Where did you grow up? 
Singapore.

What drew you to your field? 
I have always been fascinated by how far reaching and influential the processes of globalization are in everyday life—from my parents’ move to Singapore from India; to the food, music, clothing, and information I grew up consuming; to my own movement. It is amazing how small yet expansive the globe really is.

How would you explain your current research to someone outside of your field? 
My research explores how and why people move transnationally, and how that in turn affects everything from lifestyles to the rise of economies.

What is your favorite thing about being a student at Columbia GSAS?
The people and the discussions. It is so exciting to leave classes feeling utterly mind-blown.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Probably moving to Tokyo at 19. I had not been there before, did not know anyone there, and did not speak the language.

Who are your favorite writers?
Pico Iyer, Evan Osnos, and Michael Ondaatje.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series. She is brave, well read, and stands up for herself.

Who are your heroes in real life?
All the women in my life.

Who in your field do you consider to be a role model?
Carol Gluck. She is so knowledgeable (about everything!) and is so much fun.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
Pepper, the humanoid robot. It would be such a great anthropological study.

What music have you been listening to lately?
George Ezra, Miguel, and Tennis.

What is your favorite blog or website?
Fast Company.

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

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2018 GSAS Alumni Awards, which celebrate the outstanding achievements of master’s and doctoral graduates.

Daniel Kurtzer (’76PhD, Political Science) and Madeleine Grynsztejn (’85MA, Art History) will be honored with the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement. Christine Ann Denny (’05PhD, Biological Sciences) and Elan Kriegel (’10MA, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences) will receive the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award.

“The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences holds in highest regard intellectual inquiry that exerts a profound impact not only in academia, but in the larger world as well,” said Carlos J. Alonso, Dean of GSAS. “These GSAS graduates represent the very best in our alumni body.”

The honorees will receive their awards at a ceremony to be held on June 5, 2018.

About the Awardees

Daniel Kurtzer (’76PhD, Political Science)
Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement
Daniel Kurtzer is the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Following a twenty-nine-year career in the US Foreign Service, Dr. Kurtzer retired in 2005 with the rank of Career-Minister. From 1997 to 2001 he served as the United States Ambassador to Egypt, and from 2001 to 2005, as the United States Ambassador to Israel. He served as a political officer at the American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, Deputy Director of the Office of Egyptian Affairs, speechwriter on the Policy Planning Staff, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. Throughout his career, Dr. Kurtzer was instrumental in formulating and executing US policy toward the Middle East peace process, and remains active in Track II diplomacy related to the Middle East. Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Dr. Kurtzer to the Secretary's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Previously, Dr. Kurtzer served as an advisor to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and as a member of the Advisory Council of the American Bar Association's Middle East Rule of Law Initiative. He is the coauthor of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East; coauthor of The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011; and editor of Pathways to Peace: America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

Madeleine Grynsztejn (’85MA, Art History)
Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement
Madeleine Grynsztejn is Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA). Under her leadership, the MCA has become a model for twenty-first-century contemporary art museums: an artist-activated, audience-engaged space for generating art, ideas, and conversation around the creative process. For the MCA’s fiftieth anniversary in 2017, Ms. Grynsztejn completed an $80-million campaign, including a redesign of the museum that interweaves art, food, design, and learning throughout its public spaces. Ms. Grynsztejn has curated many major exhibitions on renowned contemporary artists, including Doris Salcedo, Luc Tuymans, and Alfredo Jaar, for whom she was commissioner for the Chilean Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Prior to the MCA, Ms. Grynsztejn was Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she curated the critically acclaimed traveling exhibitions Take your time: Olafur Eliasson and The Art of Richard Tuttle, which received a “Best US Monographic Museum Show” award from the Association of International Art Critics. She was named a “Chicagoan of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune in 2017 and is the new President of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). She was recently knighted to the National Order of the Legion of Honour of France by President François Hollande.

Christine Ann Denny (’05PhD, Biological Sciences)
Outstanding Recent Alumni Award
Christine Ann Denny is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology in Psychiatry at Columbia University and a Research Scientist V in the Division of Integrative Neuroscience at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She received her BS from Boston College in 2005, her MS from Boston College in 2006, and her PhD in Biological Sciences in 2012 from Columbia University, where she investigated the impact of adult hippocampal neurogenesis on behavior in the laboratory of Dr. René Hen. She then completed a short post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Hen and started her own laboratory in 2013. Dr. Denny studies the neural basis of learning and memory in disease states, such as in depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), aging, and Alzheimer’s disease. Specifically, she created a novel genetic murine line, the ArcCreERT2 mice, which allows for the permanent labeling of individual memories. This mouse line allows for a comparison of the neural ensembles activated during memory encoding and those activated during memory retrieval. In addition, Dr. Denny’s laboratory is developing novel prophylactics against stress-induced depressive-like behavior. Dr. Denny is trying to develop preventative approaches against stress-induced psychiatric disorders and has found that a single injection of ketamine before stress prevents the induction of depressive-like behavior.

Elan Kriegel (’10MA, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences)
Outstanding Recent Alumni Award
Elan Kriegel is a data scientist and the cofounder of BlueLabs, an analytics and technology company based in Washington, DC. Before joining BlueLabs, Mr. Kriegel was the Battleground States Analytics Director for Obama for America. In 2015, he joined Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as the Chief Analytics Officer. He earned his BS in Mathematics and Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his MA in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University.

What is your current role?
President and CEO, DASNY (Dormitory Authority State of New York).

What are you working on now?
Infrastructure financings and investments.

What drew you to your field?
I wanted an opportunity to combine finance and public policy into a meaningful role. The opportunity to lead the nation's largest financier of infrastructure was a chance to bring skills and lessons from my previous experiences in the public and private sectors.

What lessons from graduate school have you found useful in your professional life?
Graduate school was a wonderful teacher. It taught me the value of research, and the levels of commitment required to learn and/or gain expertise in a subject matter. I learned that I can approach a subject in a very studious way and continue to ask new questions and engage new subjects.

What skill has unexpectedly helped you in your career?
Inquiry. A continuous process of exploration has given me the opportunity to think outside of conventional boundaries, and ask myself first and foremost: What am I getting out of my experiences, and is this a place I want to be?

What is your favorite memory from your graduate years?
I loved the community. It is hard to re-create that outside of college and graduate school.

What are your passions outside of your work?
Listening to great jazz, reading, theater, and just engaging people.

What is your advice for current GSAS students?
Commit to a lifelong process of learning, and prepare for uncertainty, as it always comes your way!

What is next for you, professionally or otherwise?
I really do not know at this moment. The future is uncertain, and I am okay with that.

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Anthropology
Ou, Tzu-Chi. Resigned urbanization: Migration, dwelling, and freedom in contemporary China. Sponsor: Myron Cohen.

Applied Physics
Kim, Chanul. Predicting the temperature-strain phase diagram of VO2 from first principles. Sponsor: Chris Marianetti.

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 Cristina. New values in art: Japanese and Japoniste ceramics, 1866-1904. Sponsor: Anne Higonnet.

Gans, Sofia. "An entire chapel cast and engraved with images": New perspectives on the tomb of St. Sebald in Nuremberg. Sponsor: Stephen Murray.

Scheier-Dolberg, Joseph. Yu Zhiding (1646-1716) and the envisioning of the early Qing world. Sponsor: Robert Harrist.

Biomedical Engineering
Guo, Jia. Measuring slow functional changes with magnetic resonance imaging in normal and abnormal brains. Sponsors: Andrew Laine and Scott Small.

Biomedical Informatics
Da Graca Polubriaginof, Fernanda. Leveraging patient-provided data to improve understanding of disease risk. Sponsor: David Vawdrey.

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

Johannesson, Erik. Former insiders' trading. Sponsor: Shivaram Rajgopal.

Li, Nan. Does greater shareholder voting rights reduce the expropriation? Evidence from related party transactions. Sponsors: Fabrizio Ferri and Shivaram Rajgopal.

Papoutsi, Zoi Melina. Essays in empirical corporate finance and banking. Sponsor: Daniel Wolfenzon.

Ren, Qitian. Consumer attention allocation and firm strategies. Sponsor: Kinshuk Jerath.

Chemical Engineering
Erturk, Ece. Photochemical and enzymatic method for DNA methylation profiling and walking approach for increasing read length of DNA sequencing by synthesis. Sponsor: Jingyue Ju.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Lu, Zheng. Feasibility assessment framework for financing public-private partnership infrastructure projects through asset-backed security. Sponsor: Feniosky Pena-Mora.

Communications
Foxman, Maxwell. Playing with virtual reality: Early adopters of commercial immersive technology. Sponsor: Todd Gitlin.

Shure, Caitlin. The brain waves: Oscillations of science, technology, and spirituality. Sponsor: Todd Gitlin.

Computer Science
Sivakorn, Suphannee. Understanding flaws in the deployment and implementation of web encryption. Sponsor: Steven Bellovin.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Buckelew, Kevin. Inventing Chinese Buddhas: Identity, authority, and liberation in Song-Dynasty Chan Buddhism. Sponsors: Bernard Faure and Zhaohua Yang.

Ganany, Noga. Origin narratives: Reading and reverence in late Ming China. Sponsor: Wei Shang.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Neelakantan, Amrita. Moving people for tigers: Resettlement, food security, and landscape level conservation in central India. Sponsor: Ruth DeFries.

Economics
Arora, Ashna. Essays in labor and development economics. Sponsors: Suresh Naidu and Bernard Salanie.

Ahn, So Yoon. Matching in marriage market and labor market. Sponsors: Pierre-Andre Chiappori and Bernard Salanie.

Chen, Tuo. Micro-data in macroeconomics. Sponsor: Martin Uribe.

Datta, Bikramaditya. Essays in applied microeconomic theory. Sponsors: Patrick Bolton and Marina Halac.

de Rochambeau, Golvine. Essays on development economics. Sponsor: Eric Verhoogen.

Geng, Tong. Three essays on the economics of education. Sponsors: W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola.

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

Kosenko, Andrew. Essays in economic theory: Strategic communications and information design. Sponsor: Navin Kartik.

Krishnaswamy, Nandita. Essays in development economics. Sponsor: Eric Verhoogen.

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

Nguyen, Anh. Essays on asymmetric information. Sponsor: Katherine Ho.

Rappoport, Daniel. Essays in information economics and monotone comparative statics. Sponsors: Navin Kartik and Andrea Prat.

Tian, Lin. Essays in spatial economics. Sponsors: Donald Davis and Jonathan Vogel.

Wu, Xingye. Essays on microeconomic theory. Sponsor: Yeon-Koo Che.

Electrical Engineering
Zhang, Yuqian. Geometry and algorithms for sparse blind deconvolution. Sponsor: John Wright.

English and Comparative Literature
Bo, Lamyu Maria. Writing diplomacy: Translation, politics, and literary culture in the Transpacific Cold War. Sponsors: Rachel Adams and Lydia Liu.

English and Comparative Literature
Crow, Andrea. Ruling appetites: The politics of diet in early modern English literature. Sponsors: Julie Crawford and Molly Murray.

English and Comparative Literature
Gervasio, Nicole. Arts of the impossible: Violence, trauma and erasure in the global South. Sponsor: Marianne Hirsch.

French and Romance Philology
Myers, Sarah. Sensation and the city in Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Sponsor: Antoine Compagnon.

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

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

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Kozikoski Valereto, Deneb. Aporias of mobility: Amazonian landscapes between exploration and engineering. Sponsor: Graciela Montaldo.

Velázquez Pérez, Mariana-Cecilia. Travelers, traders and traitors: Mapping and writing piracy in England, Spain and the Caribbean. Sponsor: Patricia Grieve.

Materials Science and Engineering
Shi, Norman. Biological and bioinspired photonic materials for passive radiative cooling and waveguiding. Sponsor: Nanfang Yu.

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

Jiang, Feiqi. Genus bound for a curve with independent gonal morphisms. Sponsor: Aise Johan de Jong.

Li, Qirui. An intersection formula for CM cycles in Lubin-Tate spaces. Sponsor: Wei Zhang.

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

Mechanical Engineering
Hou, Chieh. Implementation and validation of finite element framework for passive and active membrane transport in deformable multiphasic models of biological tissues and cells. Sponsor: Gerard Ateshian.

Music
Levitsky, Anne. The song from the singer: Personification, embodiment, and anthropomorphization in troubadour lyric. Sponsor: Susan Boynton.

Music (D.M.A.)
Brook, Taylor. Synergy of form, rhythm, and orchestration in three microtonal compositions. Sponsor: Alfred Lerdahl.

Pharmacology and Molecular Signaling
Torres, Daniela. A new diffusely infiltrating glioma mouse model reveals neuronal alterations in the brain tumor microenvironment. Sponsor: Peter D. Canoll.

Physics
Esposito, Angelo. Low energy physics for the high energy physicist. Sponsor: Alberto Nicolis.

Kang, Jonghee. Generalizations of solid inflation. Sponsor: Alberto Nicolis.

Political Science
Blankenship, Brian. Promises under pressure: Reassurance and burden-sharing in asymmetric alliances. Sponsor: Robert Jervis.

Dolan, Lindsay. The politics of classification in global development. Sponsor: Jack Snyder.

Rubin, Michael. Rebel territorial control, governance, and political accountability in civil war: Evidence from the Communist insurgency in the Philippines. Sponsor: Virginia Page Fortna.

Spry, Amber. Identity in American politics: A multidimensional approach to study and measurement. Sponsor: Donald Green.

Zelizer, Adam. Learning about the issues: The rise of caucuses and decline of formal institutions in acquiring policy information. Sponsor: Gregory Wawro.

Social Work
O'Hara, Kathleen. "My work belies my mental illness": The motivation for and impacts of mental health advocacy among individuals with psychiatric disabilities. Sponsor: Ellen Lukens.

Sociology
Dern, Nathan. Adults at play: Gender performance in improv comedy theater. Sponsor: Shamus Khan.

Lee, Byungkyu. Networks in polarized times: What Americans talk about, with whom and when? Sponsor: Peter Bearman.

TC / Anthropology and Education
Lee, JungMin. Elite reproduction of Korean yuhaksaeng in top-ranked American universities. Sponsor: Herve Varenne.

TC / Applied Behavior Analysis
Cameron, Katharine. The effects of a behavioral momentum blending intervention on the accuracy of textual and spelling responses emitted by preschool students with blending difficulties. Sponsor: Douglas Greer.

Frank, Madeline. The effect of bidirectional and unidirectional naming on learning in new ways and the relation between bidirectional naming and basic relational concepts for preschool students. Sponsor: Douglas Greer.

Greer, Ashley. Vocal and nonvocal verbal behavior between mothers and their children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Sponsor: Douglas Greer.

Morgan, Georgette. An experimental analysis of bidirectional naming and the establishment of arbitrary and non-arbitrary relational responses. Sponsor: Douglas Greer.

TC / Behavioral Nutrition
Alvarez, Cristina. Mexicans’ consumption of taxed sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) and psychosocial determinants of consumption in the context of the 2014 SSB tax. Sponsor: Isobel Contento.

Arad, Avigdor. Advancing the use of exercise testing as a tool to access whole-body substrate selectivity and metabolic function in individuals at risk for developing type 2 diabetes. Sponsor: Isobel Contento.

TC / Clinical Psychology
Cheng, Bryan. Adolescent depression and suicidality in the USA: A look at YRBS profiles and health risk behaviors as predictors in the past 10 years. Sponsor: Helen Verdeli.

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

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

Jiang, Yang. Development of self-regulated learning skills within open-ended computer-based learning environments for science. Sponsor: Ryan Baker.

Malkiewich, Laura. The effects of goals and contrasting cases on learning and transfer from an engineering design task. Sponsor: Catherine Chase.

Uscianowski, Colleen. How parents supports early numeracy development during shared math storybook reading. Sponsor: Herbert Ginsburg.

TC / Comparative and International Education
Allen, Ryan. Global forces, local perceptions: Measuring the normalization effects of university rankings in China. Sponsor: Oren Pizmony-Levy.

TC / Counseling Psychology
Hernandez, Elizabeth. Undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic: Exploring the role of activism in DACAmented Latinas/os/x' thwarted transition to adulthood. Sponsor: Marie Miville.

Walker, Amelia. Development and initial validation of the disavowal of racial bias scale(DRB). Sponsor: George Gushue.

TC / Developmental Psychology
Arvidsson, Toi Sin. Individualized scaffolding of scientific reasoning development complementing teachers with an auto-agent. Sponsor: Deanna Kuhn.

Morin, Marisa. The longitudinal effects of unintended pregnancy on maternal mental health and parenting behaviors. Sponsor: Jeanne Brooks-Gunn.

TC / Educational Leadership
Nitkin, David. Technology-based personalization: Instructional reform in five public schools. Sponsor: Douglas Ready.

Saunders, Chelsey. How to teach, lead, and live well. A qualitative in-depth interview study with eight North Carolina teacher-leaders. Sponsor: Eleanor Drago-Severson.

TC / Educational Policy
Lahr, Hana. Policymaking for college completion: How foundations make decisions about their education agendas. Sponsor: Kevin Dougherty.

TC / English Education
Alikhani, Maryam. Technical poetry: Teaching technical writing to engineering students through poetry and metaphors. Sponsor: Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz.

DuBose, Brennan. Making room: Creating space for Black boy's to tell their own stories. Sponsor: Ernest Morrell.

Falkner, Adam. A poet's room: Troubling tolerance, cultural ruptures & the dialogic curriculum. Sponsor: Ernest Morrell.

Gregory, Christian. Lecture, teacher talk, and discourse: A historiography of classroom talk. Sponsor: Ruth Vinz.

Kobrin, Jeffrey. The story of the moral. Sponsor: Ruth Vinz.

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

Pirsch, Moira. It's lit: A critical qualitative case study on Hip Hop education, spirituality and race. Sponsor: Ernest Morrell.

Scanlon, Patrick. Fastened from the start: Inquiry and the poetics of attention. Sponsor: Ruth Vinz.

TC / Kinesiology
Nosrat, Sanaz. Acute effects of resistance exercise intensity in a depressed HIV sample: The exercise for people who are immunocompromised (EPIC) study. Sponsor: Joseph Ciccolo.

TC / Mathematics Education
Yuan, Hong. Modes of aquisition of Shanghai mathematics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge within communities of practice. Sponsor: Erica Walker.

TC / Measurement and Evaluation
Muller, Eric. Diagnostic classification modeling of rubric-scored constructed-response items. Sponsor: James Corter.

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.

Rufsvold, Ronda. The impact of language input on deaf and hard-of-hearing preschool children who use listening and spoken language. Sponsor: Ye Wang.

TC / Politics and Education
Abrams, Samuel. 521 Fifth Avenue: The corporate makeover of education and its limits. Sponsor: Jeffrey Henig.

TC / School Psychology
Song, Vivian. An examination of note review and the testing effect on test performance. Sponsor: Stephen Peverly.

TC / Science Education
Asamani, Gifty. "Science ain't the enemy": Exploring the dimensions of Hip-Hop based science programs for urban Black/Brown girls. Sponsor: Christopher Emdin.

Hopkins, Kristina. Applications of the nature of science to teacher pedagogy through the situation of neuroscience within the context of daily classroom practice. Sponsor: Christopher Emdin.

TC / Social-Organizational Psychology
Catenacci-Francois, Lauren. An examination of learning agility & perceptions of psychological safety on performance. Sponsor: W. Warner Burke.

Pegues, DeMarcus. Professional and petty: An investigation into the social and individual conditions that promote instigated acts of workplace incivility between Black professionals. Sponsor: Peter Coleman.

TC / Speech and Language Pathology
Freeman, Ena. Phonovibratory influences from offset to onset in repeated phonation: A study of sung gestures using high-speed digital imaging. Sponsor: John Saxman.

Levinson, Lisa. Neural correlates of early-stage visual processing differences in developmental dyslexia. Sponsor: Karen Froud.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Art History and Archaeology
Bartel, Jens. Style, space and meaning in the large-scale landscape paintings of Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795).

Biomedical Engineering
Wang, Yi. Cochlear amplification and cochlear mechanics.

Biomedical Informatics
Da Graca Polubriaginof, Fernanda. Leveraging patient-provided data to improve understanding of disease risk.

Computer Science
Yuan, Xinhao. Effective detection and prevention of concurrency bugs.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Mejia, David. Bourgeoisie and masculinity: An intellectual dispute in the Spanish realist novel (1875-1890).

Materials Science and Engineering
Banerjee, Soham. Discrete cluster modeling of nanoparticle cores.

Cao, Wei. Study of spin dynamics in magnetic heterostructures using ferromagnetic resonance.

Philosophy
Cabezas Gamarra, César. Structural racism and the explanation of durable racial inequality.

Cullen, Conor. 'Only a God can save us': On the religious dimension of human life.

Rogach, Natalia. Educating the democratic character: Dewey's "Democracy and Education".

Political Science
Magiya, Yusuf. Limited threat of war and state building: A modified bellicist theory.

Ragazzoni, David. Partisanship before parties: Parts, factions, and the ethics of taking side, in theory and practice.

Resnick, Laura. The military myth: Modern warfare and the changing character of civil-military relations.

Psychology
Vuorre, Matti. Using visual illusions to examine actions' impact on perception.

Religion
Rahman, Ebadur. Alusi as a nineteenth century Sufi: Engaging with allusory readings of the Qur'an, Ibn 'Arabi and Sufi tariqas.

Read about the recent achievements of GSAS students:

• Five doctoral candidates in GSAS—Tania Bhattacharyya (History), Eunsung Cho (History), Susanna Ferguson (History), Robby Finley (Philosophy), and Sean O’Neil (History)—were awarded 2018 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships.
• Religion PhD student Quinn Clarkreceived a Fulbright-Nehru grant to conduct fieldwork in Lucknow, India, for his dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Muslim Saint Shrines and the Politics of Belonging.”
• Meadhbh McHugh, doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature, is adapting Louise O’Neill’s novel Asking for It for the Irish stage.
• Music PhD student John Glasenappspoke on air with Indiana Public Media about studying liturgical manuscripts from Medieval Europe.

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

At the 2018 GSAS Master’s SynThesis Competition, thirteen MA candidates showcased their expertise in a diverse array of subjects, including Asian immigrant labor in New York, the applications of machine learning to financial markets, print propaganda campaigns in Hungary, and secularism and identity in contemporary India. The students’ challenge: to distill their thesis research into just five minutes, and to make a compelling presentation to an audience composed of fellow students, faculty, and alumni.

“This competition celebrates our MA students and their excellent work,” Richard Slusarczyk, GSAS Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs, said of the event, which was held on May 3 in the Satow Room of Lerner Hall. “It also helps our master’s students to hone their presentation and persuasion skills, which will serve them in any profession.”

First prize was awarded to Katherine Capuder, from the MA program in East Asian Languages and Cultures, for her presentation “I wonder if Marx is crying in his grave”: An Exploration of the Marx Boy in Prewar Japan. Elly Kalfus (Oral History) earned second place for Ballots Over Bars: Incarcerated Peoples Fight for the Right to Vote in Massachusetts, and Julie Ciccolini (Human Rights Studies) took third place for Actuarial Injustice: Discrimination in Crime Prediction Software.

An interdisciplinary faculty panel judged the presentations for both content and style. The judges were Frédérique Baumgartner, lecturer and director of the MA program in Art History; Mary Marshall Clark, codirector and cofounder of the MA program in Oral History; Josh Drew, lecturer in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology and advisor for the MA program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology; and Line Lillevik, director of the MA/MSc program in International and World History.

Videos of the winning presentations will be published here soon.

To honor the life, work, and legacy of Devon T. Wade, a doctoral student in Sociology who was killed in a tragic act of violence, the Graduate School has instituted a new prize in his name, Dean Carlos J. Alonso announced on May 13, 2018, at the GSAS Convocation ceremony for doctoral graduates.

The Devon T. Wade Mentorship and Service Award will be given each year to a PhD candidate who embodies the ethos and activism that characterized Dr. Wade, in order to “turn Devon’s life into an inspiration for those who follow,” Dean Alonso said, after reflecting on Dr. Wade’s impact at Columbia and beyond.

Dean Alonso then presented Dr. Wade’s doctoral degree to his brother, Stevon Wade, and his mother, Suzanne Wade. At the time of his death, Dr. Wade had produced a first draft of his doctoral dissertation; the Department of Sociology recommended unanimously that the degree be awarded posthumously in recognition of this achievement.

Informed by his own upbringing in a low-income Houston neighborhood plagued by violence, Dr. Wade 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 accomplishments, Dr. Wade received while in graduate school several prestigious awards, including the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Fellowship, and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellowship.

Dr. Wade also worked closely with the Graduate School to ensure that diversity was always at the forefront of its 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 the Graduate School’s Summer Research Program as a graduate student mentor. Additionally, 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.

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Anthropology
Fox, Samantha. The afterlife of Utopia: Urban renewal in Germany's model socialist city. Sponsor: Catherine Fennell.

Art History and Archaeology
Bartel, Jens. Style, space and meaning in the large-scale landscape paintings of Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795). Sponsor: Matthew McKelway.

Cook, Lindsay. Architectural citation of Notre-Dame of Paris in the land of the Paris Cathedral Chapter. Sponsor: Stephen Murray.

Biological Sciences
Lin, Yu-Cheng. Redox-balancing strategies in pseudomonas aeruginosa. Sponsor: Lars Dietrich.

Biomedical Engineering
Chen, Timothy. Human tissue engineered model of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury. Sponsor: Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic.

Dang, Alex. Electrospun antibody-functionalized PDFM-based meshes for improved T cell expansion. Sponsor: Lance C. Kam.

Nayak, Samiksha. Development and evaluation of point-of-care diagnostic technologies for providers and consumers. Sponsor: Samuel Sia.

Biostatistics
Qiu, Xin. Statistical learning methods for personalized medicine. Sponsor: Yuanjia Wang.

Business
Chung, Jaeyeon. Possessions and the self. Sponsor: Gita Johar.

Chemical Engineering
Remolona, Miguel Francisco. Hybrid ontology learning materials engineering system for pharmaceutical product engineering. Sponsor: Venkat Venkatasubramanian.

Chemistry
Choi, Boyeon. Assembly of multifunctional materials using molecular cluster building blocks. Sponsor: Xavier Roy.

Classical Studies
Herz, Zachary. Playing the judge: Law and imperial communication in Severan Rome. Sponsor: Francesco de Angelis.

Classics
Brassel, Kate. In search of a corpus: Book and body in the satires of Persius. Sponsor: Gareth Williams.

Computer Science
Xie, Jinyu. Property testing of Boolean functions. Sponsor: Xi Chen.

Electrical Engineering
Subbaiah, Charishma. Electrically driven ion pumping in a single-walled carbon nanotube through Coulomb drag. Sponsor: Kenneth Shepard.

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

Epidemiology
Saito, Suzue. Effects of expanded access to antiretroviral therapy scale up on TB- and NCD-related health service utilization and mortality risk among HIV-negative populations in rural South Africa, 2009-2014. Sponsor: Pam Factor-Litvak.

French and Romance Philology
Maurer, Anais. Under the nuclear sun: Ecocritical literature and antinuclear struggle in the Pacific. Sponsor: Souleymane Diagne.

Myers, Sarah. Sensation and the city in Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Sponsor: Antoine Compagnon.

Germanic Languages
Hessling, Vincent. Talling technology contesting narratives of progress in modernist literature: Robert Walker, Paul Scheerbart, and Joseph Roth. Sponsor: Harro Mueller.

History
Kuzuoglu, Ulug. Codes of modernity: Chinese script during the global information revolution. Sponsor: Madeleine Zelin.

Tezcanli, Merve. Building sovereignty in the late Ottoman world: Imperial subjects, consular networks and documentation of individual identities. Sponsor: Rashid Khalidi.

Zakar, Adrien. The disembodied eye: War, space and visual technologies in Syria (1900-1946). Sponsor: Marwa Elshakry.

Italian
Bulla, Irene. 'Impossible Tales': Language, monstrosity and the fantastic in the fiction of Tommaso Landolfi and H.P. Lovecraft. Sponsor: Elizabeth Leake.

Mathematics
Cornish, James. Growth rate of 3-manifold homologies under branced covers. Sponsor: Robert Lipshitz.

Music
Fogg, Thomas. Expériences sonores: Music in postwar Paris and the changing sense of sound. Sponsor: George Lewis.

Reed, Trevor. Sonic sovereignty. Sponsor: Aaron Fox.

Physics
Tian, Yun. Open heavy flavor production in relativistic heavy ion collisions at LHC. Sponsor: Brian Cole.

Political Science
Mull, Nathaniel. Natural law and the idea of the secular state in early modern thought. Sponsors: Jean Cohen and Nadia Urbinati.

Psychology
Mohr, Rebecca. Psychological outcomes of prototypicality in marginalized group members. Sponsor: Geraldine Downey.

Vuorre, Matti. Using visual illusions to examine actions' impact on perception. Sponsor: Janet Metcalfe.

Social Work
Gundanna, Anita. Pan-ethnic organizational coalition-building: Process, structure, and identity work. Sponsor: Barbara Simon.

O'Hara, Kathleen. "My work belies my mental illness": The motivation for and impacts of mental health advocacy among individuals with psychiatric disabilities. Sponsor: Ellen Lukens.

Plaza, Rayven. Modern disintegration: Predictors and consequences of school resegregation. Sponsor: Julien Teitler.

TC / Clinical Psychology
Suzuki, Jessica. A qualitative investigation of psychotherapy clients' perceptions of positive regard. Sponsor: Barry Farber.

TC / Cognitive Science in Education
Albuquerque-Matos, Flore. Argumentative writing as a collaborative activity. Sponsor: Deanna Kuhn.

TC / English Education
Kobrin, Jeffrey. The story of the moral. Sponsor: Sheridan Blau.

TC / School Psychology
Silverman, Michelle. The relationship between adverse childhood experiences and sexual risk behavior among incarcerated male youth. Sponsor: Marla Brassard.

TC / Science Education
Rojas Perilla, Diego. Influence of preservice science teachers' beliefs and goals in the cognitive demand of learning tasks they design: A multiple case study. Sponsor: Felicia Moore Mensah.

TC / Speech and Language Pathology
Freeman, Ena. Phonovibratory influences from offset to onset in repeated phonation: A study of sung gestures using high-speed digital imaging. Sponsor: John Saxman.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Biomedical Informatics
Romano, Joseph. Computational toxinology reveals actionable opportunities for drug discovery.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Hwang, Junggeun. Settlement of Millennium Tower in San Francisco.

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Min, Elizabeth. How do herbivores tip the tundra's carbon balance?.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Ishida, Yuki. The concepts of literature, human agency, and translation practices in Modern Japan: 1870s-1950s.

Komova, Ekaterina. Affect and emotional communities in 'Genji monogatari' and its reception.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Heilpern, Sebastian. Predicting the vulnerability of ecosystem functions and services to biodiversity loss: Amazonian fisheries and food security.

Huddell, Alexandra. Reaction nitrogen losses from agricultural frontiers.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Mendez, Alexandra. Writing the new: Poetry and politics between Venice and Andalusia.

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Ghosh, Samyak. Literacy and political imagination in northeastern India, 1670-1830.

Malak, Karim. Counting colonialism: Calculation, Egypt, Britain and the Ottoman Empire.

Philosophy
Britto, Arthur. Brentano on continuum and boundaries.

Zhang, Lin. Kant's conceptual and methodological critique of the human sciences.

At GSAS Convocation on May 13, thousands of loved ones, faculty, and staff gathered on the Morningside Campus to celebrate 350 graduating doctoral students and 600 graduating master’s students.

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

PhD graduates line up in Lerner Hall.

Family time before the PhD ceremony.

PhD candidates take their seats for the ceremony.

Devon T. Wade’s PhD in Sociology is awarded posthumously and received by his brother, Stevon Wade, and mother, Suzanne Wade.

Yelena Zhuravlev, a graduate of the PhD program in Genetics and Development, delivers the candidate’s remarks.

Dean Carlos J. Alonso greets Ashley Greer, PhD candidate in Applied Behavioral Analysis, and her son.

PhD candidates return to their seats after the presentation of the graduates.

Faculty applaud the doctoral graduates as they leave the ceremony.

MA candidates process to the ceremony from Butler Library.

MA graduates take their seats.

A pre-ceremony selfie.

A round of applause for the mothers in the audience.

David B. Madigan, Executive Vice President for Arts and Sciences, delivers the keynote address to the MA graduates.

Jonah Ortiz, MA candidate in Political Science, addresses the Class of 2018.

Dean Alonso greets Jacqueline Altamirano Marin, MA candidate in Human Rights Studies, as her name is read.

Pre-Arrival Requirements

Where can I find my UNI, and how do I activate it?
Your UNI can be found in an email from the GSAS Office of Admissions that you receive within ten days of accepting the offer of admission and paying your tuition deposit. If you cannot find the email containing your UNI, please write to gsas-admissions [at] columbia.edu to request that your UNI be sent to you again. Alternatively, you can look up your UNI through CUIT. For instructions on activating your UNI and your Columbia email address, please visit the CUIT website.

What are the required pre-arrival tutorials, and where can I access them?
Before you arrive on campus, you must complete several tutorials: the Academic Integrity and Responsible Conduct of Research tutorial and the Sexual Respect tutorials. These tutorials must be completed before you are allowed to register for classes. Instructions on accessing the tutorials will be sent to you via email in July. Please note that information regarding the Sexual Respect tutorial may come from the Office of University Life.

How will I know whether the GSAS Office of Admissions has received my official transcript(s)?
The easiest and fastest way to determine whether your transcript(s) have been received is to log in to your Application Status page. Please note that the GSAS Office of Admissions must receive your official transcript(s) by August 31. If you fail to submit your official transcript(s) to the Office of Admissions, a hold will be placed on your spring registration.

I have an immunization hold on my registration. How can I have this hold removed?
In order to have an immunization hold lifted, you must submit your immunization records to Columbia’s Immunization Office. You will not be permitted to register until the Immunization Office has received these records. Please note that you will not be contacted by the Immunization Office unless your records are incomplete. You may determine whether the immunization hold has been lifted by logging in to SSOL. Please contact the Immunization Office with any questions at immunizationcompliance [at] columbia.edu or (212) 854-7210.

Where can I receive assistance with I-20 and/or other visa issues?
International students should contact the International Students and Scholars Office with any questions or concerns regarding visas.

Orientation

Where can I find information about GSAS New Student Orientation?
GSAS New Student Orientation for the 2018-2019 academic year will be held on Wednesday, August 29, 2018. Programming will include an information session, a resource fair, and a barbecue with live music. Detailed information, including specific times, will be announced to incoming students via email in July.

Registration

When will I be able to register for courses?
Fall registration for incoming students opens in late August. To determine the specific dates and times when you can register, log in to SSOL and click on “Registration Appointments” in the menu. Registration appointments are published in SSOL in mid-August.

How do I register?
Registration primarily takes place online, through SSOL. For a complete overview of the registration process, please refer to the Registration section of the GSAS website.

If I cannot register until late August, will there still be open spots in the courses I want to take?
Courses generally will have open seats when registration begins. If you find that no seats remain in the course(s) you wish to take, you may join the waitlist.

How do I join a course’s waitlist?
If a course is full when you register for it through SSOL, you will be placed automatically on that course’s waitlist. Most waitlists are managed automatically on a first-come, first-served basis, and you will be enrolled in the class should a seat become available. Please do not submit a Registration Adjustment Form to the GSAS Office of Student Affairs if you are on an SSOL-managed waitlist. Other waitlists are managed manually by the course instructor. If this is the case, please contact the instructor to request a spot on the course’s waitlist. For more information about course waitlists, please visit the Registrar’s website.

May I take courses in schools other than GSAS?
Students may take some courses in other graduate schools at Columbia through cross-registration. Use the Directory of Classes to confirm that courses are open to GSAS students before beginning the cross-registration process. Please also consult your program administrator before submitting a Registration Adjustment Form to the GSAS Office of Student Affairs to enroll in courses offered by other schools.

Housing

When can I move into my campus housing?
Once you have signed your rental agreement with University Apartment Housing (UAH), you will be allowed to move into your housing. You will need to schedule an appointment to sign your agreement; this may be done through your Housing Portal account. Please visit the UAH website for details and contact Kei Phillip, GSAS liaison to UAH, with any questions at k.phillip [at] columbia.edu.

Does Columbia assist students with finding housing off campus?
Columbia’s Off-Campus Housing Assistance (OCHA) is an excellent resource for students who will be living off campus. OCHA provides information about renting apartments in New York, operates a database for University-managed sublets, and offers a “roommate board” where students may search for roommates and open rooms.

Billing and Financing

How do I view my bill and pay my tuition?
Columbia no longer sends paper tuition statements or accepts cash or check payments. All billing is done electronically through SSOL. There you may view your bill by semester or month and pay your balance.

Does Columbia offer funding for MA students?
Please visit the Financing Your Education section of the GSAS website to learn about financing options for MA students. You may also consult your program about discipline-specific opportunities. External resources, such as Foundation Center, may also be helpful.

Eight Columbia PhD candidates in the Arts and Sciences were among the recipients of prestigious 2018 fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Five students were awarded the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which supports the final year of dissertation writing for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences; two students received the Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, which offers funding for one year of dissertation writing on American art; and one student received the Luce/ACLS Predissertation-Summer Travel Grant in China Studies, which funds preparations for basic dissertation research in China.

Find below a full list of the Graduate School’s 2018 ACLS fellowship recipients.

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship

Tania Bhattacharyya
Doctoral candidate in History
Ocean Bombay: Space, Itinerancy, and Community in an Imperial Port City, 1839-1945

Eunsung Cho
Doctoral candidate in History
The Thread of Juche: Vinalon, a Figuration between Science and Society in North Korea, 1948-1970

Susanna Ferguson
Doctoral candidate in History
Tracing Tarbiya: Women, Childrearing, and Education in Egypt and Lebanon, 1850-1939

Robby Finley
Doctoral candidate in Philosophy
Logic in Accounts of the Potential and Actual Infinite

Sean O’Neil
Doctoral candidate in History
The Art of Signs: Symbolic Notation and Visual Thinking in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1750

Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art

Courtney A. Fiske
Doctoral candidate in Art History and Archaeology
Rethinking Postminimalism: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Cut, ca. 1970

Abbe C. Schriber
Doctoral candidate in Art History and Archaeology
For a Politics of Obscurity: David Hammons and Black Experimentalism, 1974-1989

Luce/ACLS Predissertation-Summer Travel Grant in China Studies

Nataly Shahaf
Doctoral candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures
The Making of Art Society in Early Twentieth-Century China

Twenty graduating MA and PhD students gathered to celebrate their achievements—and the family, friends, and faculty who have supported them throughout their academic careers—at the inaugural Students of Color Alliance (SoCA) Commencement ceremony, held on May 11 at the Joseph D. Jamail Lecture Hall in Journalism Hall. The event was designed to supplement school- and university-wide graduation ceremonies by providing additional recognition for graduate students from marginalized communities.

“This first-ever Students of Color Graduation is an occasion of great joy, but it is an event that arises from the fact that being a graduate student at Columbia is not a condition that is lived by all students as the same interchangeable experience,” GSAS Dean Carlos J. Alonso said in his opening remarks. “This event is a recognition of shared difficulties and obstacles, as much as it is of the shared satisfaction in overcoming those impediments.”

The student remarks were delivered by Jacqueline Altamirano Marin, MA candidate in Human Rights Studies and programs coordinator of SoCA, who thanked those in attendance.

“Our name on the diploma is a placeholder for the countless people who have invested time, love, and support throughout our lives,” said Altamirano Marin, who also planned the ceremony.

During the central point of the event, graduating students were announced individually by name, and ascended the stage to receive a certificate and SoCA honor cords to wear with their academic regalia.

In the keynote address, Alondra Nelson, Professor of Sociology, highlighted the uniqueness of the students’ paths—and the lack of diversity that persists in the academy—through recent census data: fewer than 2% of people in the United States over age 25 have earned a doctoral degree, and approximately 9% have earned master’s degrees; within those already small populations, students from minority backgrounds represent only about 20% of the total.

“You are special. You are rare,” Professor Nelson said to the graduates. “And all of us here are immensely proud of you, deeply in awe of you, and very much appreciating the added toll you have paid in accomplishing the extraordinary feat of achieving your graduate degrees.”

The ceremony also paid tribute to Devon T. Wade, a PhD candidate in Sociology and founding member of SoCA, who was killed in a tragic act of violence on November 26, 2017. Professor Nelson compared Dr. Wade’s activism to that of Ida B. Wells.

“He was one of the people most committed to social transformation and social justice that I have ever known. He also understood how important research was to his activist work,” Professor Nelson said of Dr. Wade. “While he never confused one for the other, he knew they were inextricably linked.”

Recognizing the success of the event, SoCA plans to make it an annual occasion, said Francisco Lara-García, PhD student in Sociology and co-chair of SoCA: “We hope this will be established as a rite of passage at Columbia: an integral part of the pomp and circumstance that makes Commencement Week so special for everyone.”

Please find below the titles of MA theses submitted in the Spring 2018 term.

African-American Studies
Daniel Armstrong-Morales. Black DiaspoRicans: Finding Home in the Colonial Hurricane of Invisibility and Displacement.

Marissa E. Morris. Unapologetically Black and Free: How Black Female Show Creators, Writers, and Directors Shift Film Language to Liberate Black Women on Screen.

Damion K. Scott. Afrofuturism and Black Futurism: Some Ontological and Semantic Considerations.

American Studies
Eliza Page Carter. Prosecutors in Media.

Bud-Erdene Gankhuyag. Illegible Demands: Racialized Labor, Law, and Life in New York Asian Immigrant Communities.

John P. McShane. Yelling to Keep from Crying: White Masculine Self-Critique in Contemporary American Comedy.

Julissa Peña. “You lived next door; you shared the same cockroaches”: Anti-Racist Solidarity and Collaborative Activism in the Post-World War II Bronx, 1960s-1970s.

Amber Kristina Thomas. “Like, Comment, and Subscribe”: How YouTube is Changing the Black Hair Care Business and Complicating Hairstyle Aesthetics For Black Women.

Gianina Iryn Wilson. More Than A Stereotype: The Fetishization of Black Women in Music after the Civil Rights Movement.

Art History
Sarah Bigler. A Turn-of-the-Century Tastemaker: Frederick Keppel and American Print Collecting.

Drew Lash. Jacob the Christian: Pictorial Exegesis of the Old Testament Patriarch in Seventeenth-Century Spain.

Mark Paul. Rules of Reality: Ornament and Abstraction in So-Called Third Style Roman Wall Painting (circa 20 BCE–20 CE).

Julia Reynolds. Édouard Vuillard: Experiments in Color, 1890-1901.

Tori Schmitt. Purification of a Lady: Translating the Medieval Purification Drama at Notre Dame d’Amiens.

Hanna Wiegers. Up, Down, and Around: Experimentation and Expression in French Royal Staircases from 1540 to 1589.

Biotechnology
Edward Ka Chin. Cancer Immunotherapy: Current Status and Future Directions.

Lauren Cuje. An Assessment of Targeted Docosahexaenoic Acid as a Prophylactic Treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease.

Frank DeVita. Information and Method: Logic for Translational Science.

Alejandro Garcia Diaz. Development and Evaluation of New Motor Neuron Reporter Cell Lines Generated by CRISPR/Cas9 Engineering of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells.

Irena Gushterova. Identification and Functional Characterization of the Novel LAMTOR1-AKT1 Fusion Gene in a Case of Pediatric Mesothelioma.

Christine D. Han. The G-Protein Coupled Receptor: The Cell Signal Controller.

Catherine Mary Heffner. Studying Isolated Synapses with Microfluidic Devices: Evaluation and Application to Alzheimer’s Disease Research.

Alice Yue Hou. Gene Therapy for Inherited and Non-Inherited Retinal Disorders.

Philippa Amalia Wyndham Jones. A Review of the Development of Autologous Transplantation of Olfactory Ensheathing Cells as a Novel Therapy for Spinal Cord Injury.

Michael Kaufhold. Translational Bioinformatics and the Future of Precision Healthcare in a Data-Driven Society.

Salaar Rehman Khan. Advancing Osseointegration of Implanted Biomaterials in the Maxilla and Mandible.

Irina Kulichenkova. The Importance of Personalized and Narrative Medicine in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Chad Moles. Synthetic Biology and Genome Engineering Go Viral to Develop Next-Generation Vaccines and Therapeutics.

Derek Evan White. CRISPR-Cas9 Based Therapeutic Approaches for Hematological Diseases.

Jarrell Simon Wiley. An Overview of the Epidemiology, Diagnostics, Pathogenesis, and Treatments of NAFLD/NASH.

Naina Zaman. Exploring the Use of Genomic Deletions Created by Modern Gene-Editing Tools for Disease Modeling and Treatment.

East Asia: Regional Studies
Shuo Han. Perspectivising Chinese Authoritarian Rule: A Study of Mass Media and Ideological Discourse.

Jiaxin Jacelyn Lin. A Three-Way Courtship: The Chinese Consulate, the Huaqiao, and the British in Singapore, 1877-1911.

Yutong (Lily) Liu. Democracy and Education: Why Expanded Higher Education Has Not Led to a More Democratic China.

Adena Peckler. Safety First: Analysis of the Public Sphere’s Relation to South Korea’s Internet Model.

Nicholas Reinhold. Japanese Threat Perceptions and Defense Planning Regarding East Asia, 2012-2017.

Liying Shen. Nationalist Boycotts in Contemporary China: A Case Study of China’s Anti-South Korea Boycotts in Response to the Deployment of THAAD.

Yong Wei Tan. The Power of Song! Sing! China and the Politics of Identity in China and Singapore.

Ziwei (Edgar) Wang. The Political Economy of Chinese Cities: How the Cadre System Interacts with Prefectural Level Municipality Hierarchy.

Liuli Zhang. Expansion or Unification: A Historiographic Study of the Qing-Zunghar War in the Seventeenth Century.

Jiajia Zhou. Fighting Child Poverty through the Third Sector in Neoliberal Japan: Analyzing Its Role and Impact from Historical and Political Perspectives.

East Asian Languages and Cultures
Katherine Capuder. “I wonder if Marx is crying in his grave”: An Exploration of the Marx Boy in Prewar Japan.

Karissa Caputo. Youth are the Hope of the Nation: A Case Study of Chinese Millennials’ Hope and Ensuing Action.

Yiran Cheng. Chinese History through a Freudian Eye: Chinese Intellectuals’ Literary Engagement with Psychoanalysis in the 1920s.

Quyao Chen. Modern Stars in Early Republican China: The Construction of Chinese Female Stardom, 1920-1937.

Yu Cheng. Colonial Railway and Economic Change: A Historical Case of Manchuria and Its Coal Mining Industry.

Yao Huang. On the Evolution of Ba Construction from the Perspective of Syntax/Semantics Interface.

Sulim Kim. Ondol Socialism: Socialist Life Expressed through North Korean Urban Spaces.

Xiang Li. Text, Space, and Ritual: The Conception of Oblivion in Tomb-Quelling Texts from Eastern Han China.

Junmin Liu. The History of Chinese Cooks (from Tang to Qing).

Mingxi Liu. Landscape in Exile: An Examination of the Exilic Writings Composed in Manchuria at Early Qing (1644-1683).

Scott Douglas Miller. Minding Mountains: Matagi Identity and Land Use in Modern Japan.

Di Luo. Carrying but Not Showing: Hanxu (含蓄) as a Cinematic Aesthetic.

Jennifer Reynolds Strange. Synthesizing Language: The Development of Organic Chemistry Nomenclature in China.

Chia-Chen Tsai. Constructing Physical and Mental Distance: The Xiang Deities in Chu Ci Poems and Paintings.

Guanyi Wang. Grammaticalization and Common Usages of the Classifier Ge in Modern Chinese.

Youlan Yu. The Building of the Images of “Nefarious Officials” and “Rebellious Officials” in the New Tang History (Xin Tang shu).

Yushuang Zheng. Rescuing “Paradise”: Gentry Businessman Ding Bing and the Reconstruction of Hangzhou after the Taiping Civil War, 1864-1899.

Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology
Emily Chou. Modeling humpback whale breeding habitats and assessing potential overlap with cumulative anthropogenic impacts in the Gulf of Guinea.

Jessica Espinosa. Life in Plastic, It’s (Not) Fantastic: The Effects of Coastal Pollution on Hermit Crabs in Fiji.

Lauren Naylor.Evidence of Human Influence on the Coastal Environment: Establishing an Impact Gradient Using Stable Isotope Analysis and Morphology Data.

Shannon Murphy. Understanding the Movement of Manta Rays (Mobula alfredi) in Papua New Guinea to Inform Conservation Management.

Christian Rivera.Assessing Ecological and Social Dimensions of Success in a Community-Based Sustainable Harvest Program.

Alex Procton. Within-group social cohesion and between-group aggression in blue monkeys.

Claire Goelst. Mapping Patterns of Mortality Around Protected Areas: Assessing spatial variation in conflict risk for African lions (Panthera leo) in Etosha National Park, Namibia.

Jessica Hoch. Soil fungal communities, plant-fungal interactions, and ecosystem services on New York City green roofs.

Neha Savant. Genomic structure and connectivity of long-tail salamanders across ponds and streams: Using genomics to inform management of a threatened species.

Adam Pekor.Incentive Payments as a Means of Mitigating Human-Lion Conflict in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

English and Comparative Literature
Sandra Abramowicz. “Some Dark Combination”: Capitalism, Counterculture, and Narrative Collapse in Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger.

B. Alex Alston. On the Problem and Possibility of the Non-Human Animal in Afro-American Literature.

Florence Ang. Why Be Straight, When You Can Be Happy: The Generative Potential of Unhappiness in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.

Samuel Barber. Digression within W. G. Sebald’s Labyrinths.

Michaela Brawn. Marriage and Money: A Naturalist Reading of the Failure of Relationship and the Plight of Being a Woman in Fashionable New York Society in Selected Works of Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Sheila Byers.“Excuse Emily and her Atoms”: Dickinson’s Materialist Poetics.

Marcelo Castro Salinas. “True Places,” “Strange Beings” and “Gibberish”: Epistemological Limits of Melville’s Oceanic Themes and Narratives.

Wendy Cheng. The Real Charlotte: The Upper Class Feminist Ontological Experiments, Soul-Stirring, and Joyce.

Katrina Dzyak. Biodiversity and the Lyric Form: Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson.

John Fitzgerald. Satanic Sovereignty and the Linguistic Performance of Power.

Mia Florin-Sefton. “Behold the Coagula”: Transfer, Get Out, and the Materials of Life.

Emily Foster. Drowning and the Drowned: Four Forms of Self-Erasure in George Eliot’s Fiction.

Evyan Gainey. “Inscrib’d with woe”: “Lycidas” and the Homoerotics of Natural Philosophy.

Xiaoyue Isabel Guan. Naming and Clothing in The Roaring Girl.

Antonia Halstead. The Subordination of Living Beings: Representation and Commodification in Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of Barbados.

Rose Howell. “Internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are –”: Dickinson’s Animate Poetics.

Marie Hubbard. Theorizing the World of Letters from Below in Jorge Amado’s Tenda dos Milagres.

Tyler Huxtable. Living in Genomic Time: Temporality, Rupture, and Multispecies Humanity in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.

Alec Joyner. The Curiosity of Curiosity: Satire, Realism, Affect, and Gender in Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed and Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel.

Chris Klippenstein. “Reading and Pointing”: Textual Proliferation in Ralph Roister Doister.

Bo McMillan. Native Son: An Urban Planning Novel.

Andrea Penman-Lomeli. Industrialisation, accumulation, and capitalist temporality in Bolaño’s 2666.

Madeline Rivlin. Inheritance in Little Dorrit.

Kieran Rock. Essential Distance: Violence, Affect, and the Non-Combatant in H.G. Wells’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through.

Andrew Slater. Iraq’s Landscape of Trauma in Mahdi Issa Al-Saqr’s House on the Tigris.

Priscilla Sol. Labor Outside the Veil: Du Bois and Black Investment in White Humanity.

Sam Yee. (Ref)Using Invisibility and (Re)Figuring Justice: Women-Led Restorative Justice Models in Morrison’s Novels.

European History, Politics, and Society
Brandon Allen. A Victorian Experiment: The Social History of Amnesty International in Britain, 1962-1967.

Melissa Bosem. At the Feet of Giants: Monumental Remains and the Construction of National Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine.

Joseph Dammann. Russian State Media in the 2017 French Presidential Election.

Ryan Eavenson. The Romanian Association for Strengthening Relations with the Soviet Union (ARLUS), Literature, and Soviet Soft Power in Romania, 1944-1964.

Meyer Horne. Impossible Hope: Riots, Resistance, and Resilience in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Sarah Roth. Operation Focus: The Controversial Role of Print Propaganda in the Lead-Up to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.

French and Romance Philology
Joo Kyung Lee. Odeurs of the Past: Nostalgic Spatiotemporality in Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya, Cyclo, and The Vertical Ray of the Sun.

Sophia Mo. Penser la textualité globale de l’image «défilée»: Un fil à suivre dans l’œuvre de Leïla Sebbar.

Global Thought
Lucia Helen Appelquist. Preparing for a Multilingual World: How Every Student in the United States Can Be an Emergent Bilingual.

Michelle Armine Aslanyan. Deportation of Mexicans and Central Americans: Brain Drain or Brain Gain?

Julia Biango. From Rhetoric to Action: The Challenges of Operationalizing Participation in Development.

Ripsime Biyazyan. Self-Determination: Policy Recommendations for Artsakh.

Alejandra Carrillo. El Sol and Its Rays: How Solar Energy Radiates through Both Micro-Entrepreneurship and FDI to Increase Rural and Urban Growth.

Leanna Carroll. Conflict in the Classroom: Implementing Social-Emotional Learning National Curriculum in Lebanon to Meet the Needs of Syrian Refugee Students.

Aditi Chadha. The Future of “Us” Lies in “Conscious.”

Anne Skylar Chapin. Social Enterprise Solutions: Economy and Empowerment in Eradicating Poverty.

Marlin John Gutierrez McCoy. Transnational Law and Asylum Seekers in the European Union.

Mane Hovhannisyan. Reasons Behind: A Historical Analysis of the Rohingya Crisis.

Kriti Jain. Project-Based Learning: A Potential Solution to the Issue of “Employability” in India.

Lara Kok. Cultural Fragmentation in Globalizing America: Demystifying the “Rural-Urban Divide” in the 2016 USA Presidential Elections.

Wenwen Ma. Rising China’s Soft Power: The Case of the Confucius Institute.

Xueyan (Sherry) Mao. The Returning Sea Turtles: Movement of Chinese Students Going to the United States and Back Again.

Jolyn Ng Hui Yan. A shrimp between two whales? How middle powers balance between competing great power interests: The case of South Korea’s foreign policies towards China during the Park Geun-hye administration.

Boluji Oluwaseun Odufote. Exploring the significance and implications of private provision through enclave infrastructure in Nigeria.

Andrew Ryan. The Medellin Model: A New Way Forward for Sustainable Development.

Bianca Sanabria. Public-Private Partnerships: A Development Model for Creating Sustainable Telemedicine Networks in Low-Income and Low-Middle-Income Countries.

Sarah Sim Yin Zhen. The Politics of Private Space: Exploring the Use of Public Housing to Establish Normative Family Structure in Singapore.

Manasa Sitaram. Transnational Trajectories: Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Taipei, and the Rise of Technological Networks.

Alexandra Tartaglia. Presidential Campaigns: Music and the Heroic Narrative in the Age of the Internet.

Rodolpho Valente Bayma. The Global Declaration of Interdependence? The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the New Ethics for Development.

Salma Wehbe. Making Money and Doing Good: The Role of Mobile Technology in Creating a Win-Win Strategy for Multinational Corporations and Street Vendors in Lagos, Nigeria.

Dominique Yong Zheng Yi. Building Diplomatic Relations: America’s Architectural Identity, 1945-Present.

Hispanic Studies
Brianna Gutierrez. Life on the Street and the Stage: An Investigation on the Representation of Translatin@ in American and Latin American Documentaries from 1990 to 2017.

Human Rights Studies
Jacqueline Altamirano Martin Cervantes.“¿Por Qué Migrar? Porque Quise Correr y Volar”: An Exploration of Women’s Motivations for Mexico-US Migration.

Julie Ciccolini. Actuarial Injustice: Discrimination in Crime Prediction Software.

Jacob Moreno Coplon. Brown vs. Brownsville: Why Today’s Black Activists Are Challenging the School Desegregation Paradigm.

Lily Jacobi. The Intersection of Abortion Access and Human Rights In Humanitarian Settings.

Aikaterini Katsouri. The Semantics of Transitional Justice and National Reconciliation in Syria: An Approach to Long-Term Peace.

Pegah Malek-Ahmadi. Human Rights in Non-International Armed Conflicts.

Iamê Manucci. Unsustainaburger: SDGs and the links between migrant labor, industrial livestock, and the environment.

Jennifer Millett-Barrett. Bound by Silence: Psychological Effects of the Traditional Oath Ceremony Used in the Sex Trafficking of Nigerian Women and Girls.

Marial Quezada. Translating Intercultural Bilingual Education into Practice: The Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico City.

Luiz Henrique Reggi Pecora. Development with culture and identity and regional human rights bodies: A comparison on the concept of development adopted by decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Commission and Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in light of indigenous peoples’ self-determined development.

Stephanie Roe. Deportation under Obama and Trump: A Contrasting Examination of Immigration Legislation and Their Real and Perceived Impact under Different Administrations.

Shibanee Sivanayagam. Tamil Eelam: Inevitably a Dream? Tamil Nationalism and the Right to Self-Determination.

Alexander Sieber. Towards Spiritual Dignity, Opting Out of Neoliberalism’s Cultural Imperialism.

Yiruo Zhang. White-Collar Gender Discrimination in China: How the Legal System Fails to Protect Women's Employment Rights.

International and World History
Clara Aseniero. Zones of Civilisation: The History of Conservation and National Parks in American Colonial Philippines, 1900-1932.

Allison Bailey. The Brothers’ Older Sister: Zaynab al-Ghazali and the International Splinters of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Boye (Jessica) Bian. Identity Issues of Japanese War Orphans and Its Relations with Japanese Social and Political Structures from 1972-1982.

Salaina Catalano. When It Happened Here: Global Fascism Comes to Michigan, 1920-1945.

Carla Coley. “A Bodyguard of Lies”: The British Security Coordination and the Secret War for the United States, 1940-1942.

Joseph DeRosa. Beduphobia, Beduphilia: Competing Conceptions of Bedouin among British Commanders of the Arab Legion (1930-39).

Malcolm Elliott. Creation and operation of the Liberian-American Swedish Mining Company (LAMCO) between the mid-1950s to the early 1960s.

Sally Greenland. Killer Queens: Women, Loyalty, and the Mongol War Machine.

Olivia Grobocopatel. Capitalizing on the idea of working together: Argentina's path towards the Declaration of Foz de Iguazu.

Jasmine Hoti. “Manipulation of Heterogeneous Identities”: Pakistan and the resilience of Afghan Refugees, 1979-1989.

Stella Kim. Mobilizing Motherhood: Gendered Discourses of War and Empire in Colonial Korea, 1937-1945.

Jiayi Li. Politicizing Science: China and the World Federation of Scientific Workers, 1956-1966.

Patrick Liddle. The Lingua Franca of White Supremacy: Occultism, the WUNS, and the Internationalization of the Radical Right, 1958-1970.

Mark Markov. “I Consider Man-of-War Essential Here Immediately”: The Evacuation of Black British Subjects during the 1863 New York Draft Riots.

Giancarlo Milea. The NATO Dual-Track Decision in Italy: Power, Politics, and Sovereignty in Public Diplomacy during the Crisis of Détente, 1977-1980.

Anisha Padma. Histories from Fragments: A Study of the African Cavalry Guards.

Alex Royt. Businesslike Communists: Soviet Finance and the Crisis of International Capital, 1919-1924.

Abigail Schoenfeld. Flipping the Script: Alphabet Reform in Turkey and Soviet Azerbaijan, 1922-1928.

Elizabeth Tribone. Curbing Fertility: Birth Control Discourse and Population Control in India, 1935-1977.

Zhao (Afra) Wang.“Shadow Governor” Xu Jiatun and Xinhua News Agency in Hong Kong: 1983-1989.

Latin America and the Caribbean: Regional Studies
Tainá Machado Castro. Lobbying Regulation, Transparency, and Democratic Governance in Brazil: Implementing a Framework for Integrity in Lobbying.

Roberta Politi. #NiUnaMenos:Innovations and Persistent Challenges to Mobilization against Gender-Based Violence in the Age of Social Media in Latin America.

Dane Schultz. Sonic Layers of Timba: Musical Genealogies, Ethnopoetics, and Performance Practices of Alexander Abreu y Havana D´Primera.

Benjamin Woods. Developing Argentina as a Strategic Partner: Where Do We Go from Here?

Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Barbara F. Wolf. Rules of Evidence in the English Medieval Court, 1268–1499

Estevan Alemán. “Walking Cities”: Spatial Unfixity and Ethnic Mobility in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 and 2.

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Karim Elhaies. Revisiting Social Realism in Post-1967 Film: Towards a Critique of the Fall and Rise of Egyptian Cinema.

Yanki Hancioglu. The point of no return? Conceptualizing the institutionalization of the Turkish Armed Forces’ role in politics via the 27 May 1960 coup d’etat.

Oral History
Desmond Jakaahn Austin-Miller. A Thesis on Blackness: Testimonies from Young Black Professionals.

Elyse Blennerhassett. Here I Am, Buried Alive.

Shira Hudson. Inspiration and Vision for The Oral History Hub NYC.

Elly Kalfus. Ballots Over Bars: The Fight for A Voice.

Filip Mazurczak. Why We Stayed: Poland's Remaining Jews' Experiences, Identities, and Reasons for Not Emigrating, 1939-2018.

Rachel Unkovic. “You Dive into the Chaos”: A Second-Person Exploration of Careers in Humanitarian Aid.

Robin Weinberg. Business Plan and Vision for a Community-Based Multimedia Oral History Project for Westport, Connecticut.

Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences
Anece Ahn. Cross-Cultural Study on Materialism and Universal Values across Time.

Shafat Alam. Machine Learning in the Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities Market.

Sophie Beiers. Bullied Students in Donald Trump’s America: A Study of the “Trump Effect” in Middle and High Schools across the US.

Tom Mikael Brunila. Whiteout: One Year of ICE Immigration Raids in the US Media.

Jon Campbell. Automatic Music Genre Classification with Random Forests.

Wei Quan (Kenneth) Chee. Welfare to Work: How Has the Exit from TANF Welfare Program Impacted Welfare Recipients’ Employment and Poverty Status?

Wanlun Chen. Airports: Competition or Cooperation? The Influence of Neighboring Airports on Airport Performance in the United States.

Eric Chiou. Statistical Learning to Predict High-School Dropouts.

Nathan Colbert. Neural Style Transfer: The Final Frontier in Electronic Music?

Bradley Doremus. Post-Recession US Migration Trends: A Gravity Model Estimation of Urban Lifestyle Preference.

Nathan Fabius. New Evidence on United States Trade Diplomacy: A Quantitative Approach to State Department Communications.

Vlada Gromova. Indian Onion Supply Chain: Government Intervention and Price Volatility.

Christina Iacovides. Economic Policy Uncertainty and Exchange Rate Return Volatility in the UK: An EGARCH Model Analysis.

Jacob Jeppesen. Who Votes What and Why? An Empirical Examination of Voting.

Ye Jun Kim. Are Dual-Class Share Structures Always Costly to Firms?

Nikhil Kotecha. Bach2Bach: Generating Music Using a Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach.

Stephanie Langeland. Investment Advice from the Federal Open Market Committee.

Jonathan Leventhal. American Media Responses to Acts of Terror.

Paddy Mark. Investigating the Existence of Dutch Disease in Oil Exporting Countries between 2009 and 2016.

David Medina Hernandez. The Impact of Universal Firearm Background Checks on Crime Rates and Death Rates.

Simon Rimmele. Cities Are Already Smart: Urban Spatiotemporal Prediction with Gaussian Processes.

Becca Siegel. Polling We Can’t Believe In: Community Influence and Misreporting in Political Polling.

Nicole Smith. Heterogeneity of Cash Transfer Programs: Revisiting Field Experiments in Malawi and Morocco Using Bayesian Additive.

Jiaqi Tan. The Effect of Building New Runways on Flight Delays: Time Series Analysis.

Wei Lun Tan. Evaluating the Local Spatial Effectiveness of the New York City Vision Zero Action Plan.

Nathan Taylor. Equal Endowments? Racial Wealth Disparities and Inheritances’ Impact on Net Worth.

Connor Wahrman. Competing to Be Corrupt: A Quantitative Analysis of the Dynamics behind Public Procurement Bribery in Latin America.

Chris Woodward. Where Are You Going? Predicting Human Mobility in the Bay Area.

Weida Xu. A comparison of supervised learning methods for housing valuation prediction in Moscow, Russia.

Emi Yamaka. J-curve effects in Japan: The difference between the 1980s-1990s and the 2000s.

Emma Yarborough. Has the Legalization of Marijuana Affected Opioid Deaths in the United States?

Yicheng Zhao. Highflyers in China: Subnational Leaders and Local Expenditures.

Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe: Regional Studies
Abby Downing-Beaver. Soviet Language Policy and Its Effects on Modern States.

Oktavia Catsaros. Does Energy Dependency Drive the Foreign Policies of Hungary and Serbia?

Andres Fernandez. Eastern Pivot: Hungary-Russia Relations under Viktor Orbán.

Kerri Matulis. The Question of Universal Human Rights Norms: Securitizing Identity in the Soviet Union and Russia.

William Persing. Belarusian and Ukrainian Responses to Russian Energy Policy.

David Pruden. A New World Financial Order? The Sino-Russian Strategic Partnership and US Economic Hegemony since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

Jack Stein. The Russian Military Transformed: Crimea and Eastern Ukraine as Test Cases for the New Look, 2014-2015.

Sociology
Fenghua Chen. The Professional Autonomy of Architects: A Field Approach.

Alejandra Cueto. Agency in question: The joy of the street versus formal employment.

Samuel Donahue. Somebody’s Watching You: Surveillance, Social Media, and Autonomy among New York Youth.

Yongchao Jing. Socioeconomic Background, Cultural Capital, and Earnings Inequality among Bachelor Graduates in the US.

Yu-Cheng Liu. Innovation and Boundary Work: The Study of Unofficial Artists in China from 1979 to 1999.

Gemintang Kejora Mallarangeng. Understanding Microcelebrity.

Tiffany Martinez. En la lucha: An Assessment of Agency and Identity among Primarily Latina Youth in an Urban Middle School.

Manika Mishra. The Means is the Message: An Approach to News by Examining the Journalistic and Lay-Reader Method.

Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya. Branded Answers to Uncertain Futures: Valuing American Heritage on a Global Market.

Christine Ohenewah. The Price of Indomitability: The Medicalized Devaluation of Black Women’s (Re)production.

Bonnie Rogers. Contrasting Notions of “Diversity” in Urban Elementary Schools.

Samuel Rosenthal. Feast or Famine? The Curious Case of Elite Graduate Outcomes in the Great Recession.

Dakota Ross-Cabrera. Black, White, and/or Latinx? Examining The Impact of Race on Second-Generation Latinx Ethnic Identity amongst Young Adult Dominican-Americans in Urban Areas.

Kea Saper. Redefining the American Dream: Perspectives and Proposals Toward Varied Life Paths through the Eyes of the Millennial Generation.

Alya Jassmer Sarna. Understanding Successful Implementation of the Five Precepts: Vipassana Meditation as Understood by the Modern Meditator.

Sara Shameem. Beyond the Prayer: A Case Study on Second-Generation Indian-American Christians in New York.

Chengming Shi. Comparing Gay and Straight Men on Gaydar: Cues in Assessing Other Men’s Sexual Orientation.

Daniyal Yousaf. Hierarchies and Divisions in a Panethnic Enclave Economy: Case Study of Jackson Heights' South Asian Restaurants.

Theatre
Ilana Gilovich. “A Fruitless Crown”: Children, Time, and Death in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth.

Abby Schroering. Theater of the World: Toward an Affirmative Ethics of Animal Performance.

Catherine Suffern. Staging the Reconciliation of Spatial and Conceptual Contradictions in The Mary Play.

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences celebrated the outstanding achievements of five of its graduates at the 2018 Alumni Awards Dinner, an intimate gathering of alumni, faculty, and students. The event was held on June 5, 2018, in the library of Columbia University’s Italian Academy.

In his opening remarks, GSAS Dean Carlos J. Alonso noted that the event, which marks the end of the academic year, was one of his favorite annual occasions. “In many ways, the potential of the school—the social role of the school—is determined by the achievements of our former students,” he said.

The first prize presented was the Campbell Award, which the Columbia Alumni Association gives annually to a graduating student in each school who demonstrates exceptional leadership qualities. The 2018 award for GSAS was given posthumously to Devon T. Wade (’18PhD, Sociology), who was killed in a tragic act of violence in November 2017. Dr. Wade had dedicated himself to researching inequality along racial and class lines, and was a passionate activist at Columbia and beyond its gates.

The Dean’s Award for Distinguished Achievement was bestowed upon Daniel Kurtzer (’76PhD, Political Science) and Madeleine Grynsztejn (’85MA, Art History). Dr. Kurtzer serves as the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and retired from the US Foreign Service in 2005 following a twenty-nine-year tenure. He served from 1997 to 2001 as the US Ambassador to Egypt, and from 2001 to 2005 as the US Ambassador to Israel.

“When I completed my PhD, I left almost immediately after my doctoral defense to enter the Foreign Service, and in a sense I left without saying both goodbye and thank you,” Dr. Kurtzer said before formally thanking his former professors.

Ms. Grynsztejn is Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), which under her leadership has redefined the potential of the twenty-first-century museum. She recently was elected President of the Association of Art Museum Directors. In her acceptance remarks, Ms. Grynsztejn reflected on a Columbia course on nineteenth-century American landscape painting taught by Professor Barbara Novak that forever changed her approach to art.

“The way she used paintings as a window onto an entire culture blew me away,” Ms. Grynsztejn said. “I realized, right there and then, that that was how I wanted to use art: as a prism to understand the whole world around me, and I wanted everyone else to use it like that, too. That is what I have committed myself to over the course of some thirty years.”

Christine Ann Denny (’12PhD, Biological Sciences)—an award-winning scientist in the areas of learning, memory, and behavior—received the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award. She is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology in Psychiatry at Columbia University, and a Research Scientist in the Division of Integrative Neuroscience at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

“It was truly a life-changing experience coming to Columbia,” Dr. Denny said. “I am the first person in my family to go to college, let alone get a doctorate. I have really been blessed by the education that I got here.”

The master’s recipient of the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award was Elan Kriegel (’06MA, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences), a data scientist and the cofounder of BlueLabs, an analytics and technology company based in Washington, DC. Before joining BlueLabs, Mr. Kriegel was the Battleground States Analytics Director for Obama for America.

Mr. Kriegel, who also was celebrating his birthday, confessed to thinking initially that Dean Alonso’s letter informing him of the award was spam. He went on to describe his time at GSAS as transformative: “When I got to Columbia, I was a TV producer at Fox News, and when I left Columbia, I was helping to run strategy for President Obama.”

Candidates for the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Outstanding Recent Alumni Award are recommended to the Dean by the Awards Committee of the GSAS Alumni Association Board of Directors. The committee chair for 2017-2018 was Tracy Zwick (’11MA, Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies), and the committee’s members were Jillisa Brittan (’86MA, English and Comparative Literature), Sylvan Feldstein (’76PhD, Political Science), Erin Thompson (’10PhD, Art History and Archaeology), Hua Eleanor Yu (’89PhD, Biological Sciences), and Harriet Zuckerman (’65PhD, Sociology).

Daniel Kurtzer

Madeleine Grynsztejn

Christine Ann Denny and Tracy Zwick

Elan Kriegel

What is your current role?
Financial advisor and portfolio manager.

What are you working on now?
I am finding solutions that fit within the objectives and constraints that my clients set forth. In the current environment, with interest rates being so low and risk premiums compressed, it can be challenging to design portfolios that meet clients’ return needs.

What drew you to your field?
I believe that better analytics and predictive models can improve our decision making and performance. Quantitative methods are playing a bigger role in many fields, especially finance, and being able to understand what is happening conceptually when reviewing data and output can have incredible value.

What lessons from graduate school have you found useful in your professional life?
The strengths and limitations of statistics. My industry is quick to highlight the strengths of a study, but hesitant to admit a study’s limitations and lack of dependability around the conclusions. I learned a powerful lesson at Columbia about how inputs such as data selection and quality can have a large impact on the output of a study.

What skill has unexpectedly helped you in your career?
Emotional Quotient (EQ), which can be as important—if not more important, at times—than Intelligence Quotient (IQ). Trust and perception are such important parts of business, and no matter how fantastic your work is or how seismic your conclusion, it is unlikely to get attention if people do not trust you. I have found that relationships, and how people view you, can be critical component of how much impact you can generate.

What is your favorite memory from your graduate years?
Studying with my peers in the study lab, and talking to them about jobs and internships. I learned a lot from listening to other students.

What are your passions outside of your work?
My family—especially my wife and daughter. I am fortunate in that most of my other passions are intertwined with my work in some way. It is hard to find enough hours in the day to do everything you want to do, so I find it best to combine passions and work when possible.

What is your advice for current GSAS students?
Do not delay in reaching out to the world outside academia. Consider working at businesses, trying new things, and meeting people in industries and jobs of interest.

What is next for you, professionally or otherwise?
I want to learn every day, be passionate about what I am doing, and have a positive impact on those around me. I have that now with my current role, so until that changes, more of the same!