor: Liza Knapp.

Social Work

Jiang, Nan. The impact of adult children's education on elderly parents' health and old-age support: Evidence from the United States and China. Sponsor: Neeraj Kaushal.

Marotta, Phillip. Assessing the impact of criminal justice system involvement on sexual health and drug HIV risks in three key-affected populations. Sponsor: Nabila El-Bassel.

Um, Hyunjoon. Factors and outcomes associated with patterns of child support arrears. Sponsor: Ronald Mincy.

Sociomedical Sciences
Grilo, Stephanie. Re-thinking race among adolescents in a multiracial generation: An emerging research and public health approach to identity and health. Sponsor: Diana Hernandez.

TC / Applied Behavior Analysis
Gentilini, Lara. Establishment of conditioned reinforcement for reading content and effects on reading achievement for early-elementary students. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

TC / Behavioral Nutrition
Lee, Adele. Using theory of planned behavior to understand the prevalence of formula feeding among Chinese community in New York City - a mixed-methods study. Sponsor: Isobel Contento.

Persaud, Amrita. The theory of planned behavior as a predictor of adherence to bariatric recommendations for diet and physical activity. Sponsor: Isobel Contento.

TC / Counseling Psychology
Awad, Michael. The development and evaluation of the multicultural gender roles scale - male version. Sponsor: Marie Miville.

Sant-Barket, Sinead. Perceiver contributors to facial recognition: How might racial (self) awareness facilitate or inhibit cross-racial identification. Sponsor: George Gushue.

White, Rashidah. Black parents' racial socialization practices and their children's educational outcomes. Sponsor: Laura Smith.

TC / Developmental Psychology
Ahn, Jihyun. The impact of family contexts and sibling relationships on youth behavior outcomes. Sponsor: Jeanne Brooks-Gunn.

TC / Economics and Education
Aguirre Brautigam, Josefa. Essays on economics and education. Sponsor: Peter Bergman.

Lin, Yuxin. Why do some students delay college enrollment? Does it matter?. Sponsor: Judith Scott-Clayton.

Park, Seung Eun. Essays on improving higher education equity and employment. Sponsor: Judith Scott-Clayton.

Rehman, Sidra. Essays on income shocks and human capital. Sponsor: Judith Scott-Clayton.

TC / English Education
Song, Ah-Young. Developing writers, dreamers, and leaders: Mapping counternarratives in an out-of-school multimodal program for youth. Sponsor: Robert Fecho.

TC / History and Education
Goldenberg, Barry. Liberation, learning, and love: The history of Harlem preparatory school, 1967-1974. Sponsor: Ansley Erickson.

Huang, Viola. An alternative to Black educational genocide: Educational initiatives during the Black power movement in Harlem in the late 1960s. Sponsor: Cally Waite.

TC / Intellectual Disabilities and Autism
Dakopolos, Andrew. Aspects of joint attention in autism spectrum disorder: Links to sensory processing, social competence, maternal attention, and contextual fact. Sponsor: Laudan Jahromi.

TC / Kinesiology
Duran, Andrea. Sedentary behavior reduction in cardiac populations: Establishing a foundation for future inquiry. Sponsor: Carol Garber.

SantaBarbara, Nicholas. Acute effects of resistance exercise in men with symptoms of muscle dysmorphia. Sponsor: Joseph Ciccolo.

TC / Mathematics Education
Ban, Sunyoung. The influence of teaching instruction and learning styles on mathematics anxiety in developmental mathematics classroom. Sponsor: Nicholas Wasserman.

TC / Measurement and Evaluation
Ahmadi, Hedyeh. Longitudinal data analysis for education and psychology. Sponsor: Laura Tipton.

Zhou, Xiaoliang. Studies of extensions of HRM-SDT for constructed responses. Sponsor: Lawrence DeCarlo.

TC / Philosophy and Education
Davis, Jessica. On the possibility of philosophy in schools: Jacques Rancière and community of philosophical inquiry. Sponsor: Megan Laverty.

TC / Science Education
Weiser, Gary. Developing NGSS-aligned assessments to measure crosscutting concepts in student reasoning of Earth structures and systems. Sponsor: Christopher Emdin.

TC / Social-Organizational Psychology
Bernstein, Ariel. Race matters in coaching: An examination of coaches' willingness to have difficult conversations with leaders of color. Sponsor: Caryn Block.

Shon, DaHee. Conceptualizing and testing the model of ambidextrous leadership: Evidence from a multi-method research study. Sponsor: Debra Noumair.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Art History and Archaeology
Ratch, Corey. History of Western art, 20th century modern.

Business
DeSimone, Rebecca. Government certified: Tax enforcement affects the private sector.

Lemaire, Alain. The role of linguistic match between users and products.

Classical Studies
Dimitropoulos, Maria. Kindred killer: Intra-familial murders in Greek art.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Coffey, Genevieve. Mapping earthquake temperature rise to understand fault structure and mechanics.

Ridge, Sean. Impacts of ocean circulation on future ocean carbon uptake.

Economics
Abbiasov, Timur. Quantifying daily environments of city dwellers using online activity data.

Bouscasse, Paul. Essays in historical macroeconomics.

Hong, Seungki. The importance of household heterogeneity in explaining emerging market business cycles.

Mazewski, Matthew. Essays in applied microeconomics.

Nguyen, Dieu Hoa. School choice, peer effect and academic performance: Evidence from Vietnam.

Saluja, Arpita. Cultural ties and bureaucratic performance.

Thompson, David. Regulation by information provision.

Italian
Mcgrath, Christina. Answering the Questioni d'Amore: Boccaccio's first social inquiry.

Mechanical Engineering
Khan, Moiz. Functional posture rehabilitation using a cable-driven robot.

Wang, Bowen. Iterative learning control and adaptive control for systems with unstable discrete-time inverse.

Where did you grow up? 
This question is always a little bit hard to answer since I’ve moved so much. I grew up mostly in towns and cities along the Mexico-U.S. border – sometimes in Mexico, sometimes in the U.S. I’ve always joked that the best way to describe myself is as a border rat.

What drew you to your field? 
Having lived in so many different places, I’ve always found it startling how similar people can behave in radically different ways if you just change the setting they’re in. I took it for granted when I was little, but as I got older, I started to realize that the explanations for this were not self-evident. Let me offer a quick example: Around the border, people in Mexico like to tell a folk story about how you can tell you’ve crossed into Mexico when you see people start throwing trash out their car window, something you never would have seen them do when they were on the other side. A lot of Mexicans love to use this story to moralize about the inherent corruption of Mexican society – I should add, I’ve never actually seen anyone do this – but, I think there is a more profound observation in this story: people do change the way they behave as soon as they cross a border. Jaywalkers in Mexico stop jaywalking in California for fear of fines, and otherwise responsible Americans drink more than they should when they’re in Tijuana. It’s stupid how much a yard in either direction of a fake line in the sand can change who you say you are and the way you act – but the fact remains that it does. Trying to explain why and how this happens was one of the things that drew me to the social sciences in general, and sociology, in particular.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
You’ll start to see a thread in my interests. I was trained as an urban planner, so I’m always thinking about the importance of place. I study how arriving and living in different cities as an immigrant shapes and alters one’s socioeconomic trajectory. In even more concrete terms, I’m interested in assessing whether living in places as different as, say, New York City or Tucson, Arizona, actually sets immigrants on divergent paths towards socioeconomic success and well-being.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
I love my department. We’ve become a much closer group of scholars and staff in recent years, and I’ve felt very supported – intellectually and personally – as I navigate the PhD. I’ve also really enjoyed being a board member of the Students of Color Alliance. The sense of community I get from being around like-minded people makes the-day-to day much easier.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
The problem of “illegal” immigration is a really recent formulation of the issue in the United States. Historically, you could not talk about being undocumented in any meaningful sense because nations had a hard time keeping track of who was coming in and going out. Basically, if you were able to get to the United States, you could stay. The emergence of the “undocumented” concept is a contemporary phenomenon and it is intimately connected to rising government power and improved surveillance technologies. So, anyone who says that their ancestors came to this country legally in prior eras is misunderstanding that there was no “illegal” or “legal” entry to speak of a hundred years ago.

Who are your favorite writers?
A book that really changed the way I think is The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade Davis. I was also recently introduced to Ryszard Kapuściński. I just finished The Soccer War and can’t wait to read more.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Goku! Who wouldn't want to be able to turn into a Super Saiyan?

Who are your heroes in real life?
My grandparents. On the money they scrapped together from owning a corner store, they somehow managed to raise ten kids in a two-bedroom house. I know I’m only able to pursue graduate studies now because of the firm foundation they set for my mom and my aunts and uncles. I’m incredibly lucky to be where I am.

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
W.E.B Du Bois. He was the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, wrote one of the first books that reads like contemporary sociology (The Philadelphia Negro) and still had a hard time getting an academic job. I think he did all right for himself outside of the academy! His story is a reminder to keep things in perspective, especially when it comes to the job market. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve also come a long way.

What music have you been listening to lately?
I’ve been listening to a lot of Lo-fi lately when I’m working. But, really I’ll listen to anything that isn’t distracting and sets a good working pace. Sometimes it’s Thelonious Monk or Coltrane. Other times Bach or Chopin really work. I went through a really long Colectivo Nortec phase right before I came to Columbia. When I’m not working, lately I’ve been really digging Mariachi Flor de Toloache, Chicano Batman, Natalia Lafourcade or really anything by Café Tacvba.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
I eat at Broadway Au Lait at least once a week. The staff even knows my order now: The Mediterranean Plate!

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Art History and Archaeology
Choi, Connie. A matter of building bridges: Photography and African American education, 1957-1972. Sponsor: Kellie Jones.

Peebles, Matthew. Act as attribute: The attacking body in ancient Greek art. Sponsor: Ioannis Mylonopoulos.

Biological Sciences
Zhang, Yinglu. Structural studies of the yeast ncRNA transcription termination complex NNS. Sponsor: Liang Tong.

Biostatistics
Lee, Annie. Statistical methods for genetic studies with family history of diseases. Sponsor: Yuanjia Wang.

Business
Castro, Francisco. The operations and design of markets with spatial and incentive considerations. Sponsor: Omar Besbes.

Yang, Ruoke. Essays on corporate social responsibility. Sponsors: Patrick Bolton and Charles Calomiris.

Zou, Yuan. Lost in the rising tide: ETF flows and valuation. Sponsor: Stephen Penman.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Kandror, Elena. Transcriptional misregulation in ALS with single cell resolution. Sponsor: Tom Maniatis.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Fitch, Gregory. System dynamics models for the valuation of real options in infrastructure investments. Sponsor: Ibrahim Odeh.

Computer Science
Sun, Timothy. Testing convexity and acyclicity, and new structural results on graph embeddings. Sponsors: Xi Chen and Rocco Servedio.

Earth and Environmental Engineering
Bhambhani, Tarun. The effect of particle size and shape on transport through confined channels in three-phase froths. Sponsor: Ponisseril Somasundaran.

Ozturk, Samet. Forecasting wind turbine failures and associated costs. Sponsor: Vasilis Fthenakis.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Bernard, Allison. The playwright and the stage: History, politics, and performance in 17th century China. Sponsor: Wei Shang.

Economics
Jo, Yoon Joo. Essays on prices and frictions. Sponsor: Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé.

Li, Xuan. Essays in behavioral labor economics. Sponsors: Jonas Hjort and W. Bentley MacLeod.

Qu, Qiuying. Essays on bank lending, industrial policy and firm performance. Sponsor: Eric Verhoogen.

Zha, Danyan. Essays in education and marriage market. Sponsors: Pierre-André Chiappori and Bernard Salanie.

Zorrilla, Oskar. Essays on information, cognition and consumption. Sponsor: Michael Woodford.

Electrical Engineering
Shou, Zheng. Deep learning for action understanding in video. Sponsor: Shih-Fu Chang.

English and Comparative Literature
Lash, Alexander. Doors, noises, and magic hats: The tools of spatial representation on the seventeenth-century stage. Sponsor: Jean Howard.

French and Romance Philology
Provitola, Blase. Sex, race, and the epistemology of desire in contemporary Francophone literature and culture. Sponsor: Madeleine Dobie.

History
Buljina, Harun. Empire, nation, and the Islamic world: Bosnian Muslim intellectuals between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, 1901-1921. Sponsor: Mark Mazower.

Newman, Rachel. Transnational ambitions: Student migrants and the making of a national future in twentieth-century Mexico. Sponsor: Pablo Piccato.

Mathematics
Choi, Beomjun. Asymptotic behavior of non-compact geometric flows. Sponsor: Panagiota Daskalopoulos.

Lee, Pak Hin. P-adic L-functions for twisted adjoint L-values on Hida families. Sponsor: Eric Urban.

Nutritional and Metabolic Biology
Gonzalez, Bryan. HNF1A deficiency impairs ?-cell fate, granule maturation and function. Sponsors: Dietrich Egli and Rudolph L. Leibel.

Political Science
Kopas, Jacob. Legitimizing the state or a grievance?: Property rights and political engagement. Sponsor: Timothy Frye.

Zubia, Aaron. The making of liberal mythology: David Hume, epicureanism, and the new political science. Sponsor: Turkuler Isiksel.

Religion
Macomber, Andrew. Playing with fire: Healing rituals and demonic disease in medieval Japanese Buddhism. Sponsor: Michael Como.

Sociomedical Sciences
Popkin, Ronna. Variants of significance? The production and management of genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancer in the era of multi-gene panel testing. Sponsor: Carole Vance.

Statistics
Austern, Morgane. Limit theorems beyond sums of independent observations. Sponsors: Arian Maleki and Peter Orbanz.

Wu, Jing. Bayesian modeling of heterogeneous event times data. Sponsor: Tian Zheng.

Sustainable Development
Wong, Jason Chun Yu. Essays on aviation, infrastructure, and sustainable development. Sponsor: Scott Barrett.

TC / Applied Anthropology
Brennan, Sarah. Anxious intersections: Queer Muslim asylum seekers in the Netherlands. Sponsor: Katherine Pratt Ewing.

TC / Applied Behavior Analysis
Bly, Brittany. The result of enhancing the value of careful reading on reading achievement in fourth graders. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

Chen, Angela. Echoic training and the acquisition of bidirectional naming in elementary students. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

Mellon, Leanna. Remediating difficulties in learning to read and spell by teaching kindergarten students to listen to composite words and vocally segment the component phonemes. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

Silsilah, Sara. What makes teachers effective: Investigating the relationship between CABAS® teacher ranks and teacher effectiveness. Sponsor: Daniel Fienup.

Yoon, SangEun. Comparison of bidirectional verbal operants between people, bidirectional self-talk, and bidirectional naming. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

TC / Behavioral Nutrition
Whyte, Kathryn. Exploring maternal diet quality using the NOVA guidelines & its relationships. Sponsor: Isobel Contento.

TC / Clinical Psychology
Lynch, David. In-session predictors of self-harm behavior in dialectical behavior therapy. Sponsor: Barry Farber.

McClintock, Clayton. Intrinsic spirituality and acute stress response: A review and preliminary data suggesting neurobiological links between spirituality and resilience to stress. Sponsor: Lisa J. Miller.

Renna, Megan. Perseveration and health: An experimental manipulation of worry and relaxation on autonomic, endocrine, and immunological processes. Sponsor: Douglas Mennin.

TC / Cognitive Science in Education
Cheng, Rong. Effects of teaching text structure in science text reading: A study among Chinese middle school students. Sponsor: Dolores Perin.

Colón-Acosta, Nirmaliz. Learning to code: Effects of programming modality in a game-based learning environment. Sponsor: John Black.

Kai, Shiming. Student affect patterns accompanying self-regulated learning behavior in physics playground. Sponsor: Ryan Baker.

TC / Comparative and International Education
Martel, Mirka. Understanding intercultural bilingual education for education equity among indigenous students in Ecuador and Peru. Sponsor: Regina Cortina.

TC / Counseling Psychology
Hinman, Kimberly. Code of empowerment or oppression? Factors contributing to women's perception of sexism in the workplace: An exploratory study. Sponsor: George Gushue.

Polihronakis, Charles. The sexual health of bisexual men: Examining the roles of bisexual minority stress and substance use. Sponsor: Brandon Velez.

Rooney, Joanna. Development of the multicultural gender role scale for Asian American women. Sponsor: Marie Miville.

TC / English Education
Choi, Minkyung. Getting to the matter of matter: A grounded theory study on how students navigate texts in an introductory chemistry course at a community college in New York City. Sponsor: Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz.

Golland, Rachel. Strong readers' beginnings: Identifying the agencies and individuals who influence reading lives. Sponsor: Sheridan Blau.

Keane, Kelly. First-year composition and dual enrollment. Sponsor: Sheridan Blau.

McLaughlin Cahill, Jennifer. Queering secondary English: Practitioner research examining culturally responsive pedagogy and YA queer book clubs. Sponsor: Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz.

Semaya, Beth. Opening and constraints: The professional learning experiences of four beginning teachers. Sponsor: Ruth Vinz.

Wozniak, Sandra. The role of performance and aesthetic practices in encouraging student engagement, motivation, and investment in writing in the college composition classroom. Sponsor: Sheridan Blau.

TC / Mathematics Education
Johnson, O'Rita. The impact of parent involvement on high-achieving females' mathematics performance and decision to major in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Sponsor: Erica Walker.

TC / Philosophy and Education
Tanchuk, Nicolas. Is inquiry learning unjust: An ethical defense of Deweyan instructional design. Sponsor: David Hansen.

TC / School Psychology
Tarantino II, Joseph. Effects of cell phones on student lecture note taking and test taking performance. Sponsor: Stephen Peverly.

TC / Social-Organizational Psychology
Pfaff, Danielle. Emotion and warmth modulation in women leaders: A qualitative exploratory study. Sponsor: Caryn Block.

TC / Sociology and Education
Fox, Ashley. The more things change, the more they stay the same: Response to racial demographic change and maintenance of White privilege and power in a suburban school district. Sponsor: Amy Wells.

Nagarajan, Pavithra. Man made: The (Re)construction of black male identity in single-sex schooling. Sponsor: Carolyn Riehl.

TC / Teaching of Social Studies
Villarreal, Christina. Who we are & how we do: Portraits of pedagogical process & possibility when teaching & learning about race & racism in social studies classrooms. Sponsor: Sandra Schmidt.

Urban Planning
Nishi, Maiko. Multi-level governance of agricultural land in Japan: Farmers? perspectives and responses to farmland banking. Sponsor: Robert Beauregard.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Biomedical Engineering
Tsitkov, Stanislav. Emergent properties of active nanoscale systems.

Computer Science
Tang, Da. Unsupervised representation learning with pairwise correlations.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Blatter, Daniel. Constraining fluids in the crust and mantle with Bayesian inversion of electromagnetic induction data.

Mechanical Engineering
Czerwin, Benjamin. Dynamic modeling of the renal system.

Haas-Heger, Maximilian. Grasp stability analysis with passive reactions.

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
AlSheikh Theeb, Thaer. Capitalizing colonization: The production of effects in Jordan.

Philosophy
Yaure, Philip. To reforge the Nation: Emancipatory politics and Antebellum black abolitionism.

Slavic Languages
Ilicic, Milica. Joy in dark places: Ethics of joyful affect.

Sociology
Au, Larry. The global emergence of a techno-scientific field - precision medicine in China and the United States.

Mariuma, Yarden. Cultural and structural brokerage in the Balkanes.

Portocarrero, Sandra. Examining diversity inclusion management.

Where did you grow up? 
Freiburg, Germany.

What drew you to your field? 
Growing up, I had never met women scientists, so I didn't think women belonged in the natural sciences. It wasn't until I took intro physics and chemistry classes in college that I began to change my mind—and the more I learned about the underlying principles of our daily life, the more interested I became in further pursuing these studies. In particular, I was always drawn to mathematical representations in chemistry, and eventually I found my way to the field of physical chemistry. At Columbia, I joined a research group that combines two of my priorities: a project that impacts our daily life while also addressing fundamental questions, and a female PI who demonstrates that women most definitely have a (leading) place in this field.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
Materials that have been cooled below their melting point but have not turned into a solid are referred to as supercooled liquids and polymer melts. They are ubiquitous in our daily lives, even if we don't always realize it—in fact, glass is one of the most famous types of these materials—yet many of their molecular-based properties are still poorly understood. My research is focused on gaining a better understanding of the dynamics of these glassy materials.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
Both in and outside of the lab, I have been given multiple opportunities to learn and grow. I have been able to take on leadership positions in and outside of the chemistry department, have developed professionally through fellowships with GSAS and the CTL, and have had access to amazing research facilities. This combination of scientific and extracurricular opportunities has made my time at Columbia an amazing learning experience.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
My fellowship in academic administration with the engineering department's Professional Development and Leadership program and the CTL's lead teaching fellowship have been very important ways for me to experience other facets of academia that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
There's a myth that old stained-glass windows are thicker at the bottom because glass flows at room temperature and gravity has made it accumulate at the bottom. This isn't true—parts of the windows are just thicker due to imperfect manufacturing approaches.

Who are your favorite writers?
I admire Celeste Ng, in particular her debut novel Everything I Never Told You. Some of my other favorite authors include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Claire Bidwell Smith, and Haruki Murakami.

Who are your heroes in real life?
AOC. She fights for what she believes in, and I aspire to be even half as persistent in my endeavors as she is in hers.

What music have you been listening to lately?
A friend of mine and I recently put together a Spotify playlist with a bunch of music we like to listen to while writing our theses. One of my favorite artists from that playlist is Angélique Kidjo. Other non-thesis artists include Childish Gambino, Fynn Kliemann, and Lake Street Dive.

What is your favorite blog or website?
NYT Cooking—I love to cook and bake, and use many NYT recipes as inspiration for my own creations.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
I'm not gonna lie, I have come to greatly appreciate the food trucks on Broadway, especially Miracle Thai. When I have a bit more time for lunch, I really like to go to Friedman's and order their Market Plate.

On April 25, GSAS and the United Nations celebrated scholarly achievements of PhD students across the Ivy League by hosting the inaugural Ivy 3MT Competition. Finalists from Brown University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University joined Columbia’s finalists, presenting their dissertation research in three minutes to a non-specialist audience using only one slide. The audience of more than 200 people was composed of United Nations staff, faculty and students from participating institutions, and friends and family of the finalists.

Finalists demonstrated a range of skills including critical thinking, data visualization, and written and oral communications. The winners were chosen by a panel of judges as well as by audience votes. This competition was modeled after the University of Queensland’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT), an international competition in which more than 600 institutions participate.

Bailey Brown, a Sociology candidate at GSAS, won the Audience Choice Award for her presentation, titled “Kinder Panic: School Selection and Parental Uncertainty.” Brown discussed her research on parental anxiety over public school options for their children and the way parents’ decisions about their children’s kindergartens may result in long-lasting, unintended consequences. For instance, decisions over kindergarten can shape how students are tracked throughout their school years and perpetuate disparities between the rich and the poor.

Brown found participation in the 3MT competition helpful because “it provided the ideal avenue for me to quickly distill key objectives from my dissertation for an interdisciplinary audience.” Brown adds, “The competition has [also] helped me prepare more engaging and thought-provoking presentations for workshops and conferences.”

The second Columbia GSAS finalist who participated, Sean O’Neil, is a History candidate who spoke on “The Art of Signs: Symbolic Notation and Visual Thinking in Early Modern Europe.” He shared his research on symbols and visual thinking among early modern people, explaining that symbols unsettled some because they evoked mysticism. As more people recognized the value of visual thinking, they became accustomed to the advantages of visual thinking with symbols and visual thinking in general, which has helped to circulate new knowledge.

O’Neil says that preparing for the competition was useful not only because it pushed him to describe his work to a non-specialist audience, “but also because the very process of doing so clarified my own thinking to myself. The competition itself proved to be a wonderful opportunity to learn more about my colleagues’ projects in other fields—projects I probably would never have learned about any other way.”

The first-place winner was Mehraveh Salehi, an Electrical Engineering PhD candidate at Yale, for her presentation titled “Individualized and Task-Specific Functional Brain Mapping.” The second-place winner was Hannah Shoenhard, a Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, for her presentation titled “Linking Genes to Brain in Sensation and Decision-Making.” The first-prize winner was awarded $1,000, and the second-prize winner was awarded $500. Bailey Brown, winner of the Audience Choice Award, was awarded $300.

The judges were Salim Hasham, Partner, McKinsey & Company; Mariangela Parra-Lancourt, Senior Economic Affairs Officer, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs; Laurel Patterson, Team Leader, SDG Integration, United Nations Development Programme; Alex Sarian, Acting Executive Director, Lincoln Center Education, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; and Mariët Westermann, Executive Vice President for Programs and Research, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Anthropology
Mazariegos, Juan. A war of proper names: Politics of naming, indigenous insurrection, and genocidal violence in Guatemala's Civil War (1981-1983). Sponsor: Rosalind Morris.

Applied Mathematics
England, Mark. Understanding observed and projected climate changes in the Antarctic, and their global impacts. Sponsor: Lorenzo Polvani.

Architecture
Gaglio, Meredith. In pursuit of a softer path: Countercultural vision, energy politics, and the American appropriate technology movement. Sponsors: Mary McLeod and Felicity Scott.

Business
Long, Fei. Long-term versus short-term contracting in Salesforce compensation. Sponsor: Kinshuk Jerath.

Chemical Engineering
Fei, Wenjie. Magneto-capillary dynamics of particles at curved liquid interfaces. Sponsor: Kyle Bishop.

Computer Science
Almashaqbeh, Ghada. CacheCash: A cryptocurrency-based decentralized content delivery network. Sponsor: Allison Bishop.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Leland, Caroline. Impacts of partial cambial dieback on tree-ring records from ancient conifers. Sponsor: Edward Cook.

Electrical Engineering
McMillan, James. Investigations of nonlinear optical phenomenon and dispersion in integrated photonic devices. Sponsor: Richard Osgood.

English and Comparative Literature
Wiet, Victoria. Eccentric conduct: Theatre and the pleasures of Victorian fiction. Sponsor: Sharon Marcus.

French and Romance Philology
Lazur, Sarah. Modernist poetics between France and Brazil: Influence and cannibalism in the works of Blaise Cendrars and Oswald de Andrade. Sponsor: Emmanuelle Saada.

Genetics and Development
Kirkling, Margaret. Notch signaling facilitates in vitro generation of cross-parenting classical dendritic cells. Sponsor: Boris Reizis.

History
Bhattacharyya, Tania. Ocean Bombay, 1839-1937: Space, itinerancy and community in an imperial port city. Sponsor: Manan Ahmed.

History
Murphy, Anna. Corporatizing defense: Management expertise and the transformation of the Cold War U.S. military. Sponsor: Elizabeth Blackmar.

Italian
Palanti, Alessia. Stranded, isolated, cloistered, and confined: Women queering space in twenty-first century Italian cinema. Sponsor: Elizabeth Leake.

Mathematics
Tan, Xiaowei. Optimal transport and equilibrium problems in finance. Sponsor: Marcel Nutz.

Microbiology, Immunology, and Infection
Justino Lage de Almeida, Mariana. Mitochondrial dynamics in hematopoietic stem cells. Sponsor: Hans-Willem Snoeck.

Music
Harper, Paula. Unmute this: Circulation, sociality, and sound in viral media. Sponsor: Ellie Hisama.

Whyte, Ralph. "A Light in Sound, a Sound-like Power in Light": Light and/as music in the history of the color organ. Sponsor: George Lewis.

Music (DMA)
Bird, David. Mixed-media and metaphor. Sponsor: George Lewis.

Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine
Upadhaya, Samik. Characterization of endogenous hematopoietic stem cells in their native state. Sponsor: Boris Reizis.

Philosophy
Heisenberg, Lars. Hegel on social critique: Life, action and the good in the philosophy of right. Sponsor: Frederick Neuhouser.

McNulty, Jacob. Logic in Hegel's Logic. Sponsor: Frederick Neuhouser.

Nielsen, Michael. Essays on learning and induction. Sponsor: Haim Gaifman.

Political Science
Hanson, Kolby. Rebel organizations in crackdown and truce. Sponsor: Virginia Page Fortna.

Saygili, Aslihan. Democratization, ethnic minorities and the politics of self-determination reform. Sponsor: Virginia Page Fortna.

Vergara Gonzalez, Camila. Assembling the Plebeian Republic: Popular institutions against systemic corruption and oligarchic domination. Sponsor: Nadia Urbinati.

Yang, Joonseok. Three essays on the political economy of business mobility: Electoral and policy implications of business location decisions in the United States. Sponsor: Robert Erikson.

Religion
Barnes, Rex. Haunting matters: Demonic infestation in northern Europe, 1400-1600. Sponsor: Euan Cameron.

Social Work
Kim, Soyeon. Hope and positive emotions in bereavement among older adults in the United States. Sponsor: Katherine Shear.

Pac, Jessica. Three essays on child maltreatment prevention. Sponsor: Jane Waldfogel.

Sociology
Ciocca, Christina. Organizational effects on bachelor's degree completion for the new majority. Sponsor: Thomas DiPrete.

Sustainable Development
Dookie, Denyse. Essays on using climate information for disaster and climate risk management. Sponsor: Daniel Osgood.

Foreman, Timothy. Essays on the economics of environmental change. Sponsor: Wolfram Schlenker.

TC / Applied Anthropology
Brennan, Sarah. Anxious intersections: Queer Muslim asylum seekers in the Netherlands. Sponsor: Katherine Pratt Ewing.

TC / Cognitive Science in Education
Lamnina, Marianna. Developing a thirst for knowledge. Sponsor: Catherine Chase.

TC / Mathematics Education
Aqil, Moulay. Morocco: Multilingualism, cultural identity and mathematics education post-French protectorate, a historical perspective. Sponsor: Alexander Karp.

Nadmi, Mustapha. A significant step toward the development of modern algebra: Al-Samaw'al Ibn Yahya Al-Maghribi, a twelfth century mathematician. Sponsor: Alexander Karp.

Urban Planning
Stiglich, Matteo. City unplanning: The techno-political economy of privately-financed highways in Lima. Sponsor: Elliott Sclar.

PROPOSALS DEFENDED

Anthropology
Elmakias, Zohar. Minefield, temple: National, theological, and military powers and site-making in Israel.

Grody, Evin. Animal use as craft practice: Reassessing animal procurement and processing in the Zambian Iron Age.

Reumert, Anna. The etiquette of migration: Sudanese migrant genealogies and practices in Beirut.

Applied Mathematics
Oehrlein, Jessica. Stratosphere-Troposhere interaction and impacts on northern hemisphere wintertime climate.

Biomedical Informatics
Grossman, Lisa. The transparent, concurrent, and collaborative medical record: Methods to improve patients' comprehension of health information.

Business
Cen, Xiao. Home equity, liquidity considerations, and entrepreneurship.

Hwang, Jiwon. Labor market discrimination, entrepreneurship, and incarceration.

Mei, Danqing. Technology shift in M&A.

Computer Science
Mahajan, Kunal. Pricing and performance in cloud computing.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Barth, Anna. A volatile approach to studying the dynamics of magma ascent during explosive eruptions.

Curtin, Lorelei. Organic geochemical records of climate change and human activity from North Atlantic islands.

Gustafson, Chloe. Electromagnetic investigations of groundwater systems in submarine and subglacial environments.

Myers, Elise. Particle association and persistence of aquatic bacteria relevant to public health: Experiments, observations, and modeling.

Russell, Joshua. New constraints on the oceanic lithosphere-asthenosphere system from high-resolution surface-wave imaging.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Berge-Becker, Zachary. Gentlemen of leisure: Expertise in the arts, and the construction of gentlemanly identities in Middle period China (1000-1600).

Chambers, Harlan. In search of the commune: China's cultural experiments for a new society (1942-1962).

White, Oliver. Transformative travel: The roots and reinventions of Hizakurige, an early 19th century Japanese travel tale.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Anujan, Krishna. The role of community assembly filters in governing the biodiversity-productivity relationship: Tests of theory on real gradients.

Hall, Jazlynn. Impacts of drought and cyclonic storms on vegetation and water provisioning in Puerto Rico.

VanAcker, Meredith. The ecological drivers of urban tick-borne disease.

Economics
Bamford, Iain. Essays in urban, international and public economics.

Deibler, Daniel. Topics in labor market contracting.

Esteban Casanelles, Teresa. Essays on political economy.

Goff, Leonard. Essays in applied econometrics and labor economics.

Ravindran, Dilip. Essays on information in the political economy.

Shin, Joo-Hyung. Labor market implications of specialization.

Warnes, Pablo. Essays in spatial economics.

English and Comparative Literature
Olivier, Francois. Walt Whitman, evolution, and empire: A study of the American Bard's influence on Edward Carpenter, Olive Schreiner, and Jan Smuts.

French and Romance Philology
Albes, Elizabeth. Writing the fictional self: Authorial doubles in Diderot, Rousseau, Staël, and Stendhal.

History
Atassi, Nader. Practicing economy: Capitalism, political economy, and economic thought in the late Ottoman Empire.

Chattopadhyay, Sohini. The unclaimed and the pauper corpse as an urban problem: Calcutta and Bombay City, 1896 - c. 1960.

Coggeshall, Samuel. Consular networks and the creation of national space between empire and revolution, 1898-1934.

Dubler, Roslyn. Sex, social policy, and the welfare State in Britain and West Germany, 1975-1998.

Glade, Rebecca. Political movements and the struggle for the State in Sudan, 1964-1985.

Lerer, David. Modern European economic history.

Zuber, Thomas. Calibrating childhood: Social services, social sciences and households (Burkina Faso, 1950s-1980s).

Italian
Sbuttoni, Claudia. The construction of Italianità at the margins of the nation: Venezia Giulia from the Risorgimento to fascism.

Scarborough, Margaret. Thinking being using having: Critique and possession in the modern.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Ameixeiras Cundins, Iria. Popular identities: Folklore under the Iberian dictatorship.

Cadena Botero, Juan. Disputing the real: Hallucination, masses, and culture in Colombia, Mexico, and USA in the late twentieth century.

Carpio Jimenez, Alberto. Trabajar y obrar: Para una crítica del trabajo desde la península ibérica en el siglo XXI.

Cook, Alexandra. The aesthetics of bad faith.

Lavin, Analía. Periferias de la ciencia: Ocultismo en el Uruguay finisecular.

Materials Science and Engineering
Fu, Lyuwen. Thermodynamics of interacting phonons.

Mechanical Engineering
DiMarco, Christopher. Mechanical behavior of polycrystalline graphene.

Meeker, Cassie. Intuitive human machine interfaces for non-anthropomorphic robotic hands.

Srinivasan, Arvind. Radiative properties of polymers and their use as passive radiative coolers.

Zhang, Haohan. A robotic platform to assist and train head-neck movements.

Zimmerman, Brandon. Investigations of mechanically mediated fatigue failure in articular cartilage: Theoretical and computational models.

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Moughania, Ali. Subject-formation at Sunni, Shia, and Sufi crossroads.

Philosophy
Hejduk, Natalie. The socratic paradoxes and Plato's epistemology from the Hippias Minor to the Republic.

Rigas, Alexander. The time of "a Life": Three papers on division two of Heidegger's being and time.

Political Science
Casler, Donald. Credible to whom? The political semantics of credibility in U.S. foreign relations.

Clark, Richard. Better together? A theory of IO cooperation.

Groves, Dylan. Exit, voice, and ideology: Three essays on rural politics in developing countries.

Hiroshima, Sean. Making bystanders: A theory of revisionist strategy.

Jun, Dahsol. Extortion via encryption: The logics of coercion in cyberspace.

Parker, Adam. The politics of labor automation.

Thomas, Daniel. Social transformation in unstable contexts: How do social relations form in response to conflict and displacement?

Zucker, Noah. Climate and development.

Religion
Tackes, John. New age Sarvodaya - Self-help in contemporary north India.

Sociology
Jürgenmeyer, Julian. Trials of legitimacy - Bank stress tests as tools of government in the age of globalized finance.

Urban Planning
Haupert, Tyler. The impact of machine learning-assisted risk assessment on racial disparities in mortgage lending in the United States.

Where did you grow up? 
Gloucester, Virginia.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I research and document the original “safe spaces”: freedom colonies and other communities that resisted and escaped Western colonialism to protect themselves from terrorism. Since the very beginning of Western colonialism, people have created spaces for themselves as a form of resistance. Examples include the palenques of Colombia; the quilombos and mocambos of Brazil; maroons throughout the Caribbean and Latin America; the Great Dismal Swamp region of North America and Asia; “freedom countries” such as Haiti, Liberia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia; and the numerous “freedmen settlements” across the North American continent (more than 558 have been found in Texas alone).

What drew you to your field? 
I love fact-based truth-telling and a great story, unfiltered. On social media, for example, hashtags are the new innovations in storytelling. #JournalismSoWhite, #MediaSoWhite, #HollywoodSoWhite, and so on are amazing illustrations of ingenious narrative, from social and citizen journalism, to fiction storytelling to digital prose.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
I enjoy being a member of an international, multicultural community of cutting-edge thinkers, doers and “be-ers.” Fact-based discussion grounded in rigorous academic and creative fervor allows for a one-of-a-kind experience without ever having to leave the most cosmopolitan, diverse, multicultural, international metropolis in the world—which the indigenous Lenni Lenape of Lenapehoking called Mannahatta.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
Being Columbia’s first-ever Wikipedia Fellow & Wikimedian-in-Residence, and the Wikipedia Visiting (Research) Scholar at SEAS, in the Computer Graphics and User Interface (CGUI) Lab, while serving as an University Senator, a Graduate Councilor, on the Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging and as the producer of the Oral History Film Series at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE). I was able to incubate my social enterprise startup #HackingRacism here at IE@Columbia (the university campus-wide incubator at the Business School) just prior to matriculation. As the liaison between the University and the Wikimedia community, we're developing exciting WikiProjects with the Oral History & Data Science departments and with historically black colleges, universities, departments, institutions, and organizations throughout the planet with WikiHBCU/DIO. This is an initiative to establish a Wiki presence (such as a fellowship, residency, or visiting scholarship) at every historically black college, university, department, institution, and organization on the planet, as a safe space from the well-documented racism of the platform. Centering special coverage on white supremacy and slavery as we commemorate the 400th year of the Atlantic Slave Trade in the English colonies and Columbia’s approval of creation of the African American and African Diaspora Studies department is particularly of interest. We're also developing coverage about Columbia as the University itself wrestles with white supremacy and racist vandalism and assaults and develops its Columbia and Slavery project with DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History Eric Foner. Developing my thesis research, #Mapping Freedom, with wikitools is part of larger efforts to increase equity, parity, diversity, and inclusion throughout the platform as well.  

Who are your favorite writers?
I enjoy the works of Barbara J. Fields, Virginia Hamilton, Mildred D. Taylor, Ishmael Reed, Samuel R. Delaney, and Donald Bogle. 

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and Columbia’s own Barbara Fields, Nyssa Chow, Amy Starecheski, and Mary Marshall Clark.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
Amma, a god worshipped by the Dogon people of Mali.

What music have you been listening to lately?
Freddie & Louis Keppard & the Original Creole Orchestra, Roberta Flack, Johnny Mathis, Mahalia Jackson, Walela, and Zevansi.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
Oasis Jimma Juice Bar, on Broadway near Tiemann Place.

The 2019 annual research symposium of The GSAS Diversity Research Collective was held on May 8, with six GSAS doctoral students presenting their individual research projects.

Each academic year, a new group of students form the Collective and meet regularly to deepen the potential impact of their research in their respective disciplines as well as on the communities on which their studies focus. An exercise in interdisciplinary thinking, public scholarship, and activating social change, it provides a space for students to build a supportive yet critical scholarly community outside of their home departments and their disciplines. The Collective enhances students’ graduate experience by creating a shared sense of community among its members.

At the 2019 symposium, Brittany Fox-Williams, in Sociology, presented on “Trust Matters: Race and Student–Teacher Relationships in NYC Public Schools.” Tiffany Huang, also in Sociology, discussed “Revisiting the Relationship Between Discrimination and Intergroup Commonality.” Brendane Tynes, in Anthropology, talked about “‘I Can't Die. I Won’t’: The Radical Reimagination of the (After)Lives of Black Women and Girls.” 

In Psychology, Dara Huggins shared her work on “Towards a Theory of Diversity and Conflict for Predicting Diversity and Inclusion Outcomes,” and in History, Bailey Yellen presented on “‘The Great Negro State’: The WPA and Postwar Black Migration to Arkansas.” Finally, Nandini Banerjee-Datta in Ethnomusciology discussed“Technology and Talk: Rabindrasangeet and the Cultivation of Bengali-American Identities.” Yun Emily Wang, a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Music, delivered the keynote address on the value of belonging—or not. 

“The Diversity Research Collective was originally conceived three years ago by two graduate student Fellows in Academic Administration,” notes Celina Chatman Nelson, Associate Dean for Academic Diversity and Inclusion. “We are proud to continue this initiative as a hallmark OADI program because it centers the intellectual perspectives of emerging scholars from underrepresented backgrounds and engages broader publics in their work.”
 

GSAS master’s students showcased their thesis research at the fourth annual Master’s SynThesis Competition, held on May 9, 2019. In five minutes, using only four slides and no notes, 12 students from as many master’s programs presented their research to a general audience and an interdisciplinary panel of faculty and alumni judges. Topics ranged from the genetic relatedness of corals in bleaching events to framing access to water as a human rights issue to using patient-derived stem cells to study ALS. 

Ivana Dizdar, an MA candidate in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies, was awarded first-place for her presentation on “He Loves Me Not: The Art of Tanja Ostojić and Daniela Ortiz, from EU Migration to Anti-Celebration.” Her advisor is Rosalyn Deutsche, Visiting Professor at Barnard College. 

“Many see art as something abstract and inaccessible, something self-contained, even something that doesn’t have a concrete relationship to the real world,” observed Dizdar. She found preparation for the SynThesis competition useful because it “helped me develop and test ways of articulating contemporary art’s relationship to other areas, especially politics, in a way that would be meaningful to people across disciplines.”

Michelle Lee, an MA candidate in Global Thought, won second-place for her presentation on “Beyond Big Brother: Implications of China’s Social Credit System for Global Governance.” David Park, Faculty Director of the MA in Global Thought and Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, serves as her advisor. 

MA candidate in Religion Clayton Raithel won third-place for his presentation, “To Think, To Feel, To Know: Affective Alignment and its Political Implications.” His advisor is Gil Anidjar, Professor in the Department of Religion, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS).

This signal event for Master’s programs enables students to synthesize and sharpen their theses so they can be explained to a general audience. “Thinking through one's ‘elevator pitch’ is a great exercise,” said Raithel, “and reminded me of why it was I became interested in my topic in the first place.” Lee added, “My research can take me into some pretty specific focus areas, but this helped me think about the ‘so what?’ and ‘why should I care?’" 

“The Master’s SynThesis Competition,” says Richard Slusarczyk, Associate Dean of Academic & Student Affairs, “pushes students to crystallize their research and incorporate additional skills — oral communications and visualization — that is useful no matter what they go on to do next. It is also an inspiration to see the range and depth of MA research at Columbia: We are so proud of what our master’s students accomplish.” 

GSAS master’s students showcased their thesis research at the fourth annual Master’s SynThesis Competition, held on May 9, 2019. In five minutes, using only four slides and no notes, 12 students from as many master’s programs presented their research to a general audience and an interdisciplinary panel of faculty and alumni judges. Topics ranged from the genetic relatedness of corals in bleaching events to framing access to water as a human rights issue to using patient-derived stem cells to study ALS. 

Ivana Dizdar, an MA candidate in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies, was awarded first-place for her presentation on “He Loves Me Not: The Art of Tanja Ostojić and Daniela Ortiz, from EU Migration to Anti-Celebration.” Her advisor is Rosalyn Deutsche, Visiting Professor at Barnard College. 

“Many see art as something abstract and inaccessible, something self-contained, even something that doesn’t have a concrete relationship to the real world,” observed Dizdar. She found preparation for the SynThesis competition useful because it “helped me develop and test ways of articulating contemporary art’s relationship to other areas, especially politics, in a way that would be meaningful to people across disciplines.”

Michelle Lee, an MA candidate in Global Thought, won second-place for her presentation on “Beyond Big Brother: Implications of China’s Social Credit System for Global Governance.” David Park, Faculty Director of the MA in Global Thought and Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, serves as her advisor. 

MA candidate in Religion Clayton Raithel won third-place for his presentation, “To Think, To Feel, To Know: Affective Alignment and its Political Implications.” His advisor is Gil Anidjar, Professor in the Department of Religion, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS).

This signal event for Master’s programs enables students to synthesize and sharpen their theses so they can be explained to a general audience. “Thinking through one's ‘elevator pitch’ is a great exercise,” said Raithel, “and reminded me of why it was I became interested in my topic in the first place.” Lee added, “My research can take me into some pretty specific focus areas, but this helped me think about the ‘so what?’ and ‘why should I care?’" 

“The Master’s SynThesis Competition,” says Richard Slusarczyk, Associate Dean of Academic & Student Affairs, “pushes students to crystallize their research and incorporate additional skills — oral communications and visualization — that is useful no matter what they go on to do next. It is also an inspiration to see the range and depth of MA research at Columbia: We are so proud of what our master’s students accomplish.” 

Thousands of family members, friends, faculty, and staff gathered to celebrate 660 graduating MA candidates and 340 graduating PhD candidates on Sunday, May 19.

Below are some photos taken throughout the day. Visit the GSAS Facebook page to see many more.

Tiffany Huang collaborated with Professors Van C. Tran and Jennifer Lee on the paper “Revisiting the Asian Second-Generation Advantage,” published recently in Ethnic and Racial Studies. In this interview, Tiffany discusses her research, how she came to work with Professors Tran and Lee, and the inequities faced by many academics of color.

What is your thesis in “Revisiting the Asian second-generation advantage”?
We use national data to examine education and labor market outcomes for the second-generation children of five Asian immigrant groups—Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Koreans. Prior research finds that second-generation Asian Americans achieve exceptionally highly in education, in part because of hyperselectivity—that is, their immigrant parents are more likely to have college educations compared with both U.S.-born Americans and to their non-migrant counterparts in their home countries.

We find that all five second-generation groups achieve exceptionally highly in education, but not all groups show intergenerational mobility. Second-generation Vietnamese, Chinese, and Koreans do show intergenerational mobility, while second-generation Indians and Filipinos do not. When it comes to labor market outcomes, second-generation Asian Americans, except for Chinese, are no more likely to be in professional or managerial occupations, compared with their white counterparts, when taking education into account. This finding suggests that the Asian second-generation advantage is confined to education and does not translate into exceptional labor market outcomes. 

What was the experience like to collaborate with Professors Lee and Tran? How did it come about that the three of you teamed up on this research and paper?
I began to research second-generation Asian Americans' labor market outcomes after taking a class on racial inequality with Professor Carla Shedd. In that course, we read Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou's "The Asian American Achievement Paradox," which looks at how second-generation Chinese and Vietnamese Americans achieve so highly in education. I was curious about what happened once Asian Americans joined the workforce, and discovered that there was some, but not much, qualitative work in the area.

I ultimately conducted a study in which I interviewed 30 second-generation Asian Americans in the New York City area about their workplace experiences. I took seminars with both Professors Lee and Tran, and worked on this project in their classes. Professor Lee is also my advisor. So both of them were quite familiar with my research interests. Knowing this, Prof. Tran invited me to collaborate with him and Fei Guo (from Macquerie University) on a paper comparing labor market outcomes for Asian immigrants in Australia and the U.S., as well as on this paper with Professor Lee that's now been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies. 

What is your own focus of research?
I am broadly interested in race, immigration, and identity, particularly for the second-generation children of immigrants. In addition to my work on Asian Americans' labor market outcomes, my dissertation project will examine how people navigate identity in the college application process. 

Is there anything else you want to share with the GSAS community?
Collaborating with Professors Tran and Lee has been a great experience. They've both been role models not only as academics, but as mentors. Research (including my own) finds that in addition to discrimination and stereotyping, differential access to professional networks and mentorship contributes to workplace inequality. Faculty of color often take on a disproportionate share of mentoring and advising, and I am grateful for their work. 

Twenty-seven graduating MA and PhD students—and the family, friends, and faculty who have supported them throughout their academic careers—gathered to celebrate at the second annual Students of Color Alliance (SoCA) Commencement ceremony, held on May 17 in Pulitzer Hall. The event supplemented school- and university-wide graduation ceremonies by providing a venue for graduate students of color to celebrate their collective as well as their individual achievements.

Carlos J. Alonso, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, gave welcoming remarks. A transcript of his remarks as delivered is below.

The student remarks were delivered by Alexandra Mathieu, SoCA Programming Chair and PhD Candidate in Political Science. Celina Chatman Nelson, Associate Dean for Academic Diversity and Inclusion, shared that the first Devon T. Wade Mentorship and Service Award, in recognition of the achievements of the late Dr. Devon T. Wade, would be announced at Convocation two days later. (This award was given to Joss Greene, PhD Candidate in Sociology.)

The keynote speaker, Porsha Olayiwola, Poet Laureate of Boston, spoke movingly and powerfully about her upbringing and the importance of self-love, affirmation, and celebration, especially in times of real or perceived threat to our very humanity. A self-described "poet, queer-dyke, hip-hop feminist, and womanist," she shared several deeply personal spoken-word poems to the great delight of the audience.

Closing remarks were delivered by SoCA co-chairs Elise McKenna Myers, PhD Candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences and James Martin, PhD Candidate in Biological Sciences, followed by a festive reception.

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Welcome Remarks by Dean Carlos J. Alonso

Good afternoon, and welcome to the second Students of Color Graduation of Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  

Welcome to all graduating students and their families, who have traversed with them the demanding academic journey whose end we mark and rejoice about today.  It is not mere words to say that, without your families, you could not have accomplished the achievements that we are celebrating today!

Last year’s first SoCA Graduation was a bittersweet event, tinged by the sadness of the then recent death of our beloved student, friend, and colleague Devon Wade. To recognize Devon’s life and achievements, the Dr. Devon T. Wade Mentorship and Service Award will be awarded this year for the first time at Convocation for PhD students this coming Sunday. This annual award will guarantee that Devon’s qualities and activism will be woven into the fabric of graduate student life at Columbia —something that I imagine would have pleased Devon immensely.

Today we celebrate the achievements of the GSAS students of color who have finished their course of study and who have fulfilled all of the requirements prescribed for the degrees in the academic programs in which they enrolled, be it the Master's or the doctoral degree.

But it bears underscoring that these students have done much more than just comply with stipulated requirements for their degrees.  We would like to think that the university is a great democratic leveler, the consummate example of a fully meritocratic institution in which effort is rewarded irrespective of who produces it and where rewards are finely attuned to achievement.  This is a myth that has been challenged to the core recently by the admissions scandals that have further eroded the standing of some of our most renowned universities and colleges.  But how could this mythology of meritocratic recognition be real, when the university does not exist outside society, even if one of its other founding myths is that of the university as separate realm from society.  The university cannot be immune to the problems that plague the social milieu, and we should not be surprised when the institution shows explicitly that it is indeed part of the world with all of its prejudices, assumptions, and injustices.

And yet, what attracts a great many of us to the university —and some of us have never been anywhere but in a university— is precisely that one of the core beliefs of the university as an institution is that it is a space where its members can demand more from one another and from themselves as a community than what would be the case out there, in the world at large.  The university is a continuous, persistent experiment in social transformation that holds itself to higher standards, even if time and again it fails to live in full consonance with those standards.  That is the attraction that the university represents for us and to us; the possibility of making a claim based on ideals of community and fairness that would not be universally accepted outside of the confines of the university.  Higher education is not immune to market forces, but it is also true that the modern university is one of the few remaining contexts in which the imperative to commodify everything is resisted on a daily basis.

But this is also why the idea of the commons, of the affirmation of a communitarian ideal is still routinely invoked in the university when it has lost almost all of its purchase in the public sphere.  The university belongs to the people within it, as well as to the alumni who graduate from it.  And since graduate school is the context in which the university reproduces itself as an institution, all of us who contribute to the graduate enterprise of the university decide with our daily acts what kind of future configuration the university will have.  It is hard work being a student, faculty, or administrator in a university, because we are all holding one another to a higher standard than what we could assume as a given in the world outside.

I mention all of this because this second Students of Color Graduation is an occasion of great joy, but it is a joy that arises from the undeniable fact that being a graduate student at Columbia is not a condition that is lived by all students as the same, interchangeable experience.  Not all students have their belonging in this institution questioned, their movements monitored at times, their achievements challenged, even if there is no outright malice involved.  This event is a recognition of those shared difficulties and obstacles as much as it is an acknowledgement of the shared satisfaction in persisting beyond those impediments.  But addressing continuously the existence of those obstacles is a challenge that we must all accept as a community, and overcome as a community.  Those of us who will remain here after you graduate celebrate your accomplishments today, and pledge to continue that work of creating a more just community after you have left.  My warmest congratulations to you all!

Events such as this one do not plan themselves spontaneously, of course.  I would like to end by recognizing the tireless effort of the SoCA committee that planned this celebration, whose effort I ask that we recognize now with a heartfelt round of applause.

Doctoral students writing their dissertations explain how the GSAS Writing Studio has provided essential services and support.

Valerie Bondura, PhD Candidate in Anthropology
GSAS Writing Studio Fellow 

“I facilitate one of the writing groups, which I’ve set up like a [writing] workshop. I’m also completing my own dissertation. We’re all doing this together, which is great. We meet each week for two hours. For the first hour, each week a different student shares what they’re writing—usually a chapter from their dissertation, or sometimes an article or conference paper they’re working on based on their dissertation. Then the rest of the group provides feedback, which is valuable because it’s an interdisciplinary group with students writing about radically different topics — theatre, ethnomusicology, Italian, and political science — so we have a fruitful intellectual environment. People come up with ideas that you would never think of because they are in different departments. It’s also helpful to read other dissertations while working on your own — to see how other writers manage their challenges. This process has helped my writing immeasurably. It’s a rare opportunity, and it is impactful. 

"For the second hour, we have silent coworking time. This is valuable because it forces all of us to reserve time in our schedule. We quietly work independently in the same room. It’s a great thing we can offer in the Studio—to progress as part of a community.” 

Danielle Drees, PhD Candidate in Theatre
Member of Valerie Bondura’s Writing Group

“I’m researching gender and labor in contemporary theatre and performance art; my dissertation focuses on plays and performances about sleep and how sleep onstage can help us understand relationships of care and interdependence. In my writing group, I workshopped a paper I’m presenting at a conference this summer. The feedback I received from my fellow dissertation writers helped move my draft presentation toward its goal of communicating clearly with an interdisciplinary and international audience. 

"The dissertation-writing group has been a valuable component of my writing process and has been one of the best resources for successful writing available outside my own department. Having worked as a writing teacher and tutor for the past decade, I know that research shows the value of sharing your writing regularly—no one learns to write well in isolation. My writing group is an incredible resource for support, accountability, critique, and collegiality. Everyone in it is so brilliant, funny, kind, and eager to learn new things. I look forward to seeing Valerie, Ira, Velia, and Niki every week.”

Franziska Landes, PhD Candidate in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program
Member of Emily Yao’s “Finish Line” Writing Group 

“The Finish Line meets every Tuesday for three hours. I find it very valuable to have a block of time on my calendar in which I know I will be doing nothing but writing and will be with other people writing, and that they are expecting me to be there. It’s not important to me if they’re in the same discipline. I actually like being with people from different disciplines to see how their writing goes. 

"We start with a check-in, which scaffolds the writing process; we each create a concrete goal and share it with one another, which makes us accountable. Then we all write for around two and a half hours, and then do another check-in at the end to share what we accomplished. The social norms and pressures are helpful — just knowing that everyone else is writing too and we are all pushing the dissertation along.”

Mike Ford, PhD Candidate in Historical Musicology
Member of Prospectus Writing Group

"In April, I defended my dissertation prospectus, entitled 'An Agile Musicology: Improvisation in Corporate Management and Lean Startups.' In this project, I use the sophisticated ways of understanding improvisation from the field of musicology and apply them improvisations in non-musical contexts like agile development teams and entrepreneurs. 

"The greatest benefit from the writing workshop was definitely the accountability for setting and meeting deadlines. It wasn’t that anyone would be mean if you didn’t do anything the past week, but knowing that I have to look my workshop mates in the eye compelled me to stay on track with my writing. They were also very generous with feedback on initial ideas and early drafts. Since [for each of my fellow workshop members] their expertise lies elsewhere, my writing had to be crystal-clear and persuasive to an audience outside my main field. The feedback that I received was very useful and ensured a logical flow of ideas throughout the document. 

"The Writing Studio’s wide range of services are certainly beneficial to graduate students, whether they provide hard skills like citation methods, or softer factors like mutual support from peers. Furthermore, the Writing Center facilitates collaborative work, which is so rare in most humanities disciplines. Finally, one should not discount the value of commiseration."

The core mission of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is to enable students to develop their intellectual strengths so that after they graduate, they can change and improve the world. At the 2019 Alumni Awards Dinner, GSAS recognized four alumni who have done just that — transforming popular culture, the social sciences, literature, and biotechnology — and one graduating student who is on her way to making her mark. This intimate and festive event was held on June 19, 2019, in the library of Columbia University’s Italian Academy. 

In his opening remarks, GSAS Dean Carlos J. Alonso said that the evening is an occasion “to recognize former students and now alumni of the school. … It is one of those moments in which we make explicit the achievements of our former students,” who are the public manifestation of the school’s mission.

Dean Alonso presented the first prize of the evening — the Campbell Award, which the Columbia Alumni Association gives each year to a graduating student who demonstrates exceptional leadership qualities. The Campbell Award was established in 2016 by the University Trustees and the Board of the Columbia Alumni Association and is named for the late Bill Campbell ’62CC ’64TC; Chair Emeritus, University Trustees; and CAA founder. The recipient of this year’s Campbell Award was Sarah Arkebauer (’19PhD, English and Comparative Literature). Ms. Arkebauer has served this year as the president of the Arts and Sciences Graduate Council (ASGC), which consists of student-elected representatives from over 70 doctoral and master’s programs in the Arts and Sciences. 

The master’s recipient of the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award was Amanda Seales (’05MA, American Studies). Ms. Seales is a comedian, actor, writer, and recording artist who uses humor as an engine for vital social change. Currently she has an active career on television as a series regular on HBO’s Insecure, and most recently she has guest-starred on ABC’s black-ish, released her debut stand-up special, I Be Knowin’, and created the live comedy game show Smart, Funny & Black. Ms. Seales was unable to attend the Alumni Awards Dinner because of a schedule change in her comedy tour.

Tracy Zwick, chair of the GSAS Alumni Board’s awards committee, presented the doctoral Outstanding Recent Alumni Award to Matthew Salganik (’07PhD, Sociology), Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Dr. Salganik has helped to bring social science into the digital age, enabling sociologists and other intellectuals to understand how the collection and processing of data about human behavior has transformed the social sciences. He is the author of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age; popular accounts of his work have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The New Yorker. Social influence is a key driver in the digital world, and Dr. Salganik was among the first to research the implications of this phenomenon. 

John Glusman (’78CC, ’80GSAS, English and Comparative Literature) was this year’s master’s recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement, which Dean Alonso presented. Mr. Glusman is the vice president and editor-in-chief of W.W. Norton & Company, and it is difficult to imagine what the literary world would look like without his editorial and publishing efforts. A veteran of nearly 40 years in the publication sector, he has championed and published the works of many important authors, including Nobel Prize winners Czesław Miłosz and Orhan Pamuk; National Book Award winner Richard Powers; National Book Critics Circle Award winners John Lahr and Jim Crace; Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Proulx, Ronan Farrow, David Rohde, and Laurie Garrett; and New York Times bestselling authors Neil deGrasse Tyson (GSAS ’92), Frans de Waal, Erik Larson, Ben Macintyre, David E. Sanger, Alice Hoffman, and Rosellen Brown. Mr. Glusman is also the author of Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-45.

“The roots of my wide range of interests date back directly to my studies of the humanities at Columbia College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,” said Mr. Glusman in his acceptance remarks. “Ultimately, the value of the humanities is to educate, illuminate, teach us to think critically, and ennoble us…to see the extraordinary in the ordinary… and the first steps in my lifelong journey to do just that began right here at Columbia, to which I owe my heartfelt thanks."

The doctoral recipient of the Award for Distinguished Achievement was George Yancopoulos (’86PhD, Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics) — a pioneer in biotech innovation and the cofounder, president, and chief scientific officer of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Because of his accomplishments — said Dean Alonso as he presented the award — people around the world benefit from lifesaving drugs. 

Over the last 30 years, Dr. Yancopoulos has worked with his longtime research partner, Dr. Leonard S. Schleifer, to build Regeneron into a leading biotech company that has invented and developed FDA-approved medicines for major diseases including cancer, vision-threatening eye diseases, heart disease, atopic dermatitis, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis. His team continues to lead biotech innovation, including through the Regeneron Genetics Center, a world-leading effort that has already sequenced the DNA of over 500,000 people. He has authored more than 350 papers, holds over 100 patents, and was the eleventh most-cited scientist in the world in the 1990s. Dr. Yancopoulos was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, was inducted into the Biotech Hall of Fame in 2014, and was named — along with Dr. Schleifer — the Ernst & Young’s 2016 Entrepreneur of the Year. 

The graduate school experience is a new one for students, Dr. Yancopoulos said in his acceptance remarks. “At every other school before graduate school, there is a curriculum; there is a path; and as long as you do what they tell you, you will be fine. [But at graduate school] there is no path; there is no curriculum; nobody tells you what to do.… With the help of your mentors and fellow students, you figure it out from scratch on your own.… Figuring it out is one of the greatest lessons you can apply to almost anything else you do in your life.” 

Dr. Yancopoulos continued, “For me, the graduate school experience was the most important part of my training in life. I owe everything to it. I am very much appreciative of this recognition, but more so to everything I learned and experienced here.”

“This celebration is important because it reminds us of the core mission of the graduate school – forming intellectually individuals who go out and challenge, change, and improve the world,” said Dean Alonso as he concluded the event. “This fundamental project is the reason for our existence, and I’m happy that you were able to join us tonight for this recognition.” 
 

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Applied Physics
Mandal, Jyotirmoy. Spectrally selective designs for optical and thermal regulation. Sponsor: Yuan Yang.

Architecture
Herman, Leslie. Building narratives of the Irish 'Colonial Period' in American architectural history. Sponsor: Reinhold Martin.

Astronomy
Emerick, Andrew. Stellar feedback and chemical evolution in dwarf galaxies. Sponsor: Greg Bryan.

Biological Sciences
Gutierrez-Vargas, Cristina. Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy studies of ribosomes with fragmented 28S rRNA. Sponsor: Joachim Frank.

Mostafavi, Hakhamanesh. Quantitative trait variation and adaptation in contemporary humans. Sponsor: Molly Przeworski.

Sun, Ruoxi. Using modern statistical/machine learning techniques to understand super resolution microscope and particle tracking. Sponsor: Liam Paninski.

Venkatasubramanian, Lalanti. Motor neurons and the path to synaptic specificity. Sponsor: Richard Mann.

Biomedical Engineering
Campi, Andrea. Mechanosensitive Ca2+ signaling of ex vivo osteocytes in aging and treatment. Sponsor: X. Edward Guo.

Feng, Xinyang. Large-scale neuroimaging in Alzheimer's disease and normal aging. Sponsors: Andrew Laine and Scott Small.

Vecchioni, Simon. Biological nanowires: Integration of the silver (I) base pair into DNA with nanotechnological and synthetic biological applications. Sponsor: Henry Hess.

Biomedical Informatics
Yahi, Alexandre. Simulating drug responses in laboratory test time series with deep generative modeling. Sponsor: Nicholas Tatonetti.

Biostatistics
Hu, Xinyu. Personalized policy learning with longitudinal health data. Sponsors: Ying-Kuen Cheung and Min Qian.

Wrobel, Julia. Funtional data analytics for wearable device and neuroscience data. Sponsor: Arthur Jeff Goldsmith.

Wu, Peng. Machine learning methods for personalized medicine using electronic health records. Sponsor: Yuanjia Wang.

Xie, Shanghong. Statistical methods for constructing heterogeneous biomarker networks. Sponsor: Yuanjia Wang.

Business
He, Pu. Essays on demand estimation and financial engineering. Sponsors: Paul Glasserman  and Fanyin Zheng.

Zheng, Minchen. Essays on institutional investors in corporate bond markets. Sponsor: Wei Jiang.

Cellular Physiology and Biophysics
Holsey, Michael. Density-dependent mu opioid receptor function revealed by single-molecule microscopy. Sponsor: Jonathan Javitch.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Brandt, Margot. Characterizing human regulatory genetic variation using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing. Sponsor: Tuuli Lappalainen.

Tan, Yong Zi. Solving challenging structures using single-particle cryogenic electron microscopy. Sponsors: Bridget Carragher and Filippo Mancia.

Williams, Linda. Mitofusin 2 maintains mouse hematopoietic stem cell quiescence by attenuating type I interferon signaling. Sponsor: Hans-Willem Snoeck.

Chemical Engineering
Pandey, Shashank. Contact charge electrophoresis: Cooperative dynamics of particle dispersions. Sponsor: Kyle Bishop.

Tackett, Brian. Development of transition metal carbides and nitrides as electrocatalysts for energy storage and CO2 conversion. Sponsor: Jingguang Chen.

Chemical Physics
Shee, James. Towards an accurate description of strongly correlated chemical systems with phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo-methodological advances and applications. Sponsors: Richard Friesner and David Reichman.

Chemistry
Bailey, Elizabeth. The mechanism of NusG-mediated transcription-translation coupling and the role of RacR in transcription regulation in Escherichia coli. Sponsor: Ruben Gonzalez.

Bailey, Nevette. Ribosomal dynamics during protein elongation. Sponsor: Ruben Gonzalez.

Ball, Melissa. Conjugated macrocycles in organic electronics. Sponsor: Colin Nuckolls.

Brisbois, James. Engineering responsive yeast systems using fungal G-protein-coupled receptors. Sponsor: Virginia Cornish.

Herbst, Ehud. Using saccharomyces cerevisiae for the biosynthesis of tetracyclines. Sponsor: Virginia Cornish.

Hull, Trevor. The effect of surface structure on the electronic properties of nanomaterials. Sponsor: Jonathan Owen.

Manz, Alyssa. Probing heterogeneous dynamics one molecule at a time: Temperature, weight, and size dependence of the dynamics of polystyrene near its glass transition temperature. Sponsor: Laura Kaufman.

Pun, Andrew. Exciton fission and fusion. Sponsor: Luis Campos.

Rauch, Michael. Main group metal hydride, alkyl and fluoride complexes: Towards CO2 functionalization with Earth abundant metals. Sponsor: Gerard Parkin.

Rreza, Iva. Quantum dot phosphors for solid state lighting. Sponsor: Jonathan Owen.

Strater, Zack. Stable cyclopropenium-based radical species. Sponsor: Tristan Lambert.

Tekle-Smith, Makeda. Synthetic innovations towards the total synthesis of highly potent linker-equipped analogs of spongistatin 1. Sponsor: James Leighton.

Voevodin, Anastasia. Design of functional materials from molecular building blocks. Sponsor: Xavier Roy.

Zhang, Boyuan. Integrating contorted aromatic molecules into molecular electronics and optoelectronic devices. Sponsor: Colin Nuckolls.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
dos Santos, Ketson Roberto. Stochastic dynamics and wavelets techniques for system response analysis and diagnostics: Diverse applications in structural and biomedical engineering. Sponsor: Ioannis Kougioumtzoglou.

Psaros Andriopoulos, Apostolos. Sparse representations and quadratic approximations in path integral techniques for stochastic response analysis of diverse systems/structures. Sponsor: Ioannis Kougioumtzoglou.

Yum, Sang Guk. Extreme storm surge return period prediction using tidal gauge data and estimation of damage to structures from storm-induced wind speed in South Korea. Sponsor: George Deodatis.

Classical Studies
Jewell, Evan. Youth and power: Roman performances of age and ageing from Plautus to Nero. Sponsor: Francesco de Angelis.

Computer Science
Farra, Noura. Cross-lingual and low-resource sentiment analysis. Sponsor: Kathleen McKeown.

Ouyang, Jessica. Adapting automatic summarization to new sources of information. Sponsor: Kathleen McKeown.

Tang, Yang. Making data storage efficient in the era of cloud computing. Sponsor: Junfeng Yang.

Townsend, Richard. Compiling irregular software to specialized hardware. Sponsor: Stephen Edwards.

Yang, Yudong. Improving the performance in end-networks. Sponsors: Vishal Misra and Daniel Rubenstein.

Yuan, Xinhao. Effective randomized concurrency testing with partial order methods. Sponsor: Junfeng Yang.

Earth and Environmental Engineering
Green, Julia. The role of the land surface in the global carbon and water cycles. Sponsor: Pierre Gentine.

Sinclair, Kenneth. Polarimetric retrievals of cloud droplet number concentration: Towards a better understanding of aersol-cloud interactions. Sponsor: Pierre Gentine.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Cunningham, Maxwell. Glacial limitation of tropical mountain height. Sponsor: Michael Kaplan.

de Obeso, Juan Carlos. Tracing alteration of ultramafic rocks in the Samail ophiolite. Sponsor: Peter Kelemen.

Haynes, Laura. The influence of paleo-seawater chemistry on foraminifera trace element proxies and their application to deep-time paleo-reconstructions. Sponsor: Bäerbel Hönisch.

Jong, Bor-Ting. Seasonality and regionality of ENSO teleconnections and impacts on North America. Sponsor: Mingfang Ting.

McKee, Darren. Intraseasonal circulation on the western Antarctic Peninsula shelf with implications for shelf-slope exchange. Sponsor: Douglas Martinson.

Mezuman, Keren. Fire and aerosol modeling for air quality and climate studies. Sponsor: Susanne Bauer.

Raymond, Colin. Regional geographies of extreme heat: New approaches and discoveries for their dry-bulb and wet-bulb flavors. Sponsor: Radley Horton.

Sousa, Daniel. Multiscale imaging of evapotranspiration. Sponsor: Christopher Small.

Tan, Yen Joe. Earthquake and volcanic processes at mid-ocean ridges. Sponsor: Maria Tolstoy.

Economics
Gibson, Christopher. Sequential games with positional uncertainty. Sponsor: Qingmin Liu.

Teachout, Matthieu. Essays on firms in developing countries. Sponsor: Jonas Hjort.

Ward, Jeremy. Essays in experimental economics. Sponsor: Alessandra Casella.

Electrical Engineering
Kim, Youngwan. Flexible optical imaging systems for diffuse optical spectroscopy and tomography in medical diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Sponsor: Andreas Hielscher.

Novack, Ari. Silicon photonic platforms and systems for high-speed communications. Sponsors: Keren Bergman and Alexander Gaeta.

Reiskarimian, Negar. Enabling fully-integrated magnetic-free non-reciprocal antenna interfaces by breaking Lorentz reciprocity: From physics to applications. Sponsor: Harish Krishnaswamy.

English and Comparative Literature
Akbari Shahmirzadi, Atefeh. Disorderly political imaginations: Comparative readings of Iranian and Caribbean fiction and poetry, 1960s-1980s. Sponsor: Brent Edwards.

Arkebauer, Sarah. The objectification of poetry: Textiles, maps, documents, and margins in the postwar American avant-garde. Sponsor: Eleanor Johnson.

Bloomfield, Gabriel. The poetry of interpretation: Exegetical lyric after the English Reformation. Sponsor: Molly Murray.

Tsygankova, Valeria. Matters of reform: Slavery, American literature, and the ontology of social change. Sponsors: Austin Graham and Ross Posnock.

Environmental Health Sciences
Bozack, Anne. Chronic arsenic exposure through drinking water: Examining nutritional influences of arsenic toxicity and arsenic-induced epigenetic dysregulation. Sponsor: Mary Gamble.

Carrion, Daniel. Household air pollution in Ghana: Examining infant upper respiratory microbial carriage and socio-ecological determinants of exposure. Sponsor: Darby Jack.

Epidemiology
Cheng, Wendy. Trajectories of hyperactivity and inattention symptom scores: An assessment of risk factors and cigarette smoking behaviors in late adolescence and young adulthood. Sponsor: Judith Jacobson.

Goldberg, Mandy. Early life origins of breast development and the implications for breast cancer risk. Sponsor: Mary Beth Terry.

Hayes-Larson, Eleanor. Towards a more policy-relevant epidemiology: Exploring assumptions about generalizing intervention effects. Sponsor: Sharon Schwartz.

French and Romance Philology
Gardner, Rose. The scepter and the cilice: The politics of repentance in sixteenth-century France (1572-1610). Sponsor: Pierre Force.

Genetics and Development
Stupnikov, Maria. Genetic regulation of pulmonary progenitor cell differentiation. Sponsor: Wellington Cardoso.

Yang, Ying. Airway basal cells in development, injury-repair, and homeostasis. Sponsor: Wellington Cardoso.

History
Cho, Eunsung. The thread of Juche: Vinalon, a figuration between science and society in North Korea, 1930-1970. Sponsors: Jungwon Kim and Eugenia Lean.

Gerien-Chen, James. Between empire and nation: Taiwan Sekimin and the making of Japanese empire in South China, 1895-1937. Sponsor: Carol Gluck.

Resnikoff, Jason. The misanthropic sublime: Automation and the meaning of work in the postwar United States. Sponsor: Casey Blake.

Shinnar, Shulamit. "The Best of Doctors Go to Hell": Rabbinic medical culture in late antiquity (200-600 C.E.). Sponsor: Beth Berkowitz.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Wurst, Daniella. Breaking the frames of the past: Photography and literature in contemporary Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Sponsor: Graciela Montaldo.

Mechanical Engineering
Batra, Richa. Particle robotics: A bio-inspired approach to robust and scalable robots composed of simple, loosely coupled components. Sponsor: Hod Lipson.

Chen, Siyuan. Causality inference between time series data and its applications. Sponsor: Hod Lipson.

Westervelt, Andrea. Biomechanical simulations of human pregnancy: Patient-specific finite element modeling. Sponsor: Kristin Myers.

Microbiology, Immunology, and Infection
Cvetkovski, Filip. Transcriptional control of tissue-resident memory T cell generation. Sponsor: Donna Farber.

Music
Bell, Eamonn. The computational attitude in music theory. Sponsor: Joseph Dubiel.

Goubert, Beatriz. Nymsuque: Contemporary musica indigenous sounds in the Colombian Andes. Sponsor: Ana María Ochoa.

Hannaford, Marc. One line, many views: Perspectives on music theory, composition, and improvisation through the work of Muhal Richard Abrams. Sponsor: Ellie Hisama.

Navon, Joshua. The making of modern musical expertise: German conservatories and music education, 1843-1933. Sponsor: Walter Frisch.

Music (DMA)
Behzadi, Ashkan. Love, crystal and stone. Sponsor: Alfred Lerdahl.

Neurobiology and Behavior
Platt, Maryann. Cellular mechanisms of neurovascular breakdown and neuronal dysfunction following recurrent group A streptococcus infections in mice. Sponsor: Dritan Agalliu.

Vignovich, Martin. Finding a neural nexus for odor and taste integration. Sponsor: Charles S. Zuker.

Nursing
Dorritie, Richard. Using health policy levers to improve quality and prevent infections. Sponsor: Patricia Stone.

Tark, Aluem. An evaluation of the physician orders for life-sustaining treatment (POLST) program. Sponsor: Patricia Stone.

Nutritional and Metabolic Biology
Cusimano, Frank. Engineered bacteria for the modulation of intestinal physiology, inflammation, and behavior along the microbiome-gut-brain axis. Sponsor: Harris Wang.

Operations Research
Escobar Santoro, Mauro. Security and statistics on power grids. Sponsor: Daniel Bienstock.

Hamilton, Michael. Pricing analysis and tools for emerging e-commerce technologies. Sponsor: Adam Elmachtoub.

Keshri, Suraj. Essays in basketball analytics. Sponsor: Garud Iyengar.

You, Wei. A robust queueing network analyzer based on indices of dispersion. Sponsor: Ward Whitt.

Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine
Qu, Xiaoyi. Microtubule dynamics in tau-dependent synaptotoxicity. Sponsor: Francesca Bartolini.

Philosophy
Arudpragasam, Anuk. Faith and habit: Emersonian themes in the ethics of James and Dewey. Sponsor: Philip Kitcher.

Finley, James. Logic in accounts of the potential and actual infinite. Sponsors: Haim Gaifman and Achille Varzi.

Ojea Quintana, Ignacio. Opinions and preferences as socially distributed attitudes. Sponsor: Philip Kitcher.

Physics
Han, Qiang. Electronic and lattice contributions to phase transitions in ruthenate perovskites and related compounds. Sponsor: Andrew Millis.

Petrashyk, Andriy. Advancements in gamma-ray astronomy with applications to the study of cosmic rays. Sponsor: Thomas Humensky.

Political Science
Lindsey, Summer. Women's security after war: Protection and punishment in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Sponsors: Macartan Humphreys and Jack Snyder.

Lin-Greenberg, Erik. Remote controlled restraint: The effect of remote warfighting technology on crisis escalation. Sponsor: Richard Betts.

Slavic Languages
Pinkham, Sophie. Pushkin for president: Russian literary cults in the transition from communism. Sponsor: Irina Reyfman.

Social Work
Bermudez, Laura. The intersection of financial agency, sexual decision-making power, and HIV risk among adolescent girls and young women in Zambia. Sponsor: Susan Witte.

Thom, Bridgette. Three papers on substance use prevention in sexual and gender minority youth. Sponsor: Barbara Simon.

Vélez-Grau, Carolina. Social connectedness, self-esteem, and suicidal ideation among Hispanic adolescents. Sponsor: Susan Witte.

Sociology
Coplin, Abigail. Domesticating biotechnological innovation: Science, market and the State in post-socialist China. Sponsor: Gil Eyal.

Sachs, Sarah. The algorithm at work: The reconfiguration of work and expertise in the making of similarity in art data. Sponsors: Gil Eyal and Joshua Whitford.

Valdez, Nicol. The elusive dream: Mexican Americans and the failed promise of America. Sponsor: Shamus Khan.

Sociomedical Sciences
Frazer, Melanie. Structural stigma, policy environment and tobacco, alcohol and marijuana use among sexual minority youth. Sponsor: Mark Hatzenbuehler.

Parker, Caroline. Superfluous life, mechanisms of abeyance, and the cultivation of personhood in Puerto Rican therapeutic communities for addiction. Sponsor: Jennifer Hirsch.

Statistics
Jones, Timothy. Scalable inference of Bayesian network models. Sponsor: Tian Zheng.

Stebegg, Florian. Linear constraints in optimal transport. Sponsor: Marcel Nutz.

Wang, Shuaiwen. High-dimensional asymptotics: New insights and methods. Sponsor: Arian Maleki.

Yousuf, Kashif. Essays on high dimensional times series analysis. Sponsor: Yang Feng.

Sustainable Development
Benatiya Andaloussi, Mehdi. Clearing the air: Essays on the economics of air pollution. Sponsor: Wolfram Schlenker.

TC / Applied Behavior Analysis
Hotchkiss, Rebecca. Parametric analyses of protocols utilized to induce verbal behavioral cusps and capabilities. Sponsor: Daniel Fienup.

TC / Clinical Psychology
Lau, Elsa. Content analysis of spiritual life in contemporary USA, India, and China. Sponsor: Lisa J. Miller.

TC / Educational Leadership
Smith, Phillip. Exploring the leadership of black male principals and heads of schools: A phenomenological study. Sponsor: Sonya Horsford.

TC / English Education
Bruno, Gregory. Policy literacy and academic remediation: Fields of power in developmental English and the community college. Sponsor: Robert Fecho.

Thomas, Dorell. Beyond epistemological drama: The case of a composition class and federal dollars. Sponsor: Janet Miller.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Anthropology
Alamo Bryan, Marina. The bodies and the archive: Bureaucratization of violence and communal exhumation in Mexico.

Jain, Sarandha. Fluvial government and liquid infrastructure: Tracking petroleum in India.

Kalm, Gustav. Governing through property and contract: The administrative power of international investment protection.

Reinhart, Natalie. Agency, testimony, and uncontrollable girls in Jamaica.

Romero Dianderas, Eduardo Javier. Inscribing forests: Engineers, technical information and the epistemic politics of forest bureaucracies in the Peruvian Amazon.

Schirrer, Anna. Reparative reason: Redress and the politics of land claims in Guyana.

Taylor, Howard. Post-colonial Germany? 'Coming to terms' with Namibia in the federal republic.

Art History and Archaeology
Miller, Caitlin. On Renaissance attributes (1440-1560).

Biomedical Engineering
Golman, Mikhail. Tendon-to-bone attachment: Mechanisms of mechanical damage to failure.

Melki, Lea. Electromechanical wave imaging in the clinic: Localization of atrial and ventricular arrhythmias and quantification of cardiac resynchronization therapy response.

Biomedical Informatics
Feller, Daniel. Leveraging computational methods to support management of large panels of chronic disease patients.

Hsieh, Alexander. Detection of post-zygotic mosaicism in blood and implications for congenital heart disease (CHD).

Business
Dashmiz, Shayan. Central bank and financial markets.

Liu, Zaijia. Cognitive, emotional, and visceral responses to norm violations: The differential role of internalization in moral and conventional domains.

Tae Seok, Oh. The psychology of fun.

Tomunen, Tuomas. Essays on asset pricing.

Computer Science
Akinola, Iretiayo. Workspace aware grasping.

Lecuyer, Mathias. Security, privacy, and transparency guarantees for machine learning systems.

Lim, Jin Tack. The design, implementation, and evaluation of software and architectural support for nested virtualization on modern architectures.

Winn, Olivia. Understanding visual language in a multilingual context.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Peltier, Carly. Precise dating of glaciations in Patagonia.

Tian, Xiaochuan. Magmatism and tectonics at large igneous provinces, rifts and mid-ocean ridges.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Hauk, Michelle. Dwelling with water: How water technology revolutionized the Japanese home, 1800-2000.

Qian, Qichen. The Lhasan Empire (1642-1750).

Shakya, Riga. Inscribing empire: The making of Sino-Tibetan relations (1720-1820).

Wang, Shih-han. Power formation in the lower Yangzi River region during the late Bronze Age (ca. 1700-473 BC).

Economics
Pereira, Gustavo Antonio. Essays on fiscal policy and informality.

French and Romance Philology
Raichlen, Katherine. National and local belonging: Representations of twentieth-century Jewish migration to France.

History
Gao, Hong Deng. Forging connections: Chinese Americans and health activism in New York City, 1943-1985.

Glickman, Susannah. Quantum futurism.

Plasek, Aaron. Genealogies of machine learning, 1948-2015.

Ryan, Thomas. The prose of South Korean counterinsurgency: War, resettlement, and development in Korea and Vietnam, 1952-1973.

Italian
Mazzi, Beatrice. Figures of the witness in contemporary Italian literature and cinema.

Mecozzi, Lorenzo. The retrospective novel, or the novel of the self.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Alberdi, Begoña. Industria, consumo y género: La estetización de la cocina en los recetarios del Cono Sur (1890-1940).

Basile, Nicole. Recipes in many hands: Medicine, society, and recetarios in early modern Spain.

Becerra, Felipe. Publicar sin escribir: Proyectos editoriales como práctica aut oral en América Latina (1963-1993).

Calles Izquierdo, Jennifer. Cuerpos disidentes: Arte latinoamericano de los años 90.

Justel Vicente, Pablo. Traslaciones de reliquias en la segunda mitad del siglo XVI: memoria cristiana, monarquía y representaciones festivas.

Materials Science and Engineering
Yang, Long. Joint neutron and x-ray pair distribution function analysis on quantum materials - from software to experiments.

Mechanical Engineering
Blutinger, Jonathan. Robotics, additive manufacturing, food technology.

Kim, Bumho. Synthesis and characterization of high-quality transition metal dichalcogenides.

Wang, Da. Inducing superconductivity in two-dimensional materials.

Music
Momii, Toru. Rethinking transpacific boundaries: Analyzing intercultural performance in contemporary Japanese music.

Psychology
Firestein, Morgan. The role of the human placenta in regulating fetal hormone exposure and implications for child neurobehavior.

Forster, Hale. Saving money or saving energy? Decision architecture, boundary conditions, and mechanisms of energy saving decisions.

Lee, Won. Behavioral, neurobiological and physiological plasticity of mice living in social hierarchies.

Sisco, Matthew. Examining the effects of weather experiences on climate change mitigation behavior.

Tedeschi, Ellen. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge: Understanding the relationship between curiosity, exploration and reward.

Religion
Mehdi, Zehra. The other Indians: Gendered Muslim subjects in the wake of Hindu-nationalism.

Tackes, John. Care products and India's religious market.

Slavic Languages
Haxhi, Tomi. Present perfect: Ideal (non) human forms in Soviet and post-Soviet speculative fiction.

Hooyman, Ben. Grotesque modernism in Russian literature of the 1900s-1930s.

Tereshchenko, Serhii. New words for the new world: The role of science fiction in the rise of scientific society (in the period of 1953 - 1974).

Sociology
Frazier, Terrell. Innovation at the intersection: Specifying the dynamics of tactical innovation within heterogeneous activist networks.

Urban Planning
Dublin, Jenna. Neighborhood change and the adaptive reuse of historic district policy.

Maaoui, Magda. Bending the law? Discretion and exclusion in inclusionary zoning. A comparison of the New York and grand Paris cases