DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Biological Sciences
DeLay, Michael. A theory of water-structure sensation in the bacterial lifecycle. Sponsor: Ozgur Sahin.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Janiszewski, Helen. New insights on the structure of the cascadia subduction zone from amphibious seismic data. Sponsor: James Gaherty.

Mechanical Engineering
Kang, Jiyeon. Robotic functional gait rehabilitation with tethered pelvic assist device. Sponsor: Sunil Agrawal.

Religion
Sippy, Shana. Diasporic desires: Making Hindus and the cultivation of longing. Sponsor: John Hawley.

Sociology
Robinson, Joan. Body of knowledge, technology and control on the maternal-fetal frontier. Sponsor: David Stark.

TC / English Education
Pindyck, Maya. Inheriting the future and the past of schooling: Moving back towards pedagogies of poetic inquiry. Sponsor: Janet Miller.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

APAM: Applied Matthematics
Tao, Yunzhe. Nonlocal Neumann volume-constrained problems and asymptotically compatible numerical approximations.

Biomedical Engineering
Jin, Weiyang. Three-dimensional CD4+ T cell mechanosensing.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Xu, Lei. Centrifuge modeling of gabion facing geosynthetic reinforced soil retaining walls.

English and Comparative Literature
Gear, Nolan. A moviegoer's modernism.

Larson-Xu, Martin. Counter production: Dispersion, dedifferentiation, and total mediation in contemporary poetry.

History
Sayantani, Mukherjee. Between two worlds: Qing China, British India and the technologies of empire in Tibet in the nineteenth century.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Valdovinos, Roberto. Myths of origin: Ixtlilxochitl and chimalpahin, seventeenth-century mestizo historians.

Religion
Arnold, Edward. Lama Tsongkhapa: Reconfiguring the socio-religious field of Tibetan Buddhism and Buddhist Tibet.

Theatre
Kuntz, Emily. Transformed within to transform without: The converted saint play in medieval and early modern drama.

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences covers the cost of upgraded PawPrint printing quotas for doctoral students in Arts and Sciences programs in their funding-eligible years.

Students who are appointed to a student officer position (e.g., teaching fellow, research fellow, graduate research assistant) will automatically receive the upgrade once their departmental administrator processes their hiring paperwork in the university’s human resources system.

Students who are not appointed as student officers must request the upgrade here. Students appointed as student officers should not submit this form (see above).

Where did you grow up? 
Lucknow and Delhi, India.

What drew you to your field? 
I am trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and became interested in questions of religion, violence, and political identity as I was practicing in India. I was interested in how the political influences the psychological. The experience of being Muslim in a country torn by Partition always positioned religion as the parenthesis to political identity. To be Muslim in India in the wake of rampant communal riots made me wonder if religion and politics were only “outside” and did not determine the way we lived as psychic political subjects.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I am researching religious and political violence, and the role it plays in forming who we are.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
The opportunity to take courses in departments other than your own. I love “hopping across streams” and drawing convergences across disciplines. The fact that GSAS allows that is great not only because it exposes you to other ideas, but also because it creates an academic culture that is more inclusive and less isolating. It allows you to talk through disciplines and more important, to listen to people who don't “speak your language” but are discussing similar ideas.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
The most important resource has been Columbia’s community of teachers and students, who are a pulsating force of thought. I am not just a cowering student whose role is to finish credits, submit assignments, and write some papers: I feel alive and aware, and am part of a community that has a voice and is not afraid to raise it.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
It’s not a misconception, but elucidating that psychoanalysis and the political converge is tough. This is because people believe that psychoanalysis is personal, and that the political is bereft of the personal. I hope I can make people think about what they consider a given. I want people to think, for example, about the psychoanalytic impact of the recent immigration ban—on the ways they think about themselves and about others around them. Similarly, I want people to ponder whether there could be something psychoanalytic underlying Trump’s victory. I do not have answers, but I do have ways of thinking about these questions. This is what I offer through my work.

Who are your favorite writers?
I have a never-ending list, but some names off the top of my head: Adam Phillips, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Donald Winnicott, Masud Khan, Gabriel García Márquez, Saadat Hasan Manto, Roland Barthes, Albert Camus, and Ashis Nandy.

Whom in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Vamik Volkan. His work is precisely on the cusp of political and psychoanalytical. I am big fan of Professor Gil Anidjar; his writing on Arabs and Jews is essential to the way one thinks about political identity in psychoanalytic sensibility. Professors Katherine Ewing, Joseph Massad, and Stefania Pandolfo are crucial in the field, for their writings and arguments stir up the comfortable assumption that Islam and psychoanalysis are antagonistic to each other. I feel extremely fortunate to be their student.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
The Hungarian Pastry Shop, for its bakery and for its ambiance. I am a regular at Macaron Parlour on Columbus Avenue—I love their cheddar chipotle scones. But I will confess that lamb and rice from the halal carts around campus is sometimes gratifying!

When students enroll at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) at Columbia University, one of the country’s oldest and most distinguished graduate schools, they join a community of scholars united in its pursuit of intellectual excellence. 

We aim to ensure that our master’s and doctoral candidates have the best possible experience as learners, and to prepare them for careers in and outside of academia. GSAS promotes the integration of graduate students into the research and pedagogical enterprises of the university, oversees all aspects of graduate education in the departments of the Arts and Sciences, and establishes policies and standards that define optimal practices in doctoral programs throughout the university.

Our students, more than half of whom come to study at Columbia from overseas, bring with them an array of identities that shape and expand our capacity for living, learning, and leading in a pluralistic society. Supporting a diverse and inclusive academic environment is essential to maintaining the intellectual excellence and rigor that characterize the Graduate School.

GSAS is also the chief advocate for Columbia's graduate students, and supports areas of student life that are not strictly academic but that are nevertheless critical to a successful graduate experience. We work closely with the Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC) and other university offices to promote the interests of graduate students in areas such as financial aid, health care, counseling, and housing.

Membership in the GSAS community continues beyond graduation. Our alumni network comprises more than 40,000 individuals worldwide, who are connected by their shared Columbia graduate experience. Our alumni play an integral role in sustaining the well-being of our current students, through their giving generously to GSAS and their sharing of their professional experiences and insights.

The Graduate School, in short, aims to provide our students with an education that will allow them to thrive academically, professionally, and personally both during their sojourn with us and afterward, when they pursue their various professional aspirations.

Sincerely,

Carlos J. Alonso, Dean
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Vice President for Graduate Education
Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor in the Humanities

Where did you grow up? 
West Hartford, CT.

What drew you to your field? 
I have two great passions in life: literature and music. The opportunity to explore their intersection was irresistible. Columbia's Center for Jazz Studies has been instrumental in expanding interdisciplinarity for jazz studies and in the academy at large. Every day, I’m thrilled to be a part of that. It’s a huge bonus that outside of my research, I have been able to bring my baritone saxophone to campus and play in the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I’m exploring how novelists adapted jazz rhythm for a prose medium. James Baldwin put it this way: “I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound.” I have a strong feeling that he modeled his prose on jazz innovators he loved—Miles Davis or Billie Holiday—not just as a source of inspiration, but at the level of literary form down to the sentence. Others did as well: the Harlem Renaissance novelist-musician Rudolph Fisher, bestselling novelist Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, and Amiri Baraka. Being attuned to this connection across media will enliven the resonances of how these writers’ sense of syncopation helped them do what Albert Murray described as improvising through the “briar patch” of life.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
The people. My advisors here care so deeply about pedagogy and are so munificent in how they mentor their advisees, I’m still not entirely sure when (and how) they do their own scholarship. Yet they are without a doubt some of the top scholars in their field. The graduate students in my department are equally committed to their students, so we all pay it forward. But many of them also have para-academic lives as poets, playwrights, novelists, podcast hosts, and community organizers. 

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
I don’t know how I got by without access to the Columbia Libraries and the myriad databases at our fingertips.

Who are your favorite writers?
Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Lou Reed.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Kurt Vonnegut’s Bokonon.

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Robert O’Meally, Krin Gabbard, Farah Griffin, and Brent Edwards. And I get to work with all of them!

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
A book.

What music have you been listening to lately?
East Broadway Run Down by Sonny Rollins. I’m currently writing a biography of Rollins under contract for Da Capo Press.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
Maison Harlem.

Read about recent achievements of GSAS students:

• Holly Fuong, PhD student in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, won first prize for poster contribution at the annual Northeastern Evolutionary Primatology Conference. 
• Soil testing conducted in Greenpoint, Brooklyn by Franziska Landes, PhD candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences, was cited in a Reuters article about lead poisoning in New York City.
• Zehra Mehdi, doctoral student in Religion, published two articles and one book review in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.
• Tzu-Chi Ou, PhD candidate in Anthropology, was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article about mass evictions in Beijing, China.
• Sarah Pearson, PhD candidate in Astronomy, won the 2017 Women in Physics Prize from the Niehls Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, in recognition of her research and public outreach efforts.
• An article by Religion PhD candidate Elizabeth Tinsleywas published in the Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University. She also was awarded a six-month fellowship by The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science to study works in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art related to premodern Japanese Buddhist astrology and astronomy.

Do you have news to share? Write to us at gsas-communications [at] columbia.edu.

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Biomedical Informatics
Lee, Albert. Characterizing immune responses to Marburg virus infection in animal hosts using transcriptomic analysis. Sponsor: Raul Rabadan.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Echelman, Daniel. Mechanics of gram-positive bacterial cell adhesion. Sponsor: Julio Fernandez.

Chemical Engineering
Ren, Jianyi. Design and synthesis of novel cleavable fluorescent nucleotide reversible terminators using disulfide linkers for DNA sequencing by synthesis. Sponsor: Jingyue Ju.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Shetty, Nandan. NYC's green infrastructure: Impacts on nutrient cycling and improvements in performance. Sponsor: Patricia Culligan.

Electrical Engineering
Tsai, Allan. Advanced techniques for high-throughput cellular communications. Sponsor: Xiaodong Wang.

Xu, Yang. Switched-capacitor RF receivers for high interferer tolerance. Sponsor: Peter Kinget.

Environmental Health Sciences
Cowell, Whitney. An investigation of neuroendocrine disrupting flame retardants and biomarkers of psychosocial stress. Sponsor: Julie Herbstman.

Epidemiology
Cohen, Bevin. Healthcare-associated infections and exposure to infected or colonized concurrent roommates and prior bed occupants. Sponsor: Elaine Larson.

Mathematics
Yan, Minghan. Topics in Walsh semimartingales and diffusions: Construction, stochastic calculus, and control. Sponsor: Ioannis Karatzas.

Mechanical Engineering
Kang, Jiyeon. Robotic functional gait rehabilitation with tethered pelvic assist device. Sponsor: Sunil Agrawal.

Neurobiology and Behavior
Lindsay, Grace. Modeling the impact of internal state on sensory processing. Sponsor: Kenneth Miller.

Nursing
Osakwe, Zainab. UTI - related hospitalization among elderly home healthcare patients. Sponsor: Jingjing Shang.

Pharmacology and Molecular Signaling
Cho, Youngjin. Development of a single molecule electronic SNP assay using polymer tagged nucleotides. Sponsor: Jingyue Ju.

Physics
Kim, Suk Hyun. Probing transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers and heterostructures by polarization-resolved spectroscopy. Sponsor: Tony Heinz.

Sociology
Dujisin, Zoltan. Disciplining post-communist remembrance: from politics of memory to the emergence of a mnemonic field. Sponsor: Gil Eyal.

Sustainable Development
McCarney, Geoffrey. Considering the interface of climate and productive natural resource use. Sponsor: Geoffrey Heal.

TC / Cognitive Studies in Education
Shi, Zhongqi. Why is it important for students and teachers to share goals? Sponsor: Xiaodong Lin.

TC / Educational Policy
Wallenstein, Jessica. Investing in school learning. Sponsor: Douglas Ready.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Biomedical Engineering
Dang, Alex. Electrospun antibody-functionalized poly(dimethylsiloxane) based meshes for improved T cell expansion.

Guo, Jia. Adaptation and optimization of MRI techniques in research of mouse models.

Shaik, Mohammed. Evaluating endothelial function during neurovascular coupling in awake behaving mice using advanced optical imaging technologies.

Classics
Simone, Caleb. Enchanted bodies: Kinesthesia, affect, and aesthetics in Greek aulos performance.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Anderson, Weston. ENSO life cycles and global food security.

English and Comparative Literature
Peh, Li Qi. The ecopoetics of imperialism: Reading the rhythms of the long eighteenth century.

Psychology
Schneider, Claudia. Motivating pro-social behavior to address real-world social issues: Investigating the potential of anticipated emotions and values-affirmation.

Turetsky, Kate. How students' social networks respond to stress and shape key academic outcomes: A mixed methods analysis.

Sociology
Owens, Lisa. The dispersion of labeling and the social construction of deviance under intensive surveillance.

Where did you grow up? 
Brooklyn, NY.

What drew you to your field?
It started with love. I had always enjoyed Latin and Greek more than anything else I studied in high school and college, but knew I was going to law school and put them out of my mind. As I became more advanced as an undergraduate, I started to realize that I thought about law and legal history differently than most classicists, and that I could study something I really loved while also making a difference in my field. That’s when I decided to pursue two graduate degrees: a JD at Yale, and a PhD in Classical Studies at Columbia.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I’m studying how Roman emperors in the early third century CE used law to market themselves, essentially—how law worked as a part of these emperors’ broader representational or self-legitimating strategies.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
The collegiality. The faculty here are so interested in encouraging the development of students, even if those students are in a different department. I’ve never felt anything less than supported in conducting interdisciplinary work.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
My fellow students, by far. My colleagues here are hilarious, brilliant, and kind. They have helped me through the hardest parts of my time here, sharpening my ideas as much over drinks as they do in the library.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct? People in the ancient world weren’t perfect, and they didn’t wander around wearing bright white clothes and laurel crowns talking about democracy. The civilization I study was dirty and violent and smelled atrocious. Also: There were people of color in Roman Britain.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
An article I wrote in law school (on stereotyping and employment discrimination) was cited by a federal court of appeals. I was quoted in the same opinion as Marlo Thomas.

Who are your favorite writers?
Alice Munro, Marisha Pessl, Donna Tartt, and Ronald Syme.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Jane Gloriana Villanueva.

Who are your heroes in real life?
Nicholas Katzenbach, Hillary Clinton, and my mother.

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Mary Beard. She's brilliant, obviously, but what I really admire is how committed she is to engaging with the world as a public scholar, and the level of thought she puts into her role as the face of Roman history. If I had to put up with half of what she puts up with, I'd be hiding in a cupboard somewhere.

What music have you been listening to lately?
Writing this, I’m listening to “Don't Leave Me This Way” by Teddy Pendergrass. Otherwise, lots of Goldfrapp, Angel Olsen, Björk, and My Bloody Valentine.

What is your favorite blog or website?
zacharyherz.com, of course!

It is with profound sadness that I share the death of Devon Wade, a doctoral candidate in Sociology, and a beloved colleague and friend to the GSAS community.

Informed by his own upbringing in a low-income Houston neighborhood plagued by violence, Devon dedicated himself to researching the understanding of inequality along racial and class lines. His work revealed the collateral consequences that incarceration has on the family—and specifically, the impact that this stigma has on the children involved. In recognition of his outstanding academic achievement, Devon received several prestigious awards, including the Truman Scholarship, the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Fellowship, and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellowship.

Devon also worked closely with the Graduate School to ensure that diversity was always at the forefront of our agenda. He was a founding member of the Students of Color Alliance (SoCA), served as a student representative on the search committee that led to the hiring of the Dean of Academic Diversity in GSAS, and was an active member of our Summer Research Program as a graduate student mentor. Devon’s impact was felt far beyond Columbia: He traveled across the US to deliver motivational and keynote addresses at prisons, and mentored the children of incarcerated parents through No More Victims, a not-for-profit organization in Houston.

I join the GSAS and Columbia communities in mourning this heartbreaking loss, and extend my condolences to Devon’s family and friends.

Sadly,

Carlos J. Alonso, Dean
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Memorial Funds

• To honor Devon’s life and to continue his legacy of advocacy, generosity, and mentorship, a fund has been established in his name to support No More Victims. Learn more here.
• Donations are being accepted to assist Devon’s family with funeral arrangements. Click here contribute.

Additional plans to honor Devon’s life and work will be added to this page as they are announced.

Where did you grow up?
Hiroshima, Japan.

What drew you to your field? 
In Hiroshima, I was surrounded by the oral testimonies of hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings. Through them, I learned to value and respect peace, and became determined to dedicate my career to preserving their memories for future generations. I became a TV journalist and conducted many interviews, but faced some challenges: What should I ask? How should the interviews be archived? Who was the intended audience? Therefore, it was natural for me to study oral history at Columbia University, which has the first and only program of its kind in the United States.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I conduct long interviews with survivors of World War II, and examine the interviews to distinguish the meanings of the events for the interviewees, which include not only what the interviewees did, but also what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think of what they did. I found oral history interviews different from other interviews that I had conducted. I am currently developing a smartphone app to help those outside the field to try doing oral history interviews.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
I appreciate the great events held at Columbia. For instance, I am currently participating in talks with Professor Carol Gluck about the public memory of World War II in East Asia and elsewhere. It has been a great way to learn about war memories of Japan and to understand other nations’ perspectives on them. Being such an international school, Columbia allows me to exchange ideas with many students from a variety of nations.

Who are your favorite writers?
Haruki Murakami and Svetlana Alexievich.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Totoro, from Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro.

Who are your heroes in real life?
My beloved cats: Monet and Manet.

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Mary Marshall Clark and Alessandro Portelli.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
A supercomputer that can read, write, and finish assignments in a second.

What music have you been listening to lately?
Ryuichi Sakamoto.

What is your favorite blog or website?
Videonews.com.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
The Hungarian Pastry Shop.

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Anthropology
Lo, Hsiu-ju. Crossing rivers and lakes: The art of everyday life in contemporary China. Sponsor: Michael Taussig.

Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics
Cosmanescu, Filip. Structural and biophysical studies of the drosphila Dpr and DIP protein families. Sponsor: Lawrence Shapiro.

Biomedical Engineering
Ma, Stephen. Spatiotemporal control of human cardiac tissue through optogenetics. Sponsor: Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic.

Biomedical Informatics
Woollen, Janet. A visual approach to improving the experience of biomedical information for vulnerable individuals. Sponsor: Suzanne Bakken.

Biostatistics
Backenroth, Daniel. Methods in functioning data analysis and functional genomics. Sponsor: Arthur Jeff Goldsmith.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Echelman, Daniel. Mechanics of gram-positive bacterial cell adhesion. Sponsor: Julio Fernandez.

Wang, Etienne. Oncostatin M promotes quiescence in hair follicle stem cells via JAK-STAT5 signaling. Sponsor: Angela M. Christiano.

Fan, Jason. Beta cell dedifferentiation and endogenous generation of gut insulin-producing cells. Sponsor: Domenico Accili.

Kumar, Brahma. Identification and characterization of tissue-resident memory T cells in humans. Sponsor: Donna Farber.

Kratchmarov, Radomir. Metabolism regulates cell fate in lymphocytes and progenitor cells. Sponsor: Steve Reiner.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics

He, Xin. Fracture mechanics and failure of multilayered materials and structures. Sponsor: Huiming Yin.

Computer Science
Hadfield, Stuart. Quantum algorithms for scientific computing and approximate optimization. Sponsor: Anargyros Papageorgiou.

Su, Fang-hsiang. Uncovering features in behaviorally similar programs. Sponsor: Gail Kaiser.

May, Avner. Kernel approximation methods for speech recognition. Sponsor: Michael Collins.

Earth and Environmental Engineering
Lemordant, Léo. Interactions between vegetation and water cycle in the context of rising atmosphere C02: Processes and impacts on extreme temperature. Sponsor: Pierre Gentine.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Liu, Peng. The way of darkness and light: Daoist divine women in pre-modern Chinese fiction. Sponsor: Wei Shang.

Zhang, Jing. Small words, weighty matters: Gossip, politics, and libel in early Republican China, 1916-1926. Sponsor: Eugenia Lean.

Electrical Engineering
Ou Yang, Tai-Hsien. Attractor meta-features and their application on biomolecular data analysis. Sponsor: Dimitris Anastassiou.

Environmental Health Sciences
Cowell, Whitney. An investigation of neuroendocrine disrupting flame retardants and biomarkers of psychosocial stress. Sponsor: Julie Herbstman.

Germanic Languages
Lipkin, Michael. Ways of living: An ethical realism in the prose of Gottfried Keller. Sponsor: Dorothea von Mücke.

Greene, Alyssa. Children of a former future: Writing the child in cold war and post-cold war German-language literature. Sponsor: Andreas Huyssen.

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Dardir, Ahmed. Licentious topographies: Space and the traumas of colonial subjectivity in modern Egypt. Sponsor: Joseph Massad.

Neurobiology and Behavior
Lindsay, Grace. Modeling the impact of internal state on sensory processing. Sponsor: Kenneth Miller.

Pharmacology and Molecular Signaling
Ahmed, Roshan. The role of fatty acid synthesis and scavenging in pancreatic cancer growth and maintenance. Sponsor: Kenneth P. Olive.

Physics
Caratelli, David. Study of electromagnetic interactions in the microBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber. Sponsor: Michael Shaevitz.

Thiyagarajan, Sathish. Cell wall growth regulation and maintenance of stability in actomyosin structures in cells. Sponsor: Ozgur Sahin.

Wang, Shuyuan. Mathematically modeling the mechanics of cell division. Sponsor: Ozgur Sahin.

Wang, Runzhi. Dynamical mean-field theory on pyrochlore iridates: A study of electron interaction and spin-orbit coupling. Sponsor: Andrew Millis.

Sociology
Rule, Alix. Standpoints on psychiatic deinstituionalizaion. Sponsor: Peter Bearman.

Sustainable Development
McCarney, Geoffrey. Considering the interface of climate and productive natural resource use. Sponsor: Geoffrey Heal.

TC / Applied Behavioral Analysis
Syed, Noor. Conditioned seeing as related to bidirectional naming repertoires for unfamiliar stimuli with third-through firth-grade student diagnosed with autism. Sponsor: Douglas Greer.

Lanter, Alexandria. Is conditioned reinforcement by observation a verbal behavior developmental cusp? Sponsor: Jessica Dudek.

TC / Clinical Psychology
Yoskowitz, Nicole. Client engagement in psychotherapy: The roles of client and beginning therapist attachment styles. Sponsor: Helen Verdeli.

TC / Cognitive Studies in Education
Zhao, Jing. Gesture and body movements for learning. Sponsor: John Black.

TC / Comparative and International Education
Landis, Deborah. Examining education and violence among girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sponsor: Susan Garnett Russell.

TC / English Education
Wolfsdorf, Adam. Literature at the dawn of trauma consciousness. Sponsor: Ruth Vinz.

Yoo, Hyun Joo. Traumatized girlhood as the uncanny and embodied writing. Sponsor: Janet Miller.

TC / Measurement and Evaluation
Nsowaa, Bright. The ordered latent transition analysis model for the measurement of learning. Sponsor: Matthew Johnson.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Applied Physics
Taylor, Jeffrey. Thin film diffusion barriers for high-temperature pressure sensors.

Art History and Archaeology
Engler, Rachel. Adolphe Appia's time and space.

Floyd, Tiffany. Dreams of ancient times: Antiquity, archaeology, and the struggle for contemporaneity in Modern Iraqui art.

Kodzhabasheva, Ani. Architecture at the intersection of empires: Building a Balkan nation between the Ottoman, tsarist, and Austro-Hungarian domains, 1864-1912.

Ralston, Daniel. Modernism margins: Fortury, Manet, and Spanish paintings in Paris in the later nineteenth century.

Biomedical Engineering
Suryaprakash, Smruthi. Engineering mesenchymal stem cells for enhanced cancer therapy.

Biomedical Informatics
McKillop, Mollie. Phenotyping enigmatic diseases from patient-generated data.

Nakikj, Drashko. Investigating and supporting sensemaking within online health communities.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Shetty, Nandan. NYC's green infrastructure: Impacts on nutrient cycling and improvements in performance.

Computer Science
Hadfield, Stuart. Quantum algorithms for scientific computing and approximate optimization.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Uchida, Takaya. Seasonality of (sub)mesoscale tubulence in the Southern Ocean and its impact on primary production.

English and Comparative Literature
Fernandez, Matthew. Reforming reform: Political satire and the American novel during the 1880's.

History
Halevy, Dotan. Gaza 1840-1950: A history of a Palestinian borderland.

Heinford, Kellen. "Slavery is Slavery": Early American mythmaking and the invention of the free state.

Mechanical Engineering
Song, Bing. Learning by repetitions in practice to track a finite-time trajectory with high accuracy.

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Ambler, Catherine. Crafting poets: The development of the Tazkira in Transoxiana.

El Houdaiby, Ibrahim. A corporate route: The Suez Canal Company as government.

Ghoshal, Sayori. Counting in and after the colony: The formation of 'religious minority' in modern India.

Hawas, Sarah. Lebanon electric: Engineering intensity.

Mukherjee, Uponita. A case for criminal detection: Science, stories and the law of evidence in British Bengal, 1850-1930.

Sengupta, Aviroop. Configurations of life: Animals, humans, and the practices of science in Bengal, 1876-1964.

Nursing
Osakwe, Zainab. UTI - related hospitalization among elderly home healthcare patients.

Philosophy
Radhakrishnan, Shivani. False consciousness and ideology critique.

Psychology
Shu, Jocelyn. Interpersonal processes in the experience and regulation of distress.

Williamson, Caitlin. The role of social context in modulating gene expression, neural activity, and neuroendocrine response in individuals of varying social status.

Xu, Judy. Understanding the behavioral and neurocognitive relation between mind wandering and learning.

Urban Planning
Petretta, Danielle. The political economy of location value capture in New York: A comparative case study of the Atlantic yards and Hudson yards mega-projects.