Please find below a detailed breakdown of the annual fellowship support offered to doctoral students in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology (E3B) for the 2018-19 academic year.

*Tuition for doctoral students registered for Residence Units. Tuition costs for students registered for Extended Residence and Matriculation and Facilities may be found on the Cost of Attendance page.

Other benefits include:

• Guaranteed Columbia housing for five academic years 
• Subsidy for upgrading to Platinum‐level health insurance plan (students only)
• Full Gold‐level health insurance coverage for eligible dependents
• Health insurance coverage while on an official medical leave
• Accommodation for Parental Responsibilities
• Child-care subsidy
• Funding to attend conferences
• GSAS International Travel Awards
• Coverage of Internet fee for students in university housing
• Printing quota upgrade when not on appointment
• Gym access during funding‐eligible years 

Please find below a detailed breakdown of the annual fellowship support offered to doctoral students in Natural Sciences Departments (*with the exception of Mathematics and Statistics; and Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology) for the 2018-19 academic year.

**Tuition for doctoral students registered for Residence Units. Tuition costs for students registered for Extended Residence and Matriculation and Facilities may be found on the Cost of Attendance page.

Other benefits include:

• Guaranteed Columbia housing for five academic years 
• Subsidy for upgrading to Platinum‐level health insurance plan (students only)
• Full Gold‐level health insurance coverage for eligible dependents
• Health insurance coverage while on an official medical leave
• Accommodation for Parental Responsibilities
• Child-care subsidy
• Funding to attend conferences
• GSAS International Travel Awards
• Coverage of Internet fee for students in university housing
• Printing quota upgrade when not on appointment
• Gym access during funding‐eligible years 

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Art History and Archaeology
Beach, Caitlin. Sculpture, slavery, and commerce in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. Sponsor: Elizabeth Hutchinson.

Biological Sciences
Bendebury, Anastasia. Phenazine homeostasis in pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms. Sponsor: Lars Dietrich.

Biomedical Engineering
Spasic, Milos. Targeting primary cilia-mediated mechanotransduction to promote whole bone formation. Sponsor: Christopher Jacobs.

Computer Science
Petsios, Theofilos. Compiler-assisted adaptive software testing. Sponsor: Steven Bellovin.

Epidemiology
Armstrong, Hilary. An investigation into the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors for improving low lung function and pulmonary exacerbations. Sponsor: Sharon Schwartz.

Work, Meghan. Breast cancer risk factors and associations with breast cancer tumor characteristics in high risk populations. Sponsor: Mary Beth Terry.

Mathematics
Venkatesh, Saraswathi. Completed symplectic cohomology and liouville cobordisms. Sponsors: Mohammed Abouzaid and John Morgan.

Physics
Gong, Zizhou. Muon spin relaxation study of MnGe and development of pair distribution function methods. Sponsor: Yasutomo Uemura.

Political Science
Yu, Tinghua. Essays on information revelation in political organizations. Sponsor: John Huber.

TC / Politics and Education
Houston, David. Public opinion and the public schools: Three essays on Americans' education policy preferences. Sponsor: Jeffrey Henig.

TC / Social-Organizational Psychology
Drinka, Ginevra. Learning agility and performance: An antecedent model. Sponsor: Wyatt Burke.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Anthropology
Casey, Clare. Becoming transgender: A proposal for multi-sited ethnography.

Architecture
Barker, Christopher. 'Architecture of democracy': The development of community design centers, c.1963-1978.

Art History and Archaeology
Barnard, Bailey. About face?: Variety and multiplicity in Hellenistic royal portraits.

Kim, Jeewon. Challenging and preserving the empire: Korean "Western-style" painting, 1930s-1950s.

Levine, Adam. Flemish Ursuline reliquaries and their reception in sixteenth-century imperial Spain.

Marshall, Janina. Ericka Beckman: Dreamwork and the emergence of pictures.

Soley, Teresa. Tomb sculpture and the Portuguese Renaissance, c. 1460 - c. 1570.

Zhu, Cathy. Bornina golden light: Images of omens and imperial ambitions in the southern Song Dynasty.

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

Spasic, Milos. Targeting primary cilia-mediated mechanotransduction to promote whole bone formation.

Business
Chun, Jinseok. Social comparison in performance appraisal.

Lu, Guannan. Global leader or cultural outsider? The divergent effects of international experiences on leadership effectiveness vs. leadership selection.

English and Comparative Literature
Pawel, Rebecca. African American writers encounter Spain.

Sack, Graham. Generative humanities: Simulating the mechanics of narrative and culture.

History
Kideckel, Michael. Fresh from the factory: Breakfast cereal, natural food, and the marketing of reform, 1890-1920.

Political Science
McAlexander, Richard. The politics of anticolonial resistance: Violence, nonviolence, and the end of empire.

Mueser, Benjamin. The concept of territorial right.

Psychology
Barulli, Daniel. Strategic flexibility and fluid reasoning in healthy aging adults.

Conley, Mark. Motivational influences on the American gun rights debate.

Schneider, Claudia. Motivating prosocial behavior: The potential of positive feelings about the self.

Urban Planning
Hagen, Jonas. Calming New York: An examination of neighborhood slow zones.

Where did you grow up? 
Brasilia, Brazil.

What drew you to your field? 
Working as a criminal lawyer made me want to better comprehend the process of policymaking and the interaction between public and private sector and how different countries apply different measures to similar problems.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I am trying to understand the different mechanisms that countries employ to fight corruption, and the role of the lobbyist in the interaction between the public and private sectors. Lobbying activity is not yet regulated in Brazil, and I intend to propose a framework for it.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
Being surrounded by people of so many different backgrounds.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
Brainstorming with teachers—some of the best teachers I have encountered—and being able to attend lectures by people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
In my academic life: being admitted to Columbia University. In my professional life: arguing a case at the Superior Court of Brazil before I was thirty years old.

Who are your heroes in real life?
My parents and my brother. My parents have big hearts. They taught me the value of compassion and perseverance. My brother, for me, is an exemplar of loyalty and discipline. They have guided me through hard times and cheered for me upon every achievement. Things make more sense because of them. That´s how lucky I am.

Whom in your field do you consider a role model?
Antônio Carlos de Almeida Castro is the most fearless and passionate lawyer I have ever known. I grew up hearing stories of him, which undoubtedly influenced me when I had to choose my profession. I also owe a lot to Pierpaolo Cruz Bottini and Igor Sant'Anna Tamasauskas, my first bosses, who taught me gender was not a barrier in my field.

What music have you been listening to lately?
Caetano Veloso.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
Dig Inn.

Where did you grow up? 
Bangalore, India.

What drew you to your field? 
Growing up in the concrete jungle that is Bangalore, I made every excuse to be outdoors as often as possible. I would not say I fell in love with wildlife as a kid, but I really liked being outside. As an undergraduate in engineering, I was not keen on the path I was pursuing, and decided to volunteer with the Wildlife Institute of India. There, I received my first opportunity to camera trap tigers in the wild and learn the intricacies of the tools and techniques involved in the study of wildlife. I was hooked thereafter.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
I am working toward understanding how we can conserve wildlife for the future. Primarily, my research focuses on the effects of anthropogenic and climatic factors on birds in southern India. I study how deforestation, mining, and increases in temperatures, for example, affect the persistence of birds. This involves taking long walks in the forests to survey birds using binoculars, pouring over dusty yellow diaries from a century ago that contain information on these birds, and using advanced statistical measures to analyze the data I collect.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
The opportunity to network with scientists in fields such as philosophy, history, and art. Columbia also has allowed me to take classes at the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden, and the City University of New York. This has proved to be immensely useful in developing my ideas and the way I think.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
People often assume that fieldwork in the forests is a holiday. While it is enjoyable, it is hard work. Sometimes, you do not have access to hot water or cannot eat more than once a day.

Who is your hero of fiction?
I am a Star Wars nerd, and try to learn from Yoda.

Who are your heroes in real life?
My mother. While I was growing up in India, my mother was my mentor, pillar of support, and friend. I admired her for taking care of two boisterous kids, working ten-hour days, cooking for us, and still having the time to read us English novels and check out books from the library for us. I learn so much from the way she handles life.

Whom in your field do you consider a role model?
Since I joined this field, I have been in awe of the way Dr. Vijayakumar SP does science. He has been tremendously supportive and inspiring. At Columbia, Professor Don Melnick and Professor Ruth DeFries are my role models. I love the way they think about science, in completely different ways.

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

What music have you been listening to lately?
Falkenbach, God is an Astronaut, Tame Impala, and Led Zeppelin.

What is your favorite blog or website?
Dynamic Ecology.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
I love Jin Ramen.

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Anthropology
Miljanic, Ana. Socialist Yugoslavia in the strict sense of the term: Every-daily inscriptions and the economies of secret-ing, 1950-1974. Sponsor: Rosalind Morris.

Biomedical Engineering
Spasic, Milos. Targeting primary cilia-mediated mechanotransduction to promote whole bone formation. Sponsor: Christopher Jacobs.

Business
Sachdeva, Kunal. Three essays on financial economics. Sponsor: Wei Jiang.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Steinfield, Justin. Molecular tinder: The role of eukaryotic recombinase loops L1 and L2 in the homology search. Sponsor: Eric Greene.

Chemical Engineering
Hsieh, Min-Kang. Design and synthesis of 3'-O-modified cleavable nucleotide reversible terminators for DNA sequencing by synthesis. Sponsor: Jingyue Ju.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Bausch, Alexandra. Interactive effects of ocean acidification and other environmental drivers on planktonic microorganisms in marine ecosystems. Sponsor: Andrew Juhl.

Economics
Ando, Sakai. Essays on misallocation and firm regulations. Sponsors: Jennifer La'O and José Scheinkman.

Forneron, Jean-Jacques. Essays on simulation-based estimation. Sponsor: Serena Ng.

Jiao, Yang. Essays in international macroeconomics and international trade. Sponsors: Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe and Shang-Jin Wei.

Electrical Engineering
Gangasani, Gautam. Architectures and circuits leveraging injection-locked oscillators for ultra-low voltage clock synthesis and reference-less receivers for dense chip-to-chip communications. Sponsor: Peter Kinget.

English and Comparative Literature
Hildebrand, Rebecca. Ambient worlds: Description and the concept of environment in the nineteenth-century British novel. Sponsor: Sharon Marcus.

History
Danziger Halperin, Anna. Education or welfare? American and British child care policy, 1965-2004. Sponsors: Alice Kessler-Harris and Susan Pedersen.

Mathematics
Gulotta, Daniel. Equidimensional adic eigenvarieties for groups with discrete series. Sponsor: Eric Urban.

Van Dobben De Bruyn, Remy. Dominating varieties by liftable ones. Sponsor: Aise Johan de Jong.

Music
Colón-Montijo, César. Specters of Maelo: An ethnographic portrait of Ismael 'Maelo' Rivera. Sponsors: Ana Maria Ochoa and Christopher Washburne.

Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine
Liu, Chang. The function of PPARgamma in the urothelium. Sponsor: Cathy Mendelsohn.

Psychology
Conley, Mark. Motivational influences on the American gun rights debate. Sponsors: Valerie Purdie-Vaughns and Tory Higgins.

TC / Applied Behavior Analysis
Crosbie, Caroline. A functional writing package and middle school students' math algorithms. Sponsor: Douglas Greer.

Kleinert, Kelly. A comparison of conditioned reinforcement for observing visual familiar and non-familiar stimuli and the effects of a repeated probe procedure. Sponsor: Douglas Greer.

Maurilus, Emmy. The effect of the enhancement or establishment of reinforcement value for math on rate of learning for pre-kindergarten students. Sponsor: Douglas Greer.

TC / Counseling Psychology
Buque, Mariel. Development and initial validation of the multicultural gender roles scale - Black women (MGRS - BW). Sponsor: Marie Miville.

TC / Mathematics Education
McGuffey, William. Insights from college algebra students' reinvention of limit at infinity. Sponsor: Nicholas Wasserman.

TC / Measurement and Evaluation
Sachdeva, Ruchi. A hypothesis testing procedure designed for Q-matrix validation of diagnostic classification models. Sponsor: Young-Sun Lee.

TC / Politics and Education
Sallman, Jennifer. Should I stay or should I go? Teacher retention in the era of accountability. Sponsor: Aaron Pallas.

TC / Sociology and Education
Duran, Jacquelyn. Second generation Dominican high school students in a diverse suburb. Sponsor: Aaron Pallas.

Urban Planning
Cassola, Marie-Adele. Planning for equitable neighborhood change: A mixed-methods analysis of 80 cities. Sponsor: Lance Freeman.

Hagen, Jonas. Calming New York: An examination of neighborhood slow zones. Sponsor: Lance Freeman.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Art History and Archaeology
Agarwala, Seher. Wondrous frontiers: Topographical and historical painting in Persian and Mughal manuscripts.

Cataldo, Emogene. Living stones: An ecology of Gothic vegetal sculpture, c. 1200-1330.

Gillman, Matthew. Medieval glass and the aesthetics of simulation.

Migwans, Crystal. Selvage and salvage: Natural fiber weaving in the Great Lakes, 1860-1960.

Yang, Yu. At the crossroads of modernism and colonialism: Architecture and urban space in Manchuria, 1905 - 1945.

Biomedical Engineering
Nayak, Samiksha. Development and evaluation of point-of-care diagnostic technologies for providers and consumers.

Saxena, Mayur. Mechanism of focal adhesions.

Business
Chun, Jinseok. Social comparison in performance appraisal.

Li, Nan. Does greater shareholder voting rights reduce the expropriation? Evidence from related party transactions.

Lu, Guannan. Global leader or cultural outsider? The divergent effects of international experiences on leadership effectiveness vs. leadership selection.

Papoutsi, Zoi. Essays in empirical corporate finance and banking.

Classics
Claros, Yujhan. Hellenistic ideologies of divine monarchy, heterosexism, and poetic liberalism in the /Argonautika/ of Apollonus and the /Metamorphoses/ of Ovid.

Computer Science
Li, Dingzeyu. Acoustic simulation and fabrication: From virtual to reality.

Sivakorn, Suphannee. Understanding flaws in the deployment and implementation of web encryption.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Jong, Bor-Ting. Seasonality of regional ENSO teleconnections and impacts on climate predictability in North America.

English and Comparative Literature
Cunard, Candace. Novel feelings: Emotion, duration, and the form of the eighteenth-century British novel.

History
Kung, Chien Wen. Coercion, culture, and Chineseness: Nationalist China and overseas Chinese anticommunism in the Philippines, 1945-1970s.

Kuzuoglu, Ulug. Codes of modernity: Chinese script during the global information revolution.

Mechanical Engineering
Chen, Siyuan. Time series causal network.

Yuan, Shengxi. Electricity sector transitions: Selected methods to alleviate associated challenges and implications on residential sector in cities.

Psychology
Conley, Mark. Motivational influences on the American gun rights debate.

Mani, Kartik. Using visual illusions to examine actions' impact on perception.

Schneider, Claudia. Motivating prosocial behavior: The potential of positive feelings about the self.

Sociology
McKinney, Warren. Incorporating diaspora - Blurring distinctions of race and nationality through heritage tourism in Ghana.

Where did you grow up? 
New York City.

What drew you to your field? 
I became interested in Russian literature in high school, and began studying Russian in college. After I graduated, I went on an exchange program to work at the Red Cross in Siberia. I became fascinated by the subject of public health in the former Soviet Union, and worked in that field for several years. Eventually, I returned to my first love—literature—and entered the PhD program at Columbia.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field?
I am researching the use of Russia's greatest cultural hero, the writer Alexander Pushkin, in evolving ideas of Russian national identity during the transition from communism. I am particularly interested in how a cultural hero can be used as a kind of bridge to reduce the sense of trauma and loss associated with major political and historical ruptures.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
The libraries. It gives me endless delight to know that I have access to almost any book on any topic in any language. I love to fall down research rabbit holes.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
I have especially enjoyed teaching, and getting to know some of Columbia's talented and diverse students. I may be biased, but I have the impression that the Slavic department attracts particularly exceptional undergraduates!

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
Russians don't say “na zdorovie” (“to health”) when they toast—that means something more like “you're welcome” or “be my guest.”

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Writing a book, Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. It came out in 2016.

Who are your favorite writers?
Turgenev, Babel, Venedikt Erofeev, Anna Akhmatova, Maupassant, George Eliot, Muriel Spark, Jane Bowles, W.G. Sebald, John Ashbery—and Pushkin, of course.

Who is your hero of fiction?
I find that heroes don't make the most lovable literary characters. My favorite literary character is Dorothea from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I also love the protagonist of Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent.

Who are your heroes in real life?
Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was murdered because of her investigation of the war in Chechnya; Paul Farmer, an anthropologist and physician who founded the organization Partners in Health; and pretty much any major woman writer before 1970.

Whom in your field do you consider a role model?
Yuri Slezkine, the Russian historian. I admire his ability to use literary storytelling to convey historical research. And Cristina Vatulescu: her book Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times was a genuinely thrilling study of the blurred line between fact and art.

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

What music have you been listening to lately?
Francoise Hardy, Eva Salina, and Brother Reverend.

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

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
Awash, an Ethiopian restaurant.

Read about the recent achievements of GSAS students:

• In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Sociology PhD student Musa al-Gharbi wrote that Texas primary results show that “2018 will not be a Democratic cakewalk.”
• Art History and Archaeology PhD student Crystal Migwansspoke on a panel about elevating Indigenous women’s voices at the Elizabeth Foundation for Arts Project Space.
• Classical Studies PhD student Zachary Herz, who completed a JD at Yale Law School while writing his Columbia dissertation on Roman legal history, was cited in a US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decision on sex stereotyping.
• Maria Snegovaya, doctoral candidate in Political Science, wrote an article for The Washington Post explaining three theories surrounding the poisoning of a former Russian spy.
• History PhD student Conor Wilkinson won the Graduate Student Best Paper Prize at the South East Regional Seminar in African Studies & Southeast Africanist Network Annual Joint Meeting, for his paper “Ancestors and Family Life in Eastern and Southern Tanzania at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”
• The National Science Foundation awarded dissertation research grants to Sociology doctoral students Adrianna Bagnall and Dialika Sall.

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

The National Science Foundation has named fourteen current PhD students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences as 2018 Graduate Research Fellows. The highly competitive fellowship program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based degrees at accredited United States institutions.

The awardees from GSAS are:

• Palani Akana (Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology)
• Chelsea Harmon (Psychology)
• Carla Hoge (Biological Sciences)
• Tyler Janoski (Earth and Environmental Sciences)
• Tiffany Jansen (Astronomy)
• Kiley Kennedy (Physics)
• Corey Lesk (Earth and Environmental Sciences)
• Lizhi Liu (Biological Sciences)
• Moiya McTier (Astronomy)
• Athena Nghiem (Earth and Environmental Sciences)
• Andrew Olenski (Economics)
• Iden Sapse (Biological Sciences)
• William Henry Towbin (Earth and Environmental Sciences)
• Bryan Wang (Biological Sciences)

Fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost-of-education allowance for tuition and fees, opportunities for international research and professional development, and the freedom to conduct their own research at any accredited US institution of graduate education they choose.

To learn more about the program, click here.

What is your current role?
Professor of History, George Washington University.

What are you working on now?
A “group portrait” of the Irish Famine immigrants in New York in the 1850s and '60s, and the lives they made for themselves in the United States.

What drew you to your field?
I love that immigration history is a never-ending saga that repeats itself again and again. The cast changes, but the story remains virtually unchanged.

What lessons from graduate school have you found useful in your professional life?
That having faith in yourself and your own abilities matters much more than what other people think.

What skill has unexpectedly helped you in your career?
My writing skills. There are many brilliant people in academia, but not many brilliant writers. For historians, a good story well told can be just as valuable as a pathbreaking idea.

What is your favorite memory from your graduate years?
The close friendships that I made and that are still strong nearly thirty years later.

What are your passions outside of your work?
I love tennis, both playing and watching my idol Roger Federer. I try to see him in person every year. I went to California for Spring Break for that very reason.

What is your advice for current GSAS students?
Students, especially in the humanities, find graduate school very stressful. They should try to focus on the great things about graduate study—reading, writing, thinking—because they will not have much time for those things later in life. Students also should not be afraid to ask for advice from faculty. Many students feel too intimidated to talk to faculty about anything other than coursework, but almost every faculty member I know loves mentoring students as well—and they wish students would ask for advice more often.

What is next for you, professionally or otherwise?
Writing another book, and pushing my students to be the best researchers and writers they can be.

Where did you grow up? 
Madison, WI, and Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.

What drew you to your field? 
I grew up bilingual, living between Italy and the US. When I began college at Barnard, I missed speaking Italian every day with my family, so I started taking Italian literature classes. I ended up liking them so much that I decided to add an Italian major to my Music major. After graduating, I missed reading, researching, and writing, so I applied to graduate school. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to come back to Columbia and continue working with the professors who had been my first mentors during my undergraduate years.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
My research focuses on the intersection of poetry, music, and multilingualism/translation in Italian literature. I’m interested in a number of different periods, but right now I'm focusing on Amelia Rosselli, a trilingual poet and musician active from the late 1950s to the late 1990s. I have been mainly examining the ways that changes in musical notation (specifically graphic notation) affected her poetry, causing a merging of the poetic text and the musical score.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
I have been so lucky to have wonderful colleagues and a great spirit of collaboration in my department. My colleagues’ different backgrounds and formations are helpful: I learn so much from them, and they help me pinpoint the gaps in my knowledge and try (as much as possible!) to fill them in.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
The libraries are amazing! The librarians I have encountered here have been very helpful to me in my research, but especially Nick Patterson, the music librarian, who is always available to help students find anything at all.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
I encounter common misconceptions about Italian culture dishearteningly often, and sometimes I even see them seep into scholarship—but there are too many to enumerate, so I'll steer clear of listing those here and stick to literature. In terms of literature, I have a bone to pick with the way Dante is sometimes taught: since people often only read Inferno, there are many misconceptions regarding the Divine Comedy—mainly that it is a pessimistic text, driven by the author's own vindictive fantasy. The Divine Comedy is, in many senses, a beautiful, mystical, moving text, and Purgatory and Paradise show that very clearly!

Who are your favorite writers?
Amelia Rosselli, Roberto Bolaño, Emmanuela Carbé, Roman Jakobson, Hannah Sanghee Park, Dante Alighieri… The list goes on.

Who are your heroes in real life?
My mom! She moves through the world with kindness, compassion, and honesty, and the way that she cares so deeply about the people around her—family, friends, colleagues, even just people on the street—makes my heart feel so full.

Where is your favorite place to eat on/around campus?
I will always hold a special place in my heart for the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where my colleagues and I have our traditional Wednesday morning breakfasts.

What is your current role?
Chief Executive Officer, ADIN Energy LLC.

What are you working on now?
I am currently involved in a plastics recycling project scheduled to be built in the United Arab Emirates later this year. If the project comes to fruition as planned, it would be the first of its kind in the region.

What drew you to your field?
How multifaceted and challenging it is. You have to keep developing your knowledge base and skill set to bring value to clients and to understand the “next big thing” in the field.  

What lessons from graduate school have you found useful in your professional life?
Perhaps the fine art of skimming texts, because of the copious amounts of reading that was needed for every class—and that I continue to need to do. More seriously, I learned to push myself and be energized by competition. The academically rigorous courses were complemented by incredibly smart classmates who inspired me to be my best. 

What skill has unexpectedly helped you in your career?
Coming from a social science academic background, I didn't realize how much I would need to hone my quantitative skills. I still have room for improvement, but gaining comfort with spreadsheets and numbers is nowadays an indispensable skill in any discipline and has proved useful for me.

What is your favorite memory from your graduate years?
While I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ukraine, I talked to my students about Professor Jeffrey Sachs and his work. A few years later, after I became a Columbia student, it was a thrill to chat briefly with him at a reception after a talk he gave. He's like a rock star to me!

What are your passions outside of your work?
Running, traveling, visiting museums—and, for better or for worse, I am obsessed with global and domestic politics.

What is your advice for current GSAS students?
A word I love is “resilience.” Being resilient (and self-aware) keeps us focused on our goals, even in the face of setbacks.

What is next for you, professionally or otherwise?
Professionally, I am fascinated by the application of technological innovations such as blockchain and artificial intelligence to the energy field, and hope to be part of those types of consulting projects soon. On a personal note, I want to attend Burning Man this year!

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Architecture
Caldeira, Marta. Architecture, history, and the city: Reconceptualizing architectural modernity between Italy and Iberia, 1968-1980. Sponsor: Reinhold Martin.

Art History and Archaeology
Coman-Ernstoff, Sonia. New values in art: Japanese and Japonisme ceramics, 1866-1904. Sponsor: Anne Higonnet.

Cook, Emily. Legacies of matter: Tradition, innovation, and remediation in the materials of Roman ideal sculpture. Sponsor: Francesco de Angelis.

Biomedical Engineering
Saxena, Mayur. Mechanism of focal adhesions. Sponsor: Michael Sheetz.

Business
Chun, Jinseok. Social comparison in performance appraisal. Sponsor: Joel Brockner.

Lu, Guannan. Global leader or cultural outsider? The divergent effects of international experiences on leadership effectiveness vs. leadership selection. Sponsor: Adam Galinsky.

Martin, Ashley. The divergent effects of diversity ideologies for race and gender relations. Sponsor: Katherine Phillips.

Piazza, Alessandro. Essays on angel investing in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Sponsor: Damon Phillips.

Xu, Ran. Essays on risk appetite and uncertainty. Sponsor: Geert Bekaert.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies
Li, Ang. Regulation of MSC chondrogenesis by cartilage ECM and therapeutic applications for cartilage injury and degenerative diseases. Sponsor: Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic.

Twomey, Edward. Structural determinants of AMPA-subtype ionotropic glutamate receptor function. Sponsor: Alexander Sobolevsky.

Chemistry
Freyer, Jessica. The design and synthesis of aromatic ion-based polyelectrolytes for divergent applications. Sponsor: Luis Campos.

Earth and Environmental Engineering
Gao, Ming. Novel liquid-like nanoscale hybrid materials with tunable chemical and physical properties as a dual-purpose reactive media for combined carbon capture and conversion. Sponsor: Ah-Hyung Alissa Park.

Wang, Shuoxun. A study of carbon dioxide capture and catalytic conversion to methane using a ruthenium, "sodium oxide" dual functional material: Development, performance and characterizations. Sponsor: Robert Farrauto.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Taylor, Benton. Tropical rainforests getting their fix: The ecological drivers and consequences of nitrogen-fixing trees in regenerating Costa Rican rainforests. Sponsor: Duncan Menge.

Economics
Balloch, Cynthia. Essays in finance and macroeconomics. Sponsors: Ricardo Reis and Jon Steinsson.

Dhungana, Sandesh. Essays in fiscal policy and consumer finance. Sponsor: Jón Steinsson.

Jia, Chengcheng. Essays on monetary policy with informational frictions. Sponsor: Michael Woodford.

Kim, Sung Ryong. Essay on macroeconomics. Sponsors: Jón Steinsson and David Weinstein.

Kim, MeeRoo. Essays on multidimensional private information in the consumer credit market. Sponsor: Bernard Salanie.

Na, Seunghoon. Essays on open economy macroeconomics. Sponsor: Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe.

Neligh, Nathaniel. Essays on attention and network formation. Sponsors: Alessandra Casella and Mark Dean.

Thomas, Danna. Essays in public finance and industrial organization. Sponsor: Katherine Ho.

Zhou, Jing. Essays on international economics. Sponsors: Martin Uribe and Shang-Jin Wei.

English and Comparative Literature
Iglesias, Christina. Modernist unselfing. Sponsor: Gauri Viswanathan.

Margini, Matthew. Incoherent beasts: Victorian literature and the problem of species. Sponsor: Erik Gray.

Epidemiology
Kujawski, Stephanie. Quality of care during childbirth in low-resource settings: Applying an epidemiology lens to an implementation problem. Sponsor: Sharon Schwartz.

History
Chen, John. Islamic modernism in China: Chinese Muslim elites, Guomindang nation-building and the limits of the global Umma, 1900-1960. Sponsors: Marwa Elshakry and Rashid Khalidi.

Italian
Delmolino, Grace. Boccaccio's legal mind: Consent, obligation, and medieval canon law. Sponsor: Teodolinda Barolini.

Mathematics
Arbesfeld, Noah. K-theoretic enumerative geometry and the Hilbert scheme of points on a surface. Sponsor: Andrei Okounkov.

Huang, Zhijie. The coupled Ricci flow and the anomaly flow over Riemann surface. Sponsor: Duong Phong.

Hung, Pei-Ken. Linear stability of the Schwarzschild space time in the harmonic gauge: odd part. Sponsor: Mu-Tao Wang.

Picard, Sébastien. The Hull-Strominger system in complex geometry. Sponsor: Duong Phong.

Pushkar, Petr. Quantum K-theory and the Baxter operator. Sponsor: Andrei Okounkov.

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

Henig, Roni. Life of the non-living: Nationalization, language and the narrative of 'Revival' in modern Hebrew literary discourse. Sponsor: Dan Miron.

Marsh, Wendell. Compositions of sainthood: The biography of Hajj Umar Tal by Shaykh Musa Kamara. Sponsor: Mamadou Diouf.

Philosophy
Morales, Jorge. The strength of the mind: Essays on consciousness and introspection. Sponsor: John Morrison.

Physics
Fumarola, Francesco. The synaptic weight matrix: Dynamics, symmetry breaking, and disorder. Sponsor: Robert Mawhinney.

Political Science
Goodman, Robert. Eloquence and its conditions. Sponsor: David Johnston.

Psychology
Schneider, Claudia. Motivating prosocial behavior: The potential of positive feelings about the self. Sponsor: Elke Weber.

Sustainable Development
Annan, Francis. Economics of contracts and risks. Sponsor: Bernard Salanie.

Dugoua, Eugenie. Essays on the economics of technological change and the environment. Sponsor: Scott Barrett.

Jung, Jaehyun. Three essays on development and health economics. Sponsors: Douglas Almond and Cristian Pop-Eleches.

TC / Behavioral Nutrition
Paul, Rachel. Understanding lifestyle behaviors and the development of a theory-based nutrition and physical activity education intervention for Latina breast cancer survivors. Sponsor: Isobel Contento.

TC / Cognitive Studies in Education
Almeda, Ma. Victoria. When practice does not make perfect: Differentiating between productive and unproductive persistence. Sponsor: Ryan Baker.

Boyd, Natalie. The effects of collaboration on student writing development. Sponsor: Deanna Kuhn.

Cesarano, Melissa. Implicit theories of emotion and social judgment. Sponsor: John Black.

Lyashevsky, Ilya. Teaching to transfer in the social emotional learning context. Sponsor: John Black.

TC / Comparative and International Education
Long, Kyle. The emergence of the American University abroad. Sponsor: Oren Pizmony-Levy.

TC / Counseling Psychology
Breslow, Aaron. HIV is NOT a crime: Exploring criminalization and discrimination in a dual model of HIV/AIDS minority stress. Sponsor: Melanie Brewster.

Prosper, Tasha. The relationship of racism-related stress, spirituality and religious orientation to mental health and activism among African Americans. Sponsor: George Gushue.

Yung, Joyce. Participatory action research with Chinese co-researchers who have serious mental illness diagnoses. Sponsor: Laura Smith.

TC / Economics and Education
Kluttig Vega, Martha. Can teachers' incentives improve educational outcomes? The role of financial and non-financial incentives. Sponsor: Thomas Bailey.

TC / English Education
Markiewicz, Agnieszka. For fake internet points: Examination of college student literacy practices in online asynchronous discussion spaces. Sponsor: Ernest Morrell.

TC / Intellectual Disabilities and Autism
LaRock, Damien. The common core state standards as applied to the instruction of students with disabilities: Special education teachers' perceptions. Sponsor: Hsu-Min Chiang.

TC / Kinesiology

Bishop, Lauri. The integration of principles of motor learning to reduce gait asymmetry using a novel robotic device in individuals chronically post-stroke. Sponsor: Lori Quinn.

TC / Mathematics Education
Waid, Brandie. Pre-service mathematics teacher beliefs and growth mindset assessment. Sponsor: Nicholas Wasserman.

TC / Philosophy and Education
Holland, LeAnn. A philosophy of weather: How we learn in an elemental, aesthetic environment. Sponsor: David Hansen.

TC / Physical Disabilities
Arora, Sonia. Quality and quantity of language input and its relation to the language outcomes of preschool children with hearing loss who use listening and spoken language. Sponsor: Ye Wang.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Art History and Archaeology
Mellon, Diana. Painting, miracles, and vernacular healthcare in the early Italian Renaissance.

Biomedical Engineering
Dang, Alex. Electrospun antibody-functionalized PDFM-based meshes for improved T cell expansion.

Guo, Jia. Measuring slow functional changes with magnetic resonance imaging in normal and abnormal brains.

Wobma, Holly. Interferon-y/Hypoxia primed mesenchymal stem cells for an improved immunosuppressive cell therapy.

Business
Choi, Yoonjin. Cultural scope: A new perspective on how organizational culture affects individual performances.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Camaj, Mario. Good Book of IT.

Lu, Zheng. Feasibility assessment framework for financing public-private partnership infrastructure projects through asset-backed security.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Boulahanis, Bridgit. The hydrosphere and the solid earth: Water's impact on mid-ocean ridge dynamics, crustal evolution, and subduction zone processes.

Olsen, Kira. Glacial earthquakes in Greenland: Investigating iceberg calving and terminus dynamics using broadband seismic data.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
St Amant, Guy. Scriptural authority in the Buddhist traditions.

Yi, Yuan. Malfunctioning machinery: The global making of textile factories in the early twentieth-century China.

French and Romance Philology
Burns, Raphaelle. A case worth reporting: Novellas, news and the popularization of casuistry in counter-reformation Europe.

History
Lasdow, Kathryn. Spirit of improvement: Construction, conflict, and community in early-national port cities.

Materials Science and Engineering
Shi, Nan. Radiative cooling and waveguiding devices inspired and enabled by nature.

Music
Hamilton, Julia. Political song in polite society: Singing about Africans in the time of the British Abolitionist Movement (1787-1807).

Urban Planning
Hagen, Jonas. Calming New York: An examination of neighborhood slow zones.

Where did you grow up? 
New Jersey.

What drew you to your field? 
I have always been interested in human behavior. Of the many fields that examine human behavior in one way or another, economic theory seemed the best fit for me because of its emphasis on abstraction and the sort of methodologies it employs. Basically, I enjoy the problem-solving aspects of economic modeling.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
A “game” is an abstract description of a situation in which “players” interact. Game theory makes predictions of behavior in games by modeling how players form beliefs over what others are doing and how they respond to those beliefs. My research involves collecting experimental data from games and developing game-theoretic models to describe the observed behavior. Most of the models I work on resemble the Nash equilibrium, but incorporate somewhat realistic elements, like various types of cognitive limitations.

What resources or opportunities that Columbia provides have been most valuable to you?
Graduate student housing is a big one. Also, there has been plenty of funding for travel and data from the Economics Department.

Is there a common misconception about a topic in your field that you wish you could correct?
I think economics as a whole is rather misunderstood, actually. It is so often conflated with business or (non-academic) finance. I think of economics more as a set of methodologies.

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Ken Arrow: a great economist, and a very kind person, I have heard.

Who are your favorite writers?
I quite like Christopher Hitchens. I have not read a novel in some time...

Who is your hero of fiction?
Ellen Ripley from Alien. 

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
I would come back as my favorite animal—the stoat.

What music have you been listening to lately?
Mostly K-pop.

Where is your favorite place to eat on or around campus?
I am very excited about the new H-mart!

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