Bringing Pedagogy into the 21st Century...Link back to contents page 2 Superscript CONTENTS From the Dean 1 Bringing Pedagogy into the 21st Century 2 Alumni Profile: Judith Shapiro,

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SuperscriptThe Graduate School of Arts & Sciences | Columbia University

Volume 4, Issue 1Fall 2013–Winter 2014

Bringing Pedagogyinto the

21st Century

2 Superscript Link back to contents page

C O N T E N T S

From the Dean 1

Bringing Pedagogy into the 21st Century 2

Alumni Profile: Judith Shapiro, Ph.D. ’72, Anthropology 8

Report from the Field: Teaching at a Community College 12

Applied Humanities: Ramona Bajema, Ph.D. ’12 and the To-hoku Earthquake Relief Effort 14

Astrobiology: Modern Science Targets an Ancient Question 22

Alumni News 26

Alumni Profile: Steven G. Mandis, M.A. ’10, M.Phil. ’13 28

On the Shelf: Faculty Publications 30

On the Shelf: Alumni Publications 32

Dissertations 34

Announcements 46

Helpful Links 49 Letters to the Editor

To share your thoughts about anything you

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received by the editor will be considered for

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your message your name and affiliation to the

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SUPERSCRIPT is published twice annually by

the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the

GSAS Alumni Association.

GSAS Alumni Association Board of Directors

Louis A. Parks, President, M.A. ’95, Ancient Studies

Lester Wigler, Vice President, M.A. ’80, Music

Bridget M. Rowan, Secretary, M.A. ’80, English and Comparative Literature

Tyler Anbinder, M.A. ’85, M.Phil. ’87, Ph.D. ’90, History

Jillisa Brittan, Chair of Development Committee, M.A. ’86, English and Comparative Literature

Gerrard Bushell, M.A. ’91, M.Phil. ’94, Ph.D. ’04, Political Science

Neena Chakrabarti, Student Representative, M.A. ’11, Chemistry

Frank Chiodi, M.A. ’00, American Studies

Kenneth W. Ciriacks, Ph.D. ’62, Geological Sciences

Annette Clear, M.A. ’96, M.Phil. ’97, Ph.D. ’02, Political Science

Michael S. Cornfeld, Chair of Nominating Committee, M.A. ’73, Political Science

Elizabeth Debreu, M.A. ’93, Art History and Archaeology

Robert Greenberg, Chair of Student Outreach Committee, M.A. ’88, Philos-ophy

George Khouri, M.A. ’69, Classics

Sukhan Kim, M.A. ’78, Political Science

Lindsay Leard-Coolidge, M.Phil. ’87, Ph.D. ’92, Art History and Archaeolo-gy

Les B. Levi, M.A. ’76, M.Phil. ’78, Ph.D. ’82, English and Comparative Liter-ature

Komal S. Sri-Kumar, Ph.D. ’77, Economics

John Waldes, Co-chair of Marketing and Research Committee, M.S. ’68, Electrical Engineering, Ph.D. ’71, Plasma Physics

Harriet Zuckerman, Ph.D. ’65, Sociology

Tracy Zwick, M.A. ’11, Modern Art

Dean: Carlos J. Alonso

Editor: Robert Ast

Assistant Editor: Andrew Ng

Senior Director for Alumni Relations: Jill Galas-Hickey

Design, Editing, and Production: Columbia Creative

Superscript 1 Link back to contents page Superscript

One of the principal raisons d’être for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is enhancing the academic

and professional life of our students. But graduate students—both Master’s and doctoral—typically devote between one and eight years in pursuit of the degree that brought them to Colum-bia. This investment of time means that students often spend a significant number of their formative adult years among us, years in which the realm of the personal usually takes a backseat to the requirements of the academic pursuits that brought them to campus. Graduate students have traditionally postponed or set aside significant

personal decisions while in graduate school, owing to the belief that life and its big choices resume upon receipt of the degree and after reintegration in the larger world outside the university.

The reality is, however, that there has never been such a transparent split between life and the graduate experi-ence: graduate school IS life for our students. In fact, graduate school is in most cases the first time in which students will not be under the tutelage of someone in loco parentis—in other words, it is the first truly adult au-tonomous experience some of them will entertain. It is also quite possible that graduate school be the first time there is significant geographic distance from their family environment, since most students tend to remain rela-tively close to home when choosing an undergraduate institution. This is especially the case with international students, who cast a much wider net when applying to institutions in which to pursue their postbaccalaureate education. Graduate school is not just what life is for our students, it is also a most significant season of that life from an existential point of view.

In my time as a faculty member, and now as dean, I have noticed a gradual but quite significant change in student attitude toward their graduate experience. Students nowadays tend to see graduate school as coextensive with

their personal lives and are continually searching for ways in which to make graduate life fit into their lives, as opposed to the other way around, which was the norm traditionally. I do not have the space here to explore the reasons for this development, which I would argue none-theless should be regarded as both healthy and welcome, since it demystifies graduate education and the graduate experience, and forces both to conform to realistic and humane parameters. This transformation requires, nev-ertheless, that graduate school administrations and sup-port services evolve to accommodate our students’ novel understanding of their relationship to their programs, to the institution, and to their discipline at large.

This development accounts, for instance, for two changes in policy that the Graduate School instituted since I be-came dean: first, the existing policy on the “Suspension of Responsibilities for Childbirth” was broadened two years ago to include male student parents, as well as instances of adoption and foster parenthood; second, the Graduate School announced last year that graduate student parents would be entitled to receive for each child a $1,000 subsidy to defray the cost of child care expenses. The realization that graduate school has to be better integrated into our students’ lives was also one of the reasons behind the creation of a new program of Internships in Academic Administration, in which graduate students explore non-academic careers in university administration that may give them more flexibility at the moment they endeavor to combine the personal and the professional. Our newly created Office of Student Affairs in GSAS has been given the consequent mandate to address the many facets of the nonacademic dimension of our students lives, while rec-ognizing the particular and specific needs of our Master’s and doctoral constituencies.

Graduate school used to be regarded by students, faculty, and administrators as a parenthesis or hiatus in the lives of graduate students. The current move toward the closer integration of life and the graduate experience is a sal-utary transformation that nonetheless presents us with new challenges that we in the Graduate School are ready and eager to assume. I would be extremely interested in hearing from you, the alumni of the school, about how we could best fulfill that responsibility.

From the Dean

Carlos J. Alonso

Dean, Graduate School of Arts and

Sciences; Morris A. and Alma

Schapiro Professor in the Humanities



In other rooms, students munched on box lunches as presenters from CCNMTL and the GSAS Teaching Center—including Mark Phillipson, the Center’s interim director—demonstrated how to use the library’s

online resources or set up a website where students could upload and annotate text and images for a class. All the while, informal groups of TAs lounged on comfy chairs in a common area framed by large windows, sipping

bottled water and talking shop.

The setting was the second day of the Teagle Summer Institute, a three-day-long series of workshops and discussions devoted to pedagogy and technology.

Now in its second year, the institute is part of a larger three-year program, the Preparing Doctoral Students for the 21st Century Initiative. Offered by the Teaching Center and CCNMTL under a grant from the Teagle Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality of undergraduate learning in the arts and sciences, the initiative seeks to equip graduate students to teach in the new millennium and, by extension, to bring the quality of undergraduate learning at Columbia to an even higher level. And it is emblematic of the way in which the University is trying to rethink the role and function of the Teaching Center at a pivotal moment in higher education.

Bringing Pedagogy into the 21st Century: The GSAS Teaching Center and the Science of Teaching and Learning By Alexander Gelfand

One sunny day this past June, a clutch of doctoral students from various

departments—Music, Sociology, Earth and Environmental Sciences—sat,

stood, and circulated in a large room on the fifth floor of Barnard College’s

Diana Center. The space was crammed with themed tables devoted to

various digital tools: one bore a piece of paper with the word “SIMS,” for

computer simulations, scrawled in black sharpie; another proclaimed

“Blogs!” Many of the tables were littered with lists and diagrams and flow

charts, and each one was equipped with an educational technologist from

the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL).

The students had all been appointed as teaching assistants or preceptors

for the coming year, and the technologists were there to show them how to

use the software to design and deliver assignments.


* * *

Since they first began to appear in the 1960s, teaching centers have become increasingly common on American college and university campuses; more than two hundred schools now have some kind of center devoted to helping faculty and graduate students improve the quality of their teaching, including many of Columbia’s peer institutions. Yet Columbia itself came to the party relatively late.

According to Carlos J. Alonso, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Vice President for Graduate Education, the University first explored the possibility of creating a full-service teaching center that would cater to both faculty and graduate students in the 1990s. At the time, however, the cost seemed prohibitive, and so in 2006 the University established a more limited center, focused on the needs of graduate students. Helmed for two years on an interim basis by Jan Allen, then the associate dean for Ph.D. programs, the Teaching Center acquired its first permanent director in 2008, when Steven Mintz came on board.

Mintz wanted to move the Center in several directions at once. For one thing, he wanted it to address not only teaching

but also research into learning—more formally known as scholarship on teaching and learning, or SOTL. SOTL emerged as an academic discipline less than a quarter-century ago with the publication of Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate by Ernest Boyer. Boyer, who was at the time president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argued that instruction merited the same systematic study and professional recognition accorded to other areas of scholarly investigation, and his contention was quickly taken up as a rallying cry by others. Allison Pingree, director of professional pedagogy in the Strengthening Learning and Teaching Excellence Initiative at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, says that research in areas relating to SOTL is already beginning to count toward academic promotion and tenure.

To Mintz, a professional historian with a long list of publications to his credit, acquiring those scholarly bona fides was crucial. Otherwise, he suspected that a teaching center would never be taken seriously at a top-tier research institution like Columbia—the kind of institution where scholarship, not teaching, has historically been regarded as the real work of faculty and graduate students. Judith

Shapiro, former president of Barnard College and current president of the Teagle Foundation, recalls that when she was hired by the anthropology department at the University of Chicago in 1970, even talking about teaching with your colleagues “would have been the professional equivalent of a burp.” A generation later, when he was a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, Mark Phillipson recalls a similar silence surrounding the art of teaching—and the concomitant experience of walking into his first teaching section at ten o’clock one morning, writing his name and phone number on the board, and realizing that he had to “turn around, face the class, and do something.”

The Teaching Center’s emphasis on SOTL is a means of redressing precisely that lack of attention to how teachers do what they do and how they can do it more effectively. Cognitive psychologists like Columbia’s own Janet Metcalfe and Lois Putnam have for many years conducted research into learning and memory, and their findings can be directly translated into helpful teaching strategies. Metcalfe, for example, points to three or four basic techniques that virtually any teacher can use to improve learning outcomes, such as spacing practice sessions

Judith Shapiro

recalls that when

she was hired by

the anthropology

department at

the University of

Chicago in 1970,

even talking about

teaching with

your colleagues

“would have been

the professional

equivalent of a

burp.”


out to help learners retain new concepts and requiring students to generate their own answers (even if they are wrong, the process is ultimately more effective than simply giving them the correct answers to begin with). “The empirical findings are very solid,” Metcalfe says. “And it works beautifully.”

Some months ago, Metcalfe addressed the staff at CCNMTL, and the results were apparent at the Teagle Summer Institute when Michael Cennamo, an educational technologist who is working toward his doctorate in education at Teachers College, gave a brief talk titled “Presentation and Metacognition.” Cennamo outlined the specific psychological reasons why so many

PowerPoint presentations fail, including the fact that people find it difficult to process information when it is delivered both orally and textually. He and his colleague Adrienne Garber, also an Ed.D. candidate at Teachers College, then presented a series of digital tools that can be used to deliver more effective presentations by exploiting the ways in which our minds process data.

Wendell Hassan Marsh, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, attended a similar workshop at the Teaching Center last year. Marsh is hardly a novice when it comes to either digital technology or teaching—a former journalist, he’s well acquainted with new media,

and he taught English to refugees while in Egypt on a Fulbright—but he says that the strategies he learned “kind of changed the way I present things in general now.” They also kept him coming back to the Center for more training.

* * *

The digital side of the workshop that Marsh attended, of the presentation that Cennamo and Garber gave, and of the entire Teagle Summer Institute, points to another development at the Teaching Center: its growing emphasis on educational technology. Phillipson is well suited to manage that change: before being appointed interim director of the Center, he spent six years as a senior program specialist in the

faculty support unit at CCNMTL; as an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of English at Columbia, he has made extensive use of wikis, the popular web apps that allow people to collectively create and annotate online content. As a teacher, Phillipson has found that such tools bolster students’ sense of participation, and can even influence the direction of a course through the generation of new ideas and avenues to explore—an effect that can have a transformative impact on overall student engagement.

The word “transfor-mative”—along with its close cousins “revolu-tionary,” “game-changing,” and “disruptive”—has often

Mark Phillipson, interim director of the GSAS Teaching Center, leading a workshop


been used to describe the role of technology in higher education. Much of the hubbub has in recent years come in response to the phenomenon of massive open online courses, or MOOCs: strictly digital combinations of text, images, and video delivered to vast numbers of people over the web. Because they are free and available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection, MOOCs have been heralded as a means of making higher education accessible to almost everyone. Some proponents even believe that they might represent a cure for what economist and former Princeton president William Bowen calls the “cost disease” of higher education, which manifests in ballooning tuition costs and skyrocketing student debt. And they’re spreading like wildfire: Columbia currently offers a number of MOOCs in subjects ranging from virology to economics through Coursera, a Silicon Valley startup that at last count had more than nine million enrollments from students scattered across nearly two hundred countries.

The speed with which MOOCs have proliferated—many of Columbia’s peer institutions have introduced their own courses, while Harvard and MIT have partnered to create the MOOC provider edX—has also raised concerns about the future of the technology.

Some fear that turning toward a fully online model might further imperil academic jobs at a time when tenured positions are already dwindling, while others believe that it will inevitably dilute the educational experience. In a recent piece for the online magazine The New Inquiry, Aaron Bady, a Ph.D. candidate in African literature at the University of California, Berkeley, assailed MOOCs for being a pedagogically shallow means of content delivery that will benefit only the most self-directed students, and he also contended that the rush to adopt them has more to do with serving corporate interests than educational ones. (In an earlier post to the blog Inside Higher Education, Bady described MOOCs as “only better than nothing.”) Because of these conflicting views, and perhaps because of the fundamental uncertainty that surrounds a phenomenon that is still in its infancy, the subject of MOOCs tends, as Mark Phillipson says, to get people “very excited, and very scared.”

The changes underway at the Teaching Center could help assuage at least some of those fears. For example, more technologically oriented offerings ought to help teachers bring the same quality of instruction that Columbia students have come to expect in the classroom to the digital

realm as well—whether that is in the context of a MOOC or of a course that mixes face-to-face and online elements.

Holly Myers, a Teagle Summer Institute participant and doctoral candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages who was preparing to lead a section in first-year Russian, was visibly thrilled to be sitting next to Michael Cennamo as he demonstrated an application called VoiceThread on his laptop. VoiceThread allows students to create online conversations around material they have uploaded to the web, and Myers could already see her undergraduate students videotaping their own Russian-language skits, uploading the videos to their class website, and commenting on one another’s work. She was especially excited because, prior to attending the Institute, she hadn’t even realized that such a thing was possible—or that someone like Cennamo might be around to show her how to do it.

“I had some vague notion of an office somewhere in Butler if I had questions about CourseWorks,” she said, referring to the University’s online course management system. “I had no notion that there was this vast network of professionals who were available to help make

“I had no notion

that there was

this vast network

of professionals who

were available

to help make things

more engaging

for students.”

—Holly Myers,

Teagle Summer

Institute participant


things more engaging for students.”

* * *

The idea of a “vast network of professionals” hints at yet another role that a reimagined Teaching Center could potentially play, as a place for graduate

students to get a sense of the possibilities that lie beyond academia and to find the support they will need to capitalize on them.

The fear that MOOCs and other digital technologies will render some tenure-track positions obsolete is accentuated by the very real

tightening of the academic job market, which has sent increasing numbers of graduate students into so-called alt-ac—short for “alternative academic”—careers that include staff and administrative positions at colleges and universities, not to mention careers that

Michael Cennamo and Adrienne Garber, edu-cational technologists at CCNMTL


have nothing to do with academia whatsoever. Not surprisingly, this can be difficult terrain to negotiate. Many graduate students are uncomfortable discussing alt-ac or nonacademic options with their faculty advisers, either because they feel ashamed of abandoning a traditional academic career or because they are afraid that betraying even the slightest lack of commitment could have catastrophic results. And many faculty advisers don’t know enough about the world beyond academia to be of much help. This is why Steven Mintz originally envisioned the Teaching Center as a “safe place” for

Teaching Fellows to explore alternative career paths, and why Mark Phillipson says that the University would be failing graduate students if it did not help them confront the realities of the job market—whether by assisting in the creation of the kinds of robust professional portfolios they’ll need to land their first faculty positions or by preparing them for life outside the ivory tower.

Phillipson is therefore introducing sequences of workshops that graduate students can complete in order to receive a formal certification. Bill Rando, director of the Yale Teaching

Center, which awards a certificate of college teaching preparation to graduate students who complete a comprehensive training program, says that many graduates of tier-one research universities who are lucky enough to land academic positions will likely find themselves working at liberal arts colleges, which have traditionally emphasized teaching over research, or at state schools, which have come under increasing pressure to demonstrate their efficient use of taxpayer dollars with evidence of effective teaching. Under those circumstances, proof of participation in teacher-

training activities can only help.

In addition to what Phillipson refers to as the “quiet mentoring” that already takes place as graduate students are exposed to alt-ac professionals such as Cennamo and Garber, the Graduate School is also launching an initiative to explicitly address alternative career options. Beginning with the spring 2014 semester, advanced doctoral students will have the opportunity to intern in some twenty administrative offices across the University, where they can get a glimpse of the day-to-

Judith Shapiro, Ph.D. ’72, AnthropologyBy Alexander Gelfand

When Judith Shapiro became head of the Teagle Foundation this past July, the former Barnard president took the reins of an organization that for nearly eighty years has given grants to institutions of higher learning and research with an eye toward improving undergraduate learning in the arts and sciences. Which seems only fitting, since Shapiro herself has spent the last forty-odd years trying to advance the same goals.

Many of the Foundation’s efforts are aimed at bolstering the quality of teaching, a vocation that is in Shap-iro’s blood. Her mother taught Latin and supervised the high school librar-ies in the New York City public school

system, the same system Shapiro herself attended (at PS 29 in Flushing Meadows, Queens), along with class-mates such as Jonathan Cole, future sociologist and provost of Columbia, and Stephen Jay Gould, future paleon-tologist and public intellectual. “I used to play teacher when I was a kid,” she says.

Nonetheless, it took her some time to find her subject. Armed with a degree in history and French from Brandeis University, Shapiro entered the graduate program in history at the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. She quickly realized that the life of a professional historian was not for her, however, and dropped out after

only a month—a decision that cost her a front-row seat at the landmark student protests of the Free Speech Movement just one year later. Back in New York City, a friend hipped Shapiro to the work of the French anthropol-ogist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she applied to the graduate program in anthropology at Columbia, where she was admitted on scholarship despite never having taken a single course in the subject.

Despite the false start, it didn’t take long for Shapiro to get up to speed. By 1965 she was doing “salvage ethnography”—fieldwork aimed at preserving cultures on the brink of extinction—among the Northern


Paiute of the Great Basin, the mas-sive watershed that lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada range. A few years later she undertook a series of studies of indigenous groups in Brazil. Her re-search among the Yanomami yielded some of the earliest anthropological analysis of gender differences—not because of any ideological motiva-tion (“second-wave feminism hadn’t yet happened,” Shapiro recalls), but because the differences between the lives of Yanomami men and women were simply too obvious to ignore.

Gender would prove to be a defining issue in Shapiro’s professional life.

In 1970 she became the first woman appointed to the anthropology depart-ment at the University of Chicago. It was, she says, an overwhelming, even paralyzing experience to be a junior fe-male faculty member adrift in a sea of distinguished senior male colleagues. Though she hadn’t yet finished her dissertation, for example, Shapiro suddenly found herself ensconced in the office previously occupied by the revered cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In what she now describes as an extremely wise professional move, Shapiro moved on to Bryn Mawr in 1975, discovering in the process “the wonderful world of women’s col-leges”—a world in which she would spend the bulk of her working life.

Though she claims never to have considered a career in administration, Shapiro was named dean of the col-lege and then its first provost. The role

day operations of a modern research university. As Dean Alonso notes, that exposure can serve as “useful preparation for a career in academia, either within the professoriate or in academic administration.”

* * *

Opportunities for mentoring of all kinds ought to increase as the result of another shift, as well. Until recently, the Teaching Center focused almost exclusively on providing teaching and professional development services to graduate students. That is now changing, however, as faculty from across

the University are being invited to take advantage of its resources. In addition to providing faculty with the same support already enjoyed by their Teaching Fellows, this will expand interaction and communication among all of those who make up the Columbia teaching community, tenured and otherwise. And that ought to be good for everyone.

Rando, who has over the past five years steered the Yale Teaching Center through a similar transition from a student-centered organization to one that also serves faculty, says that opening the doors to

all comers makes many things possible. In addition to providing TAs with increased access to senior faculty, mixing populations also enables more two-way exchanges between graduate students—many of whom have been roaming the halls for years and have considerable insight into the culture of the University—and junior faculty who have only recently ceased being graduate students themselves. Such exchanges can help freshly minted assistant professors navigate the environment where they hope to build their careers, while providing grad students with a better understanding of what their

own roles as teachers and scholars will be once they, too, move on to their first professional posts.

Those higher up in the institutional hierarchy stand to benefit as well. Harvard’s Allison Pingree points out that digital technology can provide an avenue for renewal to senior faculty who want to refresh their teaching with a shot of something new and innovative.

And faculty at all levels of seniority profit when they have the chance to mingle with colleagues from other disciplines. Universities, Rando says, tend to be


Faculty at all levels

of seniority profit

when they have the

chance to mingle

with colleagues from

other disciplines.

siloed along departmental lines: physicists hang out with physicists, English profs with English profs, and never the twain shall meet. While this may be natural, it is not particularly healthy. If those physicists never develop a genuine appreciation for what those English profs do (and vice versa), they will never develop a sense of shared purpose—a situation that can eventually breed mistrust. Moreover, drawing together faculty from different departments gives them the opportunity to share their respective insights into teaching and to discuss the common challenge of reaching

students. This, Rando says, is one of the most powerful aspects of a teaching center: done right, it can become a University-wide faculty center.

The new and improved Teaching Center will also benefit from its new and improved digs: a sleek, digitally enhanced space in Butler Library known as Studio@Butler. Everything in it—the tables, the whiteboards, the digital projectors—is on wheels and can be easily configured for a variety of uses: graduate-student workshops and faculty seminars, one-on-one consultations on teaching strategies and

departmental discussions of curricular planning, maybe even improvised study halls for students taking MOOCs—a physical complement, as it were, to the online classroom—and a laboratory where faculty and staff can gauge student reaction to the digital environment.

Phillipson also sees Studio@Butler as a response to the desire expressed by many graduate students for a “third space” on campus: a refuge beyond the orbit of one’s department and immediate social circle, where graduate students from across the University

she played in helping to establish and strengthen interdisciplinary programs and cooperative arrangements with other top-tier schools such as Swarth-more and the University of Pennsyl-vania helped attract the attention of Barnard College, where she was ap-pointed president in 1994. Coming to Barnard, she says, was like choosing a spouse: in addition to being a close sister college of Bryn Mawr, Barnard had the advantage of being located in her native New York, and its relation-ship to Columbia felt more like a gen-uine partnership than the kind a small women’s college might be expected to have with a major research university across the street.

Shapiro likens the role of a college president to that of a small-town

mayor; her primary role, as she saw it, was to hold the Barnard com-munity together and to “hear the song of the institution”—to see its distinctiveness and to understand its mission. When she stepped down in 2008, Shapiro was credited with tripling Barnard’s endowment and doubling the number of applications it received, refining its curriculum, and ramping up its commitment to educational technology. (One of her first moves was to get all of the members of her senior senior staff on email, at a time when the new communication platform was far from ubiquitous.)

Yet Shapiro herself dismisses much of the praise she has received as “leadership fetishism,” lays most

of the credit for her alleged ac-complishments at the feet of her colleagues, and claims that being a university or college president is “an endless opportunity for screwing up.” (Along with self-deprecating humor, traces of Shapiro’s anthropological training can also be discerned in her take on the college presidency—for example, when she describes the “rituals of opposition” that inevitably arise between faculty and adminis-tration.)

When she was first asked if she might like to be a candidate for the Teagle presidency—she was a member of the search committee at the time—Shap-iro said no. She was content to teach part time at Barnard and to pursue her other interests, from singing and knit-

JuDith ShAPiro, continueD


can come to find informal support and a sense of community. You could see the outlines of such a space emerging at the Teagle Summer Institute, as participants from different disciplines temporarily coalesced into small, informal groups where they commiserated over the difficulty of balancing teaching and research, talked about their job prospects, and bonded with one another regardless of their respective departmental affiliations or areas of expertise.

Not incidentally, the Teaching Center shares Studio@Butler with the

Digital Humanities Center, which offers technological and research support to faculty and students who work in the humanities and history. Phillipson hopes that this cohabitation will blur the line between teaching and research in productive ways. The entire Columbia community would gain something, for example, if more TAs and professors were to discover the scholarship of teaching and learning, or if they came to regard their own teaching as something that warranted the same rigorous procedures of inquiry they employ when conducting their scholarly investigations. “Why teach

on hunches and guesses,” Phillipson asks, “when you don’t treat your own scholarship that way?”

That question gets at the heart of the Teaching Center’s mission and purpose. It may be many things to many people—support center, digital training ground, professional development office, communal gathering place—but all of those roles and functions are undergirded by a fundamental commitment to helping faculty and students become as serious about their teaching as they are about their research.

“It’s often an uphill battle to get people to commit to teaching in the ways in which they are committed to scholarship,” Phillipson says. “So it’s good to trouble the line between the two.”

ting to spending quality time with her poodle, Nora. Ultimately, however, she found the prospect of leading an insti-tution devoted to improving the quality of undergraduate learning—and, by extension, the quality of undergrad-uate teaching—to be irresistible; and when the board asked her again, she acquiesced.

“This foundation is about my life’s work,” says Shapiro. As president, Shapiro would like to maintain Tea-gle’s recent emphasis on pedagogical innovation and assessment of student learning, but she would also like to promote curriculum revision and great-er sharing of information and material between teachers at different institu-tions. As researchers, Shapiro says, faculty members are used to thinking

of themselves as part of a community. As teachers, however, they are not: alone in their classrooms, they tend to assume that they must build their courses alone as well. But that need not be the case.

As an example, Shapiro points to Re-acting to the Past, a course developed by Barnard history professor Mark C. Carnes with Teagle support that has students explore classic texts through elaborate role-playing games. Though born in an elite liberal arts college for women, the course has over the years been expanded and refined with the help of a consortium of colleges and universities around the country, and now community colleges are beginning to show interest in it as well. Borrowing or adapting courses developed by oth-

ers isn’t a mark of failure, says Shapiro, and it can help teachers use their time more efficiently, freeing them up to more effectively mentor their students.

Above all, Shapiro remains commit-ted to continuing the Foundation’s commitment to improving under-graduate student learning, which she believes is inextricably linked to the quality of teaching. That, in turn, is why she feels it is important to back the kinds of programs that the Teaching Center is developing and that Teagle is encouraging at other colleges and universities across the country.

“When you develop faculty as teach-ers,” Shapiro says, “you’re supporting students.”


Report from the Field: Teaching at a Community College

Tenure-track positions at community colleges offer valuable job opportunities for people with graduate degrees in the humanities. In the early 1990s when I was looking for a job, it seemed

that taking a position at a community college wasn’t normal for those with Ivy League Ph.D.s. It didn’t initially occur to me, either. Having taught part-time for four years—and after interviewing at four-year colleges to no avail—I had largely given up the search for a tenure-track position in English and was working as a legal secretary when I saw an ad in The New York Times for an opening teaching college composition at Bergen Community College (BCC) in northern New Jersey. Once I joined the BCC faculty, though, I found that a few of my colleagues also had degrees from GSAS in English and Comparative Literature, including Bonnie MacDougall, M.A. ’70, Ph.D. ’82 and the late David Kievett, M.A. ’70, M.Phil. ’74, Ph.D. ’75.

However, since joining Bergen in 1994 I have served on a number of search committees, and in that time very few

GSAS graduates have applied for tenure-track or lecturer positions—somewhat odd given the paltry job offerings for those with Ph.D.s in the humanities in the past few decades. The dearth of applicants for positions at BCC is particularly surprising, since the school is located only eight miles from Manhattan (in fact, many of my colleagues live in Manhattan and Brooklyn).

Another professional consideration to note is that there is no “publish or perish” culture at the typical community college. Tenure, usually granted after five years of good service to the college, does not depend on getting a book out. This frees up those who wish to publish to work on whatever they want, at their own pace. It also provides more time to focus on the college’s core mission: teaching.

* * *

Previous to BCC, I taught Logic and Rhetoric (the introductory writing course now known as University

By Sarah Markgraf, M.a. ’86 , M.Phil . ’89 , Ph.D. ’94,

EngliSh anD CoMParativE l itEraturE


Writing) at Columbia and First-Year English at Barnard. Teaching at BCC has been a different, and in many ways more satisfying, experience.

Most books about pedagogy seem to be written for people at elite universities. For example, at BCC there is little need to challenge a student’s sense of privilege—the college has open admissions, and many of our students are part of the working class, new immigrants, and members of traditionally understood minority groups. We don’t have to push the institution toward a more student-centered classroom, since that is already the law of the land. We also don’t have to convince students that professors are not distant authoritarian figures, since few see us that way to begin with. There is no academic “star system,” or anything precious about the college environment. To illustrate the latter: one rainy spring day, the BCC commencement was held on the ground level of the parking garage.

My greatest hope as an instructor is to create an opportunity for pleasure in discovery during each class. I work in an academic environment that could seem generic and rudimentary, a force that pushes against unquantifiable or even improvisational aspects of teaching. But over the years I have carved out my own special classroom space in the area of Cinema Studies.

Most of my students come into class with the view that school is a burden. I’ve found that teaching “critical thinking skills” does little to help that situation. In fact, I’ve had greater success deliberately ignoring those very skills at times. (Any self-satisfied teaching of these “skills,” as if in a list, defeats the purpose of this approach anyway.) Quite wonderful bursts of ideas can emerge when students experience moments of chaos and surprise, such as when they watch Paul Sharits’s T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G or Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon.

My students at BCC generally feel not only burdened but also tired. I teach evening classes, and many of them have worked a full eight-hour day—often involving physical labor—before coming to class. Why should a college class make a person even more burdened and tired? In the world of open admissions (compared to Columbia and Barnard), pleasure is generally thought to be unrelated to classroom experience. One way I try to address this problem is to encourage students to become interested in new and unusual things, such as the discontinuity editing at the beginning of City of God. Energy can be created from that interest. Exposure to unanticipated—even bizarre—ideas

has the potential to move a student into a fun and exciting place, a place where truly original thinking can take place.

These moments I’ve described are rare and unpredictable, but when they arrive—what a great class it can be. (And I feel happy on my end.)

* * *

Community colleges these days are gaining popularity with the rising expense of private colleges and universities. But community colleges are still outsiders to the Ivy League and most four-year colleges. Maybe someday we won’t seem so alien. Ironically, one of the strongest imperatives of my graduate study at GSAS was to pay attention to suppressed voices, repressed populations, and underrepresented viewpoints. Community colleges are a repressed population in the world of higher education. It’s surprising that more GSAS graduates wouldn’t be interested in exploring this world of the Other!

As I was writing this short piece, I received an email announcement for the 2014 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society: “Invisible Work: Exploring the Invisibility of Teaching, Learning and Researching at the Community College.” The précis reads as follows: “Community colleges—their students, faculty, and role in higher education and American society—remain largely invisible, despite growing national attention and swelling numbers. In academia, we continue to talk about ‘traditional students’ and ‘college’ as if most students are between the ages of 18 and 21 and attending residential four-year institutions. They aren’t. . . . What are the consequences of this invisibility for those at community colleges and for higher education itself?”

Apparently I’m not the only one thinking about such issues.


Applied Humanities: Ramona Bajema, Ph.D. ’12 and the Tohoku Earthquake Relief Effort


The call first came

at four a.m. Ramona

Bajema, then a doctor-

al student in modern

Japanese history, was

on spring break, finish-

ing up her dissertation

at her mother’s house in picturesque Ojai,

California. Her best friend, Ella Gudwin, vice

president of emergency response for the aid

organization AmeriCares, was trying desper-

ately to reach her.

“The first couple of calls, I thought, She

probably just thinks I’m in New York, and

doesn’t know the time difference,” Bajema

recalls. “I picked up the phone and she said,

‘Do you know what’s going on?’ I said, ‘No, are

you okay?’ I was laughing, thinking, Ella, I’m

in California, it’s five in the morning. She said,

‘Okay, I need you to sit down for a second and

turn on your computer.’”

Applied Humanities: Ramona Bajema, Ph.D. ’12 and the Tohoku Earthquake Relief Effort By DylAn Suher


What Bajema saw when she opened her computer were images of devastation that shocked and horrified the entire world. On that morning, March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck just off the coast of the To-hoku region of Japan. It was the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, and it was followed by a tsunami with record-breaking, 133-foot high waves. Entire villages were swept into the sea. The final death toll would reach upwards of fifteen thousand people. The tsunami also precipitated a partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear

reactor. Thousands were evacuated from areas near the plant, and two years later authorities still struggle to keep tons of radioactive wastewater from contaminating the local water supply.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, many in the Columbia community helped. But Bajema went one step further. Temporarily setting aside her academic career, she signed on as a program director for AmeriCares’s relief efforts in Japan. She arrived in To-hoku in June 2011 and has stayed ever since, helping AmeriCares

bring relief to people affected by the earthquake and tsunami.

“The difference with Ramona,” her adviser, Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Language and Cultures, notes with admiration, “was that Ramona went—and she stayed.”

* * *

Ramona Bajema has always been an outlier. She grew up around artists, intellectuals, and academics: her mother is an artist and art dealer, and her father is an actor and writer. Raised outside the mainstream of American culture, Bajema was drawn to Japan from an early age. Her mother introduced her as a young child to Japanese art, cinema, and cuisine, and Bajema, who has no familial ties to the country, was intrigued by what appeared to her to be a drastically different world.

The early infatuation eventually blossomed into a lifelong interest, fueled in part by her politics: as a high school student in San Francisco, she protested against the Gulf War. The young Bajema saw Japan as a counterbalance to American power. “This was during the time of ‘The Japan That Can Say No,’ this alternative capitalism, state capitalism. It looked like Japan could rival

In the aftermath of

the earthquake, many

in the Columbia

community helped.

But Bajema went

one step further.

Temporarily setting

aside her academic

career, she signed on

as a program director

for AmeriCares’s

relief efforts in Japan.

Ramona Bajema gardening in Tōhoku


America,” Bajema recalls. “I thought, Oh, great, I’m going to become this in-between force between Japan and America.”

Having witnessed the precarious life of the artists around her, Bajema was determined to be pragmatic. “I thought, I will go and make money and take care of all these people,” Bajema said. She did her undergraduate thesis at the University of California, Berkeley, not on the arts or culture of Japan, but on the history of Japanese financial markets.

After graduation, she participated in the Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) program, a Japanese government initiative to place native English speakers as assistant language teachers in Japanese schools. Bajema taught English for two years in the idyllic prefecture of Fukui. She then completed a master’s degree at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. After graduating from SAIS, Bajema accepted a position with Lehman Brothers, where she had interned the summer before graduation; she seemed to be on the way to a lucrative career in finance.

But Bajema soon found that finance wasn’t for her. She quit in a hurry, literally

fleeing Lehman’s Tokyo offices in the middle of the night. “It was not me, it was not my values, it was not a good fit,” Bajema says. “I came back to the United States just going, ‘Oh my God, my ten-year plan, what am I going to do?’”

Unsure of what to do next, Bajema came to history out of frustration. A friend who worked at the BBC repeatedly picked her brain about Japanese history for news segments, and Bajema obliged—but always without receiving attribution in the resulting programs. “I was in the shower, getting so frustrated that once again I was getting called upon and not getting any credit for it, and then I realized, Oh, if I had a Ph.D. then they’d have to cite me,” Bajema says. “I got out of the shower and said, ‘Now’s the time to do it, I have to go back.’”

Bajema’s background made her an attractive candidate for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “She knew contemporary Japan as well as the history and culture of Japan, she had very good language skills, and she was dedicated and committed,” Gluck says of the decision to take Bajema on as a student.

Bajema would find her openness and independence to be valuable assets, not only in graduate school, but in her future disaster relief work—a vocation she never anticipated.

“Ramona would always take on very difficult things,” Gluck says. “She wouldn’t just work in her comfort zone.”

* * *

When Bajema saw the images coming out of To-hoku, she was immediately reminded of her time in Fukui. To-hoku and Fukui are both largely rural places, made up of fishing and farming villages, and both are home to many nuclear power plants. “It just looked like it had happened to Fukui,” Bajema says, “and I saw these flashes of the faces of my kids and the teachers that I worked with.”

Bajema found she could process the shock by helping. She connected Gudwin with her contacts from SAIS and colleagues from Columbia who were in To-hoku. She spent hours researching and emailing clinics and hospitals—unaware that many of the clinics she was trying to contact had been swept out into the sea. “I realized within twenty-four hours that, in this case, I could actually help, and that was an amazing feeling, to not just hear about something horrific passively,” Bajema says.

But Bajema didn’t fly to Japan immediately. When spring break ended, she returned to New York as she had originally planned. She

had postdoctoral positions to apply for, and most pressingly, a dissertation to finish. For her dissertation, Bajema had returned to art, writing about Japanese-American artists between the world wars. Bajema had found a lost history of Japanese artists—most of whom immigrated from Japan as educated laborers and intended to return to their homeland—who became American. The painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi, for instance, originally from Japan, was the first American artist to be honored by the Whitney Museum of Art with a retrospective while still alive.

Though Bajema was passionate about her topic, the tragedy in To-hoku preoccupied her. Reminders were everywhere. That semester, she served as a teaching assistant with Carol Gluck in a course on the history and memory of World War II. One day during lecture, Gluck put up a photo of Hiroshima next to a photo of Rikuzentakata, a village obliterated by the tsunami. “She talked about the visual impact it must have on so many elderly people who were born into World War II and are leaving with the tsunami,” Bajema recalls, “and I realized that this was going to be a huge historical moment for Japan, and that I wanted to stay attached to this.”


Bajema was not the only Columbian who felt compelled to assist in the relief effort. Columbia has a large population of Japanese students, as well as many students and faculty with a direct connection to Japan. There were fundraisers and initiatives—bake sales, armbands for sale, photography auctions—at almost every school at the University raising money for the Japan Society, the Red Cross, and other relief organizations. These individual initiatives coalesced into an umbrella organization, the Consortium for Japan Relief, which organizes symposia on topics related to the disaster, such as mental health issues and the lingering effect of radiation.

“Many of us from Japan living in New York City were struggling because we had mixed feelings. Relief that we avoided the crisis, but at the same time guilt for not being able to do anything and a desire to do something for the mother country,” recalls Daiyu Suzuki, president of the consortium and a student at Teachers College. “The fact that so many things happened immediately toward Japan relief was a manifestation of those feelings.”

Bajema felt that guilt and obligation particularly strongly. She began to feel that she had to go herself,

stay, and work full time for the relief effort. And Bajema does not compromise on what she feels is right. “I told myself after Lehman that I was never going to do what I thought I should do ever again,” she says, “I was only going to do what I believed in.”

Aside from a sense of a personal mission, sheer coincidence helped to draw Bajema into working for the relief effort. Her friend Ella Gudwin’s organization AmeriCares was looking for a director for their Japan efforts. “Ella was saying, ‘Oh God, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I need a program manager on the ground to spend the money right,’” Bajema recalls. “So I said, ‘Would you consider me?’”

Gudwin accepted the offer, and Bajema passed through the gauntlet, meeting with decision makers in every department and at every level of the AmeriCares organization. She emerged the overwhelming favorite to head up the Japan program. “People identified two key elements,” Gudwin says of the decision to hire Bajema, “One, she’s very ‘spongy’: she’s smart, and she’s going to absorb new information and come to a point of decision on that information very quickly. Two, she’s a natural communicator, she’s a storyteller, and I think that’s rooted in her appreciation for history.”

Formally hired in April 2011, Bajema began commuting three or four days a week to Stamford to train at the AmeriCares headquarters. Her fellow students and professors were very supportive. Chief among Bajema’s supporters: her adviser, Carol Gluck.

“Carol said, ‘Oh, perfect, we’ll see this as a social-service postdoc,’” Bajema recalls.

* * *

When Bajema arrived in To-hoku in June 2011, she was primarily worried about finding dentures.

AmeriCares specializes in providing immediate medical care in the wake of disasters. Robert Macauley, the founder of the organization, started his aid efforts by personally chartering a commercial jet to rescue 243 stranded Vietnamese orphans. A relatively small organization in the field of disaster aid, particularly when compared with giants like the Red Cross, AmeriCares seeks to fill gaps left by the larger organizations.

In To-hoku the gap was dental care. The population in rural To-hoku is overwhelmingly elderly, and the tsunami had literally swept away their dentures. Children trapped in temporary shelters and subsisting on crackers and sugary snacks developed

cavities. At the same time, the tsunami and earthquake had destroyed many nearby dental clinics. In response to this crisis, AmeriCares set up three prefabricated, mobile dental clinics to allow local dentists to attend to their patients. “You don’t know these things until you come here,” Bajema says. “How could you know about this problem from New York? Nobody writes about it!”

Bajema had a lot to learn about the nonprofit world. AmeriCares paired her with an experienced humanitarian aid worker, and Gudwin grilled her on stack after stack of grant proposals in a custom-made crash course in NGO management. The learning curve was sometimes daunting, but Bajema discovered that her academic background was helpful for the learning process. “A lot of it was being really honest about what I didn’t know. What my academic background gave me most of all was the ability to say ‘I don’t know, you have to teach me,’” she says.

But Bajema also found she had a lot to offer AmeriCares. For one, she knew the history. To-hoku is renowned in Japan for its physical beauty. The poet Bash wrote a famous travelogue of his journey to the region, and the Matsushima islands, just off the coast of To-hoku, are considered one of the


most beautiful scenic views in all of Japan. But there has also been a dark side to that beauty. “To-hoku has a hideous history of famine and has always been neglected by Tokyo,” Bajema says. “None of the issues raised during the tsunami are new.” The suicide rate for To-hoku even before the disaster was the highest of any region in Japan.

Knowing the history of the region, Bajema was determined to stay in To-hoku, in the city of Sendai. That way, she could prove that she was not just another person to arrive,

make promises, and depart before those promises were fulfilled. And she also knew, based on her knowledge of Japanese culture and the specific history of the region, that the next great medical need would be psychological care.

The challenge was addressing those needs in a way that would reach the Japanese. Despite having the highest suicide rate in the developed world, cultural norms and government policy have discouraged mental health treatment approaches built around talk therapy in favor of approaches that

emphasize pharmaceutical treatments and institu-tionalization. Japan has only one psychiatrist for every ten thousand people, roughly half the ratio of the United States, and many Japanese clinics don’t employ any clinical counselors. “Japan has more psychiatric beds per capita than any country in the world,” notes Gudwin, “but it does not have a tradition of counseling or talk therapy or anything like that.”

But Bajema was trained to look beyond cultural stereotypes and would simply not tolerate any

The Tōhoku gardening project


mention of Japanese stoicism. “Because of working with people like Carol Gluck and Harry Harootunian and Marilyn Ivy, cultural explanations are anathema to me,” Bajema says. “I approach it as, All human beings are going to have a similar response to disasters of this nature. People were saying, ‘The Japanese are not going to let you in.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, they’re human. It’s emotional. They cry, too.’”

To devise an innovative solution, Bajema did what any good graduate student would do—research. She came across articles on how horticultural therapy and gardening programs have aided in the rehabilitation of violent criminals and veterans suffering from PTSD. Intrigued, she searched for more information on gardening programs and came across a study conducted after an earthquake in Niigata, Japan. Researchers had built a garden in a temporary community of elderly evacuees. The residents of the community with a garden, when compared with a control group, had lower blood pressure, lower rates of dementia, and less severe arthritis. “So I thought, This is phenomenal,” Bajema says, “because if it could help on a psychological well-being and emotional level, and also on a physical level for

the elderly, this could be a real answer.”

Her solution was culturally specific. The residents of rural To-hoku had always gardened, and Bajema and her partners planned the gardens in a way that would help the residents of To-hoku maintain their ties to the land where they had lived for generations. Many of the gardens were even built on the foundations of homes that had been swept away by the tsunami.

Bajema’s co-workers at AmeriCares were supportive, but skeptical. They specialized in disbursing funds to distribute medicine and build clinics. They had never built gardens. They applied close scrutiny to the project, in an attempt to make sure that Bajema accounted for every contingency and the project succeeded. “My boss and immediate team never said no, but I was getting a lot of push-back from them,” Bajema recalls. “Then I had a meeting in December of 2011 with the CEO, with a menu of all the things that I wanted to do. He immediately looked at the garden on the list and went, ‘That makes sense.’”

There was no road map for building these gardens, nor would her supervisors be able to tell her what needed to be done. It was not a

nine-to-five job. But as a graduate student Bajema had faced those conditions before: it was not unlike the beginning of dissertation research.

Undaunted, Bajema got to work. Partnering with a local organization, Peace Boat, Bajema disbursed more than one hundred thousand dollars to build over a hundred community gardens. Displaced tsunami survivors who had spent months cooped up in cramped, temporary shelters emerged to work the land. Elderly survivors who had been sullen and withdrawn opened up to explain the finer points of growing daikon radishes. All of the participants who were monitored showed a marked decrease in blood pressure. Altogether, AmeriCares estimates that this program has brought over five thousand survivors together and out of their homes to talk and to exercise.

But one data point in particular demonstrates the remarkable success of the gardening program.

“Ramona,” Gudwin asserts, “has been the recipient of more hugs than anyone else in the entire organization.”

* * *

This year marked the second anniversary of the

Displaced tsunami

survivors who had

spent months cooped

up in cramped,

temporary shelters

emerged to work

the land. Elderly

survivors who had

been sullen and

withdrawn opened

up to explain the

finer points of

growing daikon

radishes.


To-hoku earthquake, and Bajema and AmeriCares still have much to do. Bajema is overseeing the reconstruction of group homes and not-for-profit workshops for the disabled. She is managing what AmeriCares calls “community-directed initiatives.” These are tiny grants for grassroots organizations, supporting cultural activities vital to community well-being, such as traditional summer festivals and storage sheds for taiko drums.

And a final frontier for To-hoku relief beckons: the areas of Fukushima prefecture affected by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. Bajema had always wanted to do a garden project in Fukushima, where obesity rates for residents afraid to leave their homes are on the rise, but was stymied by the radiation in the soil. This year, she finally plans to expand the program to Fukushima, bringing in soil from outside and placing it in raised beds. “Usually, people hear about these programs through word of mouth. But we’ve already had eleven people sign up just by doing a mailer, which is really amazing,” Bajema notes.

At the same time, Bajema never lost sight of her academic goals. Working nights in Sendai, at the height of the earthquake recovery efforts, she

finished her dissertation on time, flying to New York to defend it in December 2011. “She didn’t put it off! God bless her, she finished and she defended, and then she took the manuscript back and completed the deposit copy with all the footnotes and deposited and received her degree,” Gluck says. “That’s Ramona!”

Bajema hopes eventually to be able to write a history of the earthquake, the tsunami, and the recovery efforts, but believes that she will need time and distance. “Once she leaves To-hoku, I think she will have a story to tell,” Gluck says. “The story she will tell will not be a story that begins on 3/11. As a historian, she’ll have a longer background to the story and a wider angle of vision on the present response.”

For now, Bajema must cultivate her gardens, which means delaying her return to academia. She wants to insure the projects she started will survive when she leaves. She also wants to write a report on her gardening programs, to help organizations replicate these efforts in other disaster-affected areas.

But she does not regret this academic detour at all. “Based on the results I’ve seen here, I’ve never been as proud of anything I’ve done in my life,” Bajema says.

And, she asserts, it is a detour that any Columbia student is capable of taking. “The NPO [nonprofit organization] field needs people who have analytical skills to be able to question how successful X, Y, or Z is. The work demands tremendous physical and emotional fortitude, and I think that analytical thinkers, people who are doing the humanities have that,” Bajema says. “You can work for an NPO. We have something to offer.”


By Andrew Ng

Iconic image of Earth rising over the moon, taken in 1968


I f you asked someone ten years ago what “astrobiology” is, you may have gotten

a blank stare in return. As a scientific pursuit, astrobiology is relatively new. But the underlying disciplines—astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology—have been around for ages, and the underlying question—“Are we alone?”—is an ancient one.

Simply put, astrobiology is the study of life in the universe. This study includes life on Earth, but with our knowledge of Earth’s processes as simply one data set of hopefully many to come.

“For a long time, astrobiology was seen as science without data,” says Caleb Scharf, director of the Columbia Astrobiology Center. “But then the game changed, and suddenly we were in a position to study it.”

The turning point that Scharf refers to was the surge in the detection of “exoplanets”—planets that orbit other stars—over the past decade or so. The first confirmed discovery of a planet around a sunlike star happened in 1995, and the rate of discovery has

been almost exponential ever since. Today nearly a thousand confirmed exoplanets and a few thousand more candidates have been detected, thanks to both ground-based and space-based telescopes. Astronomers use several techniques to infer the presence of exoplanets, but the most common involve looking for tiny changes in a star’s velocity due to the gravitational influence of planets and looking for the dimming of a star’s light as a planet crosses in front of it.

While these exoplanet discoveries were surging, a more gradual realization had been building in the field of microbiology. Scientists were discovering bacteria living in places on Earth that were once thought inhospitable—from hot springs and deep-sea vents to deep within the crust and even up in the clouds. If life on Earth could thrive in these extreme locales, then the prospect of life on other worlds was becoming more and more enticing.

So in 2005 the time was ripe for Scharf, who had spent the previous five years at Columbia as a research scientist studying

galaxy clusters and testing cosmological models, to contact fellow scientists at Columbia and two other institutions on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)—to gauge their feelings on astrobiology.

“Our initial workshops were like confessionals,” Scharf says, “where people from different disciplines would raise their hands and admit, ‘Yes, I’m interested in astrobiology.’ We quickly realized that many of us were already doing research that could be broadened into addressing the question of life in the universe.”

From these workshops and meetings, the Columbia Astrobiology Center was born—not a physical center per se, but a virtual collective of scientists with a common interest in the topic. The center includes scientists from the Departments of Astronomy, Physics, and Psychology, Columbia’s Astrophysics Laboratory, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the Earth Institute, and Barnard College. Scientists from GISS and AMNH are

also part of the collective. As the list of departments and organizations indicates, astrobiology is not one singular discipline but an inherently interdisciplinary pursuit with many lines of inquiry.

Daniel Wolf Savin, senior research scientist in the Astrophysics Laboratory, represents one of the biggest successes of a member of the center. Savin has built an experimental apparatus at Columbia’s Nevis Laboratories in Irvington, New York, to investigate how carbon combines with hydrogen under the conditions that one would find in interstellar space. Organic molecules like these seed the universe with the ingredients for life, and thus are of great interest to astrobiologists. While similar experiments have faced technical challenges in the past, Savin’s team is using their unique instrument to better control the temperatures and energies of the chemical reactions and circumvent these past limits.

Another project on the horizon involves “Model E,” which is a state-of-the-art climate model for the


Earth developed by GISS scientists. Scharf and GISS colleagues are hoping to kick-start a five-year project to make Model E applicable to any planet or moon. With millions of lines of computer code and parameters that are currently fine-tuned for Earth, generalizing the model is not a trivial endeavor. But armed with such a model, which would first be calibrated by studying the environmental history of familiar worlds such as Mars, Venus, and Titan, scientists would be able to characterize the climate systems of exoplanets and determine their suitability for life.

The allure of astrobiology is pulling in the next generation of scientists as well. Aaron Veicht, M.A. ’10, M.Phil. ’11, Physics, started his doctoral program at Columbia with a research focus on nuclear physics and no astronomy background whatsoever. But he eventually switched to exoplanetary research after a series of events led him to discover his true scientific passion.

Around 2009 Veicht began tinkering with graphics processing units, or GPUs, purely as a hobby. GPUs were invented to handle complex computer visuals, like those found in video games and other graphics-heavy programs. However, with their ability to process massive amounts of data in

parallel, GPUs have found an alter ego as inexpensive supercomputers, with applications ranging from quantum mechanics to molecular modeling.

For his own enjoyment, Veicht created a program that modeled physical systems forward in time, given a set of initial parameters. To test the program, he decided to input something he thought had a known answer—how the orbits of planets around stars evolve over millions of years. He contacted Caleb Scharf, who promptly informed him that the problem was, in fact, still at the core of modern planetary science.

A year later, Veicht continued stoking his burgeoning interest in astronomy by taking a seminar on exoplanets at Columbia. The seminar revealed to him just how fertile the field was for new scientific discoveries.

“It blew my mind,” says Veicht. “This was a field in which I thought I could make a large impact. So I switched my research focus to exoplanets. My advisers at Columbia were very supportive of my proposal to change projects and follow my passion, and they ensured a smooth transition.”

With Scharf’s encouragement, Veicht joined the lab of Ben

To conduct their observations, the

team points the telescope at a given

star and employs a high-tech suite

of instrumentation and software to

block out its light, allowing them to

find planets normally overwhelmed

by the light of the star. Incredibly,

their technique has allowed them to

find planets that are up to one million

times fainter than the star itself.

Four exoplanets (circled) orbiting star HR 8799 with the starlight suppressed


Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at AMNH and another member of the Astrobiology Center. Veicht currently works on two projects in Oppenheimer’s lab.

The first is direct imaging of exoplanets—an extremely difficult endeavor, given how much brighter and larger a star is compared to its planets. Several times a year, Oppenheimer’s team travels to the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California, where the Hale Telescope resides. To conduct their observations, the team points the telescope at a given star and employs a high-tech suite of instrumentation and software to block out its light, allowing them to find planets normally overwhelmed by the light of the star. Incredibly, their technique has allowed them to find planets that are up to one million times fainter than the star itself. Once they have isolated the faint light coming off the planets, they can deduce the abundance or absence of chemicals in the planets’ atmospheres by examining their light spectra—the unique and telltale “fingerprints” created by different chemicals. Earlier this year Oppenheimer’s team published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal detailing this “reconnaissance” method on HR 8799, a star about 128 light-years away with

four gas giant planets orbiting it. Although these planets are probably inhospitable (they average 1,340 degrees Fahrenheit with ammonia or methane atmospheres), the same techniques can hopefully be applied to more Earthlike planets in the future.

In addition to this cutting-edge research, Veicht continues working on the project that brought him to astronomy in the first place: the modeling of planetary orbits. Observations of an exoplanetary system do not give precise values for attributes like mass, location, and orbits of the planets. Rather, the best one can do is to infer a range of possible values. A computational model can help winnow down these possible values by running simulations on them—those that result in stable orbits over the next 10 to 100 million years are considered more “true,” whereas those that result in chaos (i.e., planets falling into the star, crashing into one another, or getting flung out of the system) are discarded.

Running these simulations requires substantial computing power. The number of simulations for each planetary system could be anywhere from 100,000 to 1,000,000, with more than a thousand possible systems to model. The use of GPUs helps considerably, but Veicht and his advisers are also

hoping to recruit the public’s help by starting a citizen science project that will allow people to lend their computers to run these simulations over the Internet.

“Today’s graduate students, like Aaron Veicht, comprise the generation that will see the greatest leaps in astrobiology,” says Scharf. “If you want to be a scientist, astrobiology is an excellent option—there are so many interesting things happening in this field, right now and in the foreseeable future.”

In addition to promoting astrobiology within academic circles, Scharf is spreading the word among the general public. He has written articles and op-eds for The New Yorker, Wired, and Nautilus magazines, as well as The New York Times. He maintains a blog on Scientific American’s website called Life, Unbounded, which covers a wide range of space-related topics and drew an audience of more than 350,000 last year. And in 2014 he will publish an astrobiology-themed popular science book called The Copernicus Complex.

“Copernicus’ heliocentric model removed us—humankind and the Earth—from the center of all things, and spurred the notion that we are not that special,” Scharf explains.

“But new discoveries in astrobiology indicate that the story is not that simple. As we continue to learn the details of other planetary systems, it appears that our solar system is not typical. For example, most exoplanets’ orbits are more elliptical than those found in our solar system. Also, exoplanets ranging between Earth-sized and Neptune-sized are very common, but our solar system does not have any of those.”

These discoveries and more continue to fuel the interests of scientists in the Columbia Astrobiology Center. For Scharf, astrobiology sits right alongside evolution and the Big Bang as science topics with the potential for huge impacts on human culture. If scientists find an exoplanet tomorrow with strong and clear indications of life, the impact on society would be as exciting to imagine as the discovery itself.

“Before 1968, when the iconic photo of Earth rising over the moon was released, many people still didn’t have a genuine vision that we lived on a sphere,” says Scharf. “If just a picture of our planet can dramatically shift our thinking, how will evidence that we are not alone change our culture? It would be revolutionary.”


Alumni News | Graduate School of Arts & Sciences


Alumni News | Graduate School of Arts & Sciences

28 Alumni Profile

30 On the Shelf

34 Dissertations

46 Announcements

49 Helpful Links


Alumni Profile

Steven G. MandisM.A. ’10, Museum Anthropology, M.Phil. ’13, Sociology

Interview by Andrew Ng

You spent twelve years at Goldman Sachs, left Gold-man in 2004 to cofound a multi-billion dollar asset management firm, then served as senior adviser to McKinsey & Company and worked at Citigroup. After sixteen years on Wall Street, what motivated you to enroll in Columbia as a student in 2008?What drew me back to aca-demia was the desire to sat-isfy my intellectual curiosity, to ask questions, and think about how to answer them. This emphasis on education came from my parents, who are Greek immigrants. They would say, “People can take a lot of things away from you in life, but no one can take away your education.”

I started looking into classes at Columbia’s School of Con-tinuing Education to figure out what I was interested in and to prove myself as a student, after being away for so many years. I ended up

taking classes in anthropolo-gy and sociology.

What motivated you to enter a doctoral program at GSAS?At first I wasn’t sure wheth-er to apply to the Business School or GSAS, but ulti-mately, I decided on GSAS because I already had a business background, and I thought GSAS would give me a broader perspective. When I told my friends I wanted to study sociology and anthropology, they said, “What?!” The teachers also wondered how seriously I would take classes. But in the end I finished with a 4.0 GPA!

How did you settle upon Goldman Sachs as the sub-ject of your dissertation?I took a class in econom-ic sociology and wrote a paper related to Wall Street. Afterward, my professor, David Stark, pointed out that many sociologists don’t have my level of expertise in the

banking industry, and that I could make an original contribution to the field in that area. At the same time, because of the financial crisis, people were starting to raise questions about Wall Street and Goldman Sachs’ culture. When I saw other Goldman alumni, we’d talk about whether the culture had changed. Everyone had an opinion, but I realized no one had a framework or had researched it in an academic way.

Your dissertation examines the “organizational drift” of Goldman Sachs—its move-ment away from its founding principles over time. Can you summarize your applica-tion of sociological theory to explain this evolution?I drew from the framework of Diane Vaughan, a sociol-ogy professor at Columbia who studied the Challenger space shuttle disaster. The official investigation into Challenger concluded that

parts of the rocket called “O-rings” were the prob-lem—they were off by a tiny fraction, and that’s why the shuttle blew up. However, Vaughan went back and asked, “Why were the O-rings off in the first place?” She concluded that a variety of pressures had caused the scientists to take incremental risks, and that these risks had added up to an organizational failure.

Similarly, in my disserta-tion, I look at the various organizational, competitive, and regulatory pressures at Goldman Sachs over time to explain its evolution, adding an emphasis of technological pressure to the framework that Vaughan established. And I use the idea of “orga-nizational drift” to describe the company’s incremental departure from its found-ing principles. People don’t notice organizational drift, because it happens so slowly that they can’t see it.


Vaughan discussed a similar idea in her work.

In October, you published a book called What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insid-er’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintentional Consequences. How did your dissertation turn into this book?At some point, I came in contact with a literary agent, Susan Rabiner, who special-izes in academic topics that

have the potential to cross over to mass audiences. I met with her about my dis-sertation, and she said, “This is not a book about Goldman Sachs. It’s a book about organizations, and it would appeal to leaders of organi-zations. The best publisher to approach would be the Harvard Business Review Press.” By that time I had 600 pages worth of text and notes, and hundreds of pages of footnotes and appendices.

My editor at the Harvard Business Review Press, Tim Sullivan, totally understood the message and approach. He helped me focus and turn it into a story that both leaders of organizations and academics could enjoy. It was very hard to write a book that satisfied both.

This interview has been con-densed and edited; read the full interview on the GSAS website.

On the Shelf

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Lessons in Secular Criticism

Stathis Gourgouris, Classics

Essays by Stathis Gourgouris present a new theory

of radical democracy and examine the success of

efforts to separate politics from religion.

Early China: A Social and Cultural History

Li Feng, East Asian Languages and Cultures

Li Feng draws on recent scholarship and archaeo-

logical discoveries to provide an overview of early

Chinese civilization, from the beginning of human

history in China to 220 C.E.

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created

Jobs, Challenge, and Change

Edmund Phelps, Economics

Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps argues that the

rise in prosperity in many nations between the

1820s and 1960s was fueled by widespread

innovation, which is now under threat.

Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Poli-

tics During World War II

Farah Griffin, English and Comparative Literature

Farah Griffin gives a rich account of three black

female artists and the strides they made for social

justice during World War II, laying the ground-

work for the civil rights movement.

Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic

Novel, and Optical Media

Stefan Andriopoulos, Germanic Languages

Drawing together literature, media, and philos-

ophy, Stefan Andriopoulos traces connections

between Kant and phantasmagoria, the Gothic

novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the

invention of television.

Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World,

1950–1992

Charles K. Armstrong, History

Charles K. Armstrong explores the motivations,

processes, and effects of North Korea’s foreign

relations during the Cold War era.

The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon

to Richter

Deborah R. Coen, History

Deborah R. Coen explores how the seismic

accounts of Darwin, Twain, Dickens, and other

citizen-observers comprise a natural experiment

at the nexus of the physical and human sciences.

Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of Amer-

ica’s Children

David Rosner, History and Sociomedical Sciences

With coauthor Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner

chronicles the contentious political and ethical

issues surrounding lead poisoning in the

twentieth century and the efforts to protect American

children.

Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt

Macalester Bell, Philosophy

Macalester Bell offers a far-ranging account of

the nature of contempt and its use and abuse.

The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism

Carol Rovane, Philosophy

Carol Rovane explicates a notion of relativism that

has a consistent logical, metaphysical, and practi-

cal significance, and how relativism influences the

moral choices we make.

Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Suc-

cess and Influence

Edward Tory Higgins, Psychology

With coauthor Heidi Grant Halvorson, E. Tory

Higgins delves into two different types of mo-

tivation that drive human behavior: promo-

tion-focused and prevention-focused.


On the Shelf

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Goodbye, Brazil: Émigrés from the Land of Soccer

and Samba

Maxine L. Margolis, Ph.D. ’70, Anthropology

Maxine L. Margolis offers a global perspec-

tive on the relatively recent phenom-

enon of Brazilian emigration, asking

who the émigrés are, why they left home, how they

traveled, and how their native and host countries

responded.

The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat: Poems

Stephen Massimilla, ’96SOA, M.A. ’98, M.Phil.

’01, Ph.D. ’05, English and Comparative Literature

Stephen Massimilla’s new poetry collection

treats “the loss, beauty, and suffering that

define our common humanity.”

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled

History of America’s Universities

Craig Steven Wilder, M.A. ’89, M.Phil. ’93, Ph.D.

’94, History

Craig Steven Wilder lays bare uncomfortable

truths about race, slavery, and the American

academy, revealing how the slave economy

and higher education grew up together.

El Documental Cinematográfico y Televisivo Con-

temporáneo

Isabel M. Estrada, M.Phil. ’97, Ph.D. ’99, Latin

American and Iberian Cultures

This first book by Isabel M. Estrada examines

how mass media, specifically film and tele-

vision documentaries, played a role in the

“recovery of memory” process of the Spanish Civil

War and the ensuing Franco dictatorship.

Roll with It: Brass Bands on the Streets of New

Orleans

Matthew Sakakeeny, Ph.D. ’08, Music

Matthew Sakakeeny’s book, based on his

dissertation, follows the lives of brass

band musicians in New Orleans before

and after Hurricane Katrina.



If A, Then B: How the World Discovered Logic

Michael Shenefelt, Ph.D. ’90, Philosophy

With coauthor Heidi White, Michael

Shenefelt examines the initial formulation

of logical principles 2,300 years ago and

subsequent discoveries, all situated within their social

and historical contexts.

High-pT Physics in the Heavy Ion Era

Michael J. Tannenbaum, M.A. ’60, Ph.D. ’65, Physics

With coauthor Jan Rak, Michael J. Tan-

nenbaum gives an experiment-oriented

overview of large transverse momentum

particle physics.

Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide

Lara J. Nettelfield, M.A. ’99, M.Phil. ’01, Ph.D. ’06,

Political Science

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork,

Lara J. Nettelfield and coauthor Sarah Wag-

ner trace the impact of the fall of the United

Nations “safe area” of Srebrenica during the Bosnian

war.

The Good Man: The Civil War’s “Christian General”

and His Fight for Racial Equality

Gordon L. Weil, Ph.D. ’61, Public Law and Govern-

ment

Gordon L. Weil examines the life of General

Oliver Otis Howard, a Union officer during

the Civil War, commissioner of the Freed-

men’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and one of

the founders of Howard University (which bears his

name).

The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle: Marriage, Murder,

and Madness in the Family of Jonathan Edwards

Ava Chamberlain, M.A. ’80, M.Phil. ’85, Ph.D. ’90,

Religion

Ava Chamberlain unearths the tragic story of

Elizabeth Tuttle, the “crazy grandmother” of

the eighteenth-century American theologian

Jonathan Edwards.


Anthropology

Heather Noelle Atherton. Com-munity identity in the Spanish colonial borderlands: San José de las Huertas, New Mexico. Sponsor: Nan A. Rothschild.

Anuj Bhuwania. Competing pop-ulisms: Public interest litigation and political society in post-Emer-gency India. Sponsor: Brinkley M. Messick.

Yogesh Chandrani. Legacies of co-lonial history: Region, religion, and violence in postcolonial Gujarat. Sponsor: Nicholas B. Dirks.

Krista M. Hegburg. Aftermath: Ac-counting for the Holocaust in the Czech Republic. Sponsor: Rosalind C. Morris.

Thushara Naresh S. Hewage. Genealogies of the postcolonial state: Insurgency, emergency, and democracy in Sri Lanka. Sponsor: David Scott.

Mythri Jegathesan. Bargaining in a labor regime: Plantation life and the politics of development in Sri Lanka. Sponsor: E. Valentine Daniel.

Etsko Kasai. Everyday fascism of contemporary Japan. Sponsor: Marilyn J. Ivy.

Munira Khayyat. A landscape of war: On the nature of conflict in south Lebanon. Sponsor: Brinkley M. Messick.

Jun Mizukawa. The crisis of language in contemporary Japan: Reading, writing, and new technol-ogy. Sponsor: Marilyn J. Ivy.

Özge Serin. Writing of death: Ethics and politics of the death fast in Turkey. Sponsor: Rosalind C. Morris.

Anand Vivek Taneja. Nature, histo-ry, and the sacred in the medieval ruins of Delhi. Sponsor: Partha Chatterjee.

Sarah Elizabeth Vaughn. Between a promise and a trench: Citizen-ship, vulnerability, and climate

change in Guyana. Sponsor: David Scott.

Darryl Alan Wilkinson. Politics, infrastructure, and nonhuman subjects: The Inka occupation of the Amaybamba cloud forests. Sponsor: Terence N. D’Altroy.

APAM: Applied Mathematics

David Goluskin. Zonal flow driven by convection, and convection driv-en by internal heating. Sponsors: David E. Keyes and Edward A. Spiegel.

Clara Orbe. Tracer-independent approaches to stratosphere-tropo-sphere exchange and tropospheric air-mass composition. Sponsor: Lorenzo M. Polvani.

Neil Francis Tandon. What is driving changes in the tropo-spheric circulation? New insights from simplified models. Sponsor: Lorenzo M. Polvani.

Ningyao Zhang. Homogenization theory for partial differential equa-tions with large, random potential. Sponsor: Guillaume Bal.

Xiang Zheng. Large-scale simu-lation of spinodal decomposition. Sponsor: David E. Keyes.

APAM: Applied Physics

Sriharsha Veerabhadraiah Arad-hya. Interplay between mechanics, electronics, and energetics in atomic-scale junctions. Sponsor: Latha Venkataraman.

Matthew Stiles Davis. Pressure profiles of plasmas confined in the field of a dipole magnet. Sponsor: Michael E. Mauel.

Jonathan R. Widawsky. Probing electronic and thermoelectric prop-erties of single-molecule junctions. Sponsor: Latha Venkataraman.

Matthew Wales Worstell. Symme-try breaking and the inverse energy cascade in a plasma. Sponsor: Michael E. Mauel.

APAM: Materials Science and Engineering

Theodore Jervey Kramer. Func-tional nanocomposites formed by two-step back-filling methods. Sponsor: Irving P. Herman.

Architecture

Cesare Birignani. The police and the city: Paris, 1660–1750. Spon-sor: Mary McLeod.

Art History and Archaeology

Kim Benzel. Pu-abi’s adornment for the afterlife: Materials and technologies of jewelry at Ur in Mesopotamia. Sponsor: Zainab Bahrani.

Diana M. Bush. The dialectical object: John Heartfield, 1915–1933. Sponsor: Alexander Alberro.

Kathryn Josette Chiong. Words matter: The work of Lawrence Weiner. Sponsor: Rosalind Krauss.

Susanna Dora Lewis Cole. Space into time: English canals and En-glish landscape painting, 1760–1835. Sponsor: Jonathan Crary.

Marie-Stéphanie Madeleine Delamaire. An art of translation: French prints and American art, 1848–1876. Sponsor: Elizabeth W. Hutchinson.

Anna Ratner Hetherington. Melancholy figures: From Bosch to Titian. Sponsor: David Rosand.

Dipti Sudhir Khera. Picturing India’s “Land of Kings” between the Mughal and British empires: Topographical imaginings of Udaipur and its environs. Sponsor: Vidya Dehejia.

Emily Katherine Liebert. Roles re-cast: Eleanor Antin and the 1970s. Sponsor: Alexander Alberro.

Martina Mims. August Endell’s construction of feeling. Sponsor: Barry Bergdoll.

Arianna Lysandra Packard. The catafalque of Paul V: Architecture, sculpture, and iconography. Spon-sor: David Freedberg.

Nassim Ellie Rossi. Italian Renais-sance depictions of the Ottoman Sultan: Nuances in the function of early modern Italian portraiture. Sponsor: David Rosand.

Anna Lise Seastrand. Praise, pol-itics, and language: South Indian murals, 1500–1800. Sponsor: Vidya Dehejia.

Yuthika Sharma. Art in between empires: Visual culture and artistic knowledge in late Mughal

Delhi, 1748–1857. Sponsor: Vidya Dehejia.

Astronomy

Maureen Elizabeth Teyssier. Extreme stellar populations in the universe: Backsplash dwarf galax-ies and wandering stars. Sponsor: Kathryn V. Johnston.

Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics

Kate Ann Stafford. Thermal adap-tation of conformational dynam-ics in ribonuclease H. Sponsor: Arthur G. Palmer III.

Biological Sciences

Sarah Rose Alaei. C-terminal lysines modulate Connexin32 turnover and its ability to suppress growth of Neuro-2a cell cultures. Sponsor: J. Chloë Bulinski.

Mauricio Alfredo Arias Hernan-dez. Designer exons inform a bio-physical model for exon definition. Sponsor: Lawrence Chasin.

Lilyn Daftuar. Rethinking the role of ribosomal proteins in the Mdm2-p53 axis. Sponsor: Carol Prives.

Eric Patrick Henckels. Regulation of matrix metallopeptidase 1 in breast cancer metastasis. Sponsor: Ron Prywes.

Jing-Ping Hsin. The functions of the RNA polymerase II CTD in transcription and RNA processing. Sponsor: James L. Manley.

Christine Shaoyu Huang. Struc-tural and functional studies of biotin-dependent carboxylases. Sponsor: Liang Tong.

Justine Virginia Kupferman. Targeting ion channels to distal dendrites. Sponsor: Steven A. Siegelbaum.

Thera Cathy Lewis. Serum regula-tion of inhibitor of DNA binding/differentiation 1 expression by a BMP pathway and BMP responsive element. Sponsor: Ron Prywes.

Bharat Duttala Reddy. Elucidating the biological function of PW-WP-domain containing protein complexes. Sponsor: Songtao Jia.

Ambar Asghar Salam. HDAC6 activity is required for efficient

DissertationsDepositedRecently


polarization and intracellular trans-port of organelles in directionally migrating cells. Sponsor: J. Chloë Bulinski.

Andrew J. Washkowitz. The role of Mga in the survival of pluripotent cells during peri-implantation development. Sponsor: Virginia E. Papaioannou.

Sarah Jane Weil. Novel regula-tory mechanisms of cytoplasmic dynein: A role for the complex base. Sponsor: Richard Vallee.

Biomedical Engineering

Keenan Tali Bashour. Spatial dy-namics and the mechanoresponse in CD4+ T cell activation. Sponsor: Lance C. Kam.

Ouri Cohen. In vivo three-dimen-sional proton Hadamard spec-troscopic imaging in the human brain. Sponsor: Andrew F. Laine.

Lauren E. Grosberg. Development and applications of high-speed and hyperspectral nonlinear micros-copy. Sponsor: Elizabeth M. C. Hillman.

Hamed Mojahed. Sequence de-velopment and expansion of zero J-modulation echo-planar chemical shift imaging in three dimensions (3D ZJ-EPSI). Sponsor: Andrew F. Laine.

Hesam Parsa. Leveraging micro-technology to study multicellular microvascular systems and mac-romolecular interaction. Sponsor: Samuel K. Sia.

Supansa Yodmuang. Precondi-tioning cells for cartilage tissue engineering: Influences of silk material properties and hypoxia on chondrogenesis. Sponsor: Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic.

Biomedical Informatics

Bo-Juen Chen. Personalized med-icine: Studies of pharmacogenom-ics in yeast and cancer. Sponsor: Dana Pe’er.

Biostatistics

Adam J. Ciarleglio. On wave-let-based procedures for sca-lar-on-function regression. Spon-sor: R. Todd Ogden.

Yi Wang. Sample size calculation based on the semiparametric anal-ysis of short-term and long-term hazard ratios. Sponsor: Zhezhen Jin.

Business

Stephen A. Atlas. Essays on deci-sions involving recurring finan-cial events. Sponsors: Daniel M. Bartels and Eric Johnson.

Santiago Román Balseiro. Compe-tition and yield optimization in ad exchanges. Sponsor: Omar Besbes.

Shinjinee Chattopadhyay. Essays on the economics of entrepre-neurship. Sponsor: Raymond J. Fisman.

Yang Chen. Essays on institutional investors. Sponsor: Wei Jiang.

Juanita Gonzalez Uribe. Venture capital and innovation. Sponsor: Morten Sorensen.

Jon Nathan Kerr. The real effects of opacity: Evidence from tax avoid-ance. Sponsor: Trevor S. Harris.

Russell Paul Lemler. Rethinking organizational leader identity development: A social network and ethnographic approach. Sponsor: Jerry W. Kim.

Meng Li. Changes in the profit-ability-growth relation and the im-plications for the accrual anomaly. Sponsor: Doron Nissim.

Andres Liberman. Essays in em-pirical corporate finance. Sponsor: Wei Jiang.

Yina Lu. Data-driven system design in service operations. Spon-sor: Marcelo Olivares.

Shira Mor. Cultural metacognitive processes: Psychological mech-anisms promoting intercultural effectiveness. Sponsor: Michael W. Morris.

Alicja K. Reuben. Essays on the strategic discretion of prosecutors in the legal system. Sponsor: Bruce Kogut.

Assaf Aharon Shtauber. Essays in financial economics. Sponsor: Gur Huberman.

Ahmet Serdar Simsek. Pricing decentralization in customized

pricing systems and network mod-els. Sponsor: Robert L. Phillips.

Liad Weiss. Egocentric categoriza-tion: Self as a reference category in product judgment and consumer choice. Sponsor: Gita V. Johar.

Andy J. Yap. How power and pow-erlessness corrupt. Sponsors: E. Tory Higgins and Dana Carney.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedi-cal Studies

Joseph Minhow Chan. Network and algebraic topology of influenza evolution. Sponsor: Raul Rabadan.

Eileen M. Guilfoyle. Stressed astro-cytes: Insights on the pathology of Alexander disease. Sponsor: James E. Goldman.

Benjamin David Hopkins. PTEN-long, a translational variant of the tumor suppressor PTEN. Sponsor: Ramon E. Parsons.

Shahrnaz Kemal. Distinct roles for dynein regulatory proteins NudE and NudEL in brain development. Sponsor: Richard Vallee.

Natalie Maria Kofler. Notch deficiency causes arteriovenous malformations and altered pericyte function. Sponsor: Jan Kitajewski.

Ya-Ting Lei. TRPM5 channels con-tribute to persistent neural activity and working memory. Sponsor: Steven A. Siegelbaum.

Darrick Kong Li. Novel RNA tar-gets of the spinal muscular atrophy protein. Sponsor: Livio Pellizzoni.

Colin James Palmer. The tran-scription factor Zfx is required for tumorigenesis caused by Hedge-hog pathway activation. Sponsor: Boris Reizis.

Germán Alonso Plata Caviedes. Probabilistic reconstruction and comparative systems biology of microbial metabolism. Sponsor: Dennis Vitkup.

Avraham Joshua Ziskind. Neurons in cat primary visual cortex cluster by degree of tuning but not by absolute spatial phase or temporal response phase. Sponsor: Kenneth D. Miller.

Chemical Engineering

Damla Eroglu. Modeling and characterization of rate phenom-ena in complex electrochemical systems: Sodium-metal chloride batteries and Ni/SiC co-deposition. Sponsor: Alan C. West.

Luis Andrés Escobar-Ferrand. Layer by layer, nanoparticle “only” surface modification of filtration membranes. Sponsor: Christopher James Durning.

Min-Hsuan Kuo. Trace gas-in-duced brine and disordered interfacial layers on ice. Sponsor: V. Faye McNeill.

Yanir Maidenberg. Directed self-assembly of polymer-decorated nanoparticles. Sponsor: Jeffrey T. Koberstein.

Chemical Physics

Dahlia Anne Goldfeld. Advances in structure and small-molecule docking predictions for crystallized G-protein-coupled receptors. Spon-sor: Richard A. Friesner.

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Chemistry

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Daniel Robert Griffith. Synthetic studies of the yunnaneic acids. Sponsor: Scott A. Snyder.

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Chaoran Jing. Trimethoprim-based chemical tags for high-resolution live cell imaging. Sponsor: Virginia Cornish.

Richard James Karpowicz Jr. I. Advanced fluorescent false neurotransmitters for the study of monoamine transporter activity and synaptic transmission. II. New small-molecule inducers of glial cell line-derived neurotrophic fac-tor (GDNF) from C6 glioma cells. Sponsor: Dalibor Sames.

Matthew Douglas Merguerian. Building a genetic system in yeast to search for high-affinity proteins in sequence space. Sponsor: Vir-ginia Cornish.

Jason Gary Polisar. I: The reaction of carboxylic/thiocarboxylic acids with isonitriles. II: Ruthenium hydride ring opening of an azeti-dinium cation. Sponsor: Jack R. Norton.

Caitlin Marie Quinn. Solid state NMR relaxation studies of triose-phosphate isomerase. Sponsor: Ann E. McDermott.

Christine Laura Schenck. Using molecular design to influence in-termolecular interactions. Sponsor: Colin P. Nuckolls.

Danielle Felicia Sedbrook. In pur-suit of conjugation in one dimen-sion: Synthetic studies of oligomer-ic and polymeric organic materials. Sponsor: Colin P. Nuckolls.

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Jing Zhang. Theoretical study of electron transport and trapping in solvated titanium dioxide nanoparticles. Sponsor: Richard A. Friesner.

Xinxin Zhu. Novel bio-imaging techniques based on molecular switching. Sponsor: Wei Min.

Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics

Mahesh Raju Bailakanavar. Space-time multiscale-multiphys-ics homogenization methods for heterogeneous materials. Sponsor: Jacob Fish.

Brett Alexander Benowitz. Model-

ing and simulation of random pro-cesses and fields in civil engineer-ing and engineering mechanics. Sponsors: George Deodatis and Haim Waisman.

Daniel Peter Hochstein. Thermal conductivity of fiber-reinforced lightweight cement composites. Sponsor: Christian Meyer.

YunJi Hwang. Stochastic analysis of storm-surge-induced infra-structure losses in New York City. Sponsor: George Deodatis.

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Classical Studies

Todd Alexander Davis. Archery in Archaic Greece. Sponsor: Richard A. Billows.

Classics

Evgenia Papathanasopoulou. Space in Aristophanes: Portraying the civic and domestic worlds in Acharnians, Knights, and Wasps. Sponsor: Helene Foley.

Communications

Katherine Ann Brown. Patterns in the chaos: News and nationalism in Afghanistan, America, and Paki-stan during wartime, 2010–2012. Sponsor: Todd Gitlin.

Julia Sonnevend. Global iconic events: How news stories travel through time, space, and media. Sponsor: Michael Schudson.

Computer Science

Hao Dang. Stable and semantic robotic grasping using tactile feed-back. Sponsor: Peter K. Allen.

Michele Merler. Multimodal indexing of presentation videos. Sponsor: John R. Kender.

Richard W. Neill. Heterogeneous cloud systems based on broadband embedded computing. Sponsor: Luca Carloni.

Iasonas Petras. Contributions to information-based complexity and to quantum computing. Sponsor: Joseph F. Traub.

Snehit Prabhu. Computational contributions toward scalable and efficient genome-wide association methodology. Sponsor: Itsik Pe’er.

Austin David Reiter. Assistive visual tools for surgery. Sponsor: Peter K. Allen.

Paul Etienne Vouga. Discrete differential geometry of thin mate-rials for computational mechanics. Sponsor: Eitan Grinspun.

Lauren Gabrielle Wilcox-Patterson. User interfaces for patient-cen-tered communication of health status and care progress. Sponsor: Steven K. Feiner.

John Ruoyu Zhang. Correlating visual speaker gestures with mea-sures of audience engagement to aid video browsing. Sponsor: John R. Kender.

Earth and Environmental Engineering

John Edward Feighery. A com-bined field and laboratory investi-gation into the transport of fecal indicator microorganisms through a shallow drinking-water aquifer in Bangladesh. Sponsor: Kartik Chandran.

Naomi Beth Klinghoffer. Utili-zation of char from biomass gas-ification in catalytic applications. Sponsor: Marco J. Castaldi.

Amanda Elizabeth Simson. Devel-oping an energy-efficient steam

reforming process to produce hydrogen from sulfur-containing fuels. Sponsor: Marco J. Castaldi.

Thomas Adrian Socci. A computa-tional model of networked small-scale fuel synthesis demonstrating greater production flexibility and specificity. Sponsor: Klaus S. Lackner.

Jun Wu. Greener surface active reagents: Structure, property, and performance relationships. Spon-sor: Ponisseril Somasundaran.

Earth and Environmental Sciences Christopher Tyler Hayes. Marine thorium and protactinium distri-butions: Tools for past and present chemical flux. Sponsor: Robert F. Anderson.

Milena Marjanovic. Signatures of present and past melt distribution at fast and intermediate spreading centers. Sponsor: Suzanne M. Carbotte.

Carlos Daniel Ruiz Carrascal. Adaptation strategies to climate change in the tropics: Analysis of two multifactorial systems. Spon-sor: Mark A. Cane.

East Asian Languages and Cultures

David Carl Atherton. Valences of vengeance: The moral imagination of early modern Japanese vendetta fiction. Sponsor: Haruo Shirane.

BuYun Chen. Dressing for the times: Fashion in Tang dynasty China, 618–907. Sponsor: Dorothy Yin-Yee Ko.

Jennifer Lindsay Guest. Prim-ers, commentaries, and kanbun literacy in Japanese literary culture, 950–1250 CE. Sponsors: Haruo Shirane and David Barnett Lurie.

Sarah Elizabeth Kile. Toward an extraordinary everyday: Li Yu’s (1611–1680) vision, writing, and practice. Sponsor: Wei Shang.

Michael Barrett McCarty. Divided loyalties and shifting perceptions: The Jo-kyu-ū disturbance and court-ier-warrior relations in medieval Japan. Sponsor: David Barnett Lurie.

Gregory Magai Patterson. Elegies for empire: The poetics of memory


in the late work of Du Fu (712–770). Sponsor: Wendy Swartz.

Gian-Piero Persiani. Waka after the Kokinshu: Anatomy of a cultur-al phenomenon. Sponsor: Haruo Shirane.

Minna Wu. On the periphery of a great “empire”: Secondary forma-tion of states and their material basis in the Shandong peninsula during the late Bronze Age, ca. 1000–500 B.C.E. Sponsor: Feng Li.

Christina Song Me Yi. Fissured languages of empire: Gender, ethnicity, and literature in Japan and Korea, 1930s–1950s. Spon-sors: Tomi Suzuki and Theodore Hughes.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environ-mental Biology

Georgina Davie Cullman. Land use, diverse values, and conserva-tion practice in the periphery of Makira Natural Park, northeastern Madagascar. Sponsors: Eleanor J. Sterling and Paige West.

Victor Hugo Gutierrez-Velez. Oil palm expansion and land cover changes in the Peruvian Amazon: Implications for forest conserva-tion and fire mitigation. Sponsor: Ruth DeFries.

Mary A. Heskel. Environmental controls of foliar respiration in Arctic tundra plants. Sponsor: Kevin L. Griffin.

Kari Lynn Schmidt. Spatial and temporal patterns of genetic variation in scarlet macaws (Ara macao): Implications for popu-lation management in La Selva Maya, Central America. Sponsor: George Amato.

Economics

Ama Baafra Abeberese. Essays on firm behavior in developing coun-tries. Sponsor: Eric Verhoogen.

Adonis Antoniades. Three essays in banking. Sponsor: Pierre-André Chiappori.

Patrick Opoku Asuming. Three essays on the economics of health in developing countries. Sponsor: Cristian Pop-Eleches.

David S. Blakeslee. Three essays on development and the political

economy of south Asia. Sponsor: Suresh Naidu.

Alejo Eduardo Czerwonko Pupi. Essays in alternative financial ser-vices. Sponsor: Katherine Ho.

Sarena Faith Goodman. Essays on human capital investment. Spon-sor: Brendan O’Flaherty.

Yun Kyung Kim. Essays on cor-porate cash holdings and busi-ness groups. Sponsor: Brendan O’Flaherty.

Hyuncheol Kim. Three essays on health economics. Sponsor: Cris-tian Pop-Eleches.

Youngwoo Koh. Essays on market design and auction theory. Spon-sor: Yeon-Koo Che.

Tao Li. Essays in economics and corporate finance. Sponsor: Patrick Bolton.

Neil Mehrotra. Essays on mac-roeconomics and labor markets. Sponsor: Ricardo Reis.

WooRam Park. Essays on the returns to higher education. Spon-sor: Miguel S. Urquiola.

Petra Maria Charlotte Persson. Relationships and communication. Sponsor: Navin Kartik.

Maya Rossin-Slater. Social policy and family well-being: Essays in applied microeconomics. Sponsor: Wojciech Kopczuk.

Dmitriy Sergeyev. Essays on macroeconomics and interna-tional finance. Sponsor: Michael Woodford.

Anukriti Sharma. Essays on fertili-ty and sex ratios in India. Sponsor: Cristian Pop-Eleches.

Minkee Song. Essays on large panel data analysis. Sponsor: Jushan Bai.

Sébastien Turban. Essays in politi-cal economy. Sponsor: Alessandra Casella.

Zhanna Victorovna Zhanabekova. Essays in health care and public economics. Sponsor: Wojciech Kopczuk.

Electrical Engineering

Courtenay Valentine Cotton. Char-acterizing audio events for video

soundtrack analysis. Sponsor: Daniel P. W. Ellis.

Marshall Paige Cox. Processes and materials for organic photovoltaics. Sponsor: Ioannis Kymissis.

Zhi-De Deng. Electromagnetic field modeling of transcranial electric and magnetic stimulation: Targeting, individualization, and safety of convulsive and subcon-vulsive applications. Sponsor: Kenneth L. Shepard.

Maria A. Gorlatova. Energy-har-vesting networked modes: Mea-surements, algorithms, and proto-typing. Sponsor: Gil Zussman.

Ning Gu. Experimental inves-tigations of the role of proxim-ity approximation in near-field radiative transfer. Sponsor: Arvind Narayanaswamy.

Kyung-Wook Hwang. Design of scalable on-demand video stream-

ing systems leveraging video viewing patterns. Sponsor: Daniel Rubenstein.

Alexandros Iliadis. Haplotype inference through sequential Monte Carlo. Sponsor: Dimitris Anastassiou.

Noam Ophir. Silicon photonics for all-optical processing and high-bandwidth-density intercon-nects. Sponsor: Keren Bergman.

John Christopher Sarik. Systems for pervasive electronics and inter-faces. Sponsor: Ioannis Kymissis.

Yevgeniy Slutskiy. Idenification of dendritic processing in spiking neural circuits. Sponsor: Aurel A. Lazar.

Christos Vezyrtzis. Continu-ous-time and companding digital signal processors using adaptivity and asynchronous techniques.


Sponsors: Yannis P. Tsividis and Steven M. Nowick.

English and Comparative Litera-ture

Jeffrey Michael Brown. To stage a reading: The actor in British mod-ernism. Sponsor: W. B. Worthen.

Jean-Christophe Cloutier. Archival vagabonds: Twentieth-century American fiction and the archive in novelistic practice. Sponsor: Brent Hayes Edwards.

Victoria J. Collis. Anxious records: Race, imperial belonging, and the black literary imagination, 1900–1946. Sponsor: Brent Hayes Edwards.

Alicia Margaret DeSantis. The feeling of a line: Nineteenth-centu-ry American literature and the psy-chology of imagination. Sponsor: Nicholas Dames.

Anne Claire Diebel. The outward turn: Personality, blankness, and allure in American modernism. Sponsor: Ross Posnock.

Nathaniel Farrell. The modernist defense of poetry in prose and verse. Sponsor: Michael Golston.

John Andrew Hay. The post-apoca-lyptic American frontier: Uncanny historicism in the nineteenth century. Sponsor: Ross Posnock.

Alvan Azinna Ikoku. Forms of global health. Sponsor: Brent Hayes Edwards.

Kairos Garcia Llobrera. The predic-ament of illegality: Undocumented aliens in contemporary American immigration fiction. Sponsor: Frances Negrón-Muntaner.

Joan Virginia Melville. The theatre of anon: Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia Woolf, and the perfor-mance of Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Sponsor: Martin Meisel.

Samuel Joseph North. Useful works: Literary criticism and aesthetic education. Sponsor: Nich-olas Dames.

Imani D. Owens. At the cross-roads: African American and Caribbean writers in the interwar period. Sponsor: Farah Jasmine Griffin.

Kathleen Mary Smith. The literary lives of intention in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Sponsor: Susan Crane.

Kate Joanna Stanley. Surprise en-counters: Readings in transatlantic modernism. Sponsor: Marianne Hirsch.

Jessica Elaine Teague. Ears taut to hear: Sound recording and twen-tieth-century American literature. Sponsor: Brent Hayes Edwards.

Eugene Vydrin. Site specifics: Modernist mediums in modern places. Sponsor: Michael Golston.

Daniel Wright. Bad logic: Reason-ing about desire in the Victorian novel. Sponsor: Sharon Marcus.

Epidemiology

Meredith Becker Buxton. Blood-borne infections and duration of injection drug use among young, newly initiated injection drug users. Sponsor: David Vlahov.

Ettie M. Lipner. Genetic contribu-tion to type 1 diabetes microvascu-

lar complications. Sponsor: Nicole Schupf.

Magdalena M. Paczkowski. Poten-tially traumatic event experiences and health care service use in Liberia. Sponsor: Sandro Galea.

Lynn Meredith Petukhova. The genetic architecture of alopecia areata. Sponsor: Ruth Ottman.

Christian Ricardo Salazar. Allostat-ic load in relation to periodontal disease, tooth loss, and mortality: Findings from the 1914 Glostrup aging study. Sponsor: Pam R. Factor-Litvak.

French and Romance Philology

Casiana Elena Ionita. The educated spectator: Cinema and pedagogy in France, 1909–1930. Sponsor: Elisabeth Ladenson.

Cathy Kit-Ting Leung. George Sand and rewriting: The poetics of intertextuality in George Sand’s “Jacques cycle.” Sponsor: Joanna Stalnaker.

Erica Wan Ru Weems. Charity and interpretation in the Heptaméron and the Tiers Livre. Sponsor: Pierre Force.

Benjamin C. Young. Eloquence and music: The Querelle des Bouf-fons in rhetorical context. Sponsor: Pierre Force.

Genetics and Development

James Chi-ping Chen. Computa-tional inferences of mutations driv-ing mesenchymal differentiation in glioblastoma. Sponsor: Andrea Califano.

Daniel Concepcion. The roles of T and Tbx6 during gastrulation and determination of left/right asymmetry. Sponsor: Virginia E. Papaioannou.

Lisa Michelle Kennedy. Genetic analysis of novel regulators of neu-ronal migration in Caenorhabditis elegans: The insulin/IGF-1 signal-ing pathway, a chromatin-binding factor ZFP-1 (AF10), and endoge-nous RNAi. Sponsor: Alla Grishok.

Kally Zhang Pan. Cell-size control in fission yeast. Sponsor: Frederick Chang.

Germanic Languages

Brook Henkel. Animistic fictions: German modernism, film, and the animation of things. Sponsor: Stefan Andriopoulos.

Tyler Robert Whitney. Spaces of the ear: Literature, media, and the science of sound, 1870–1930. Sponsor: Stefan Andriopoulos.

History

Jessica Lee Adler. Paying the price of war: United States soldiers, veterans, and health policy, 1917–1924. Sponsor: Alice Kes-sler-Harris.

Nina Ansary. Roots of feminist invocations in post-revolutionary Iran. Sponsor: Richard W. Bulliet.

Giuliana Chamedes. The Vatican and the making of the Atlantic or-der, 1920–1960. Sponsor: Victoria de Grazia.

Jun Hee Cho. Court in the market: The “business” of a princely court in the Burgundian Netherlands, 1467–1503. Sponsor: Martha C. Howell.

Aimee M. Genell. Empire by law: Ottoman sovereignty and the British occupation of Egypt, 1882–1923. Sponsor: Mark A. Mazower.

Michael W. Heil. Clerics, courts, and legal culture in early medieval Italy, c. 650–900. Sponsor: Adam J. Kosto.

Laura Jeanne Hornbake. Commu-nity, place, and cultural battles: Associational life in central Italy, 1945–1968. Sponsor: Victoria de Grazia.

Lawrence William Koblenz. From sin to science: The cancer revo-lution of the nineteenth century. Sponsor: Kenneth T. Jackson.

Jared Braidwood Manasek. Empire displaced: Ottoman-Habsburg forced migration and the Near Eastern crisis, 1875–1878. Sponsor: Samuel Moyn.

Susan Kay Mays. Rapid advance: High technology in China in the global electronic age. Sponsor: Madeleine Zelin.

Michael James Neuss. Balancing blood, balancing books: Medicine, commerce, and the royal court


in seventeenth-century England. Sponsor: Matthew L. Jones.

Lucy Victoria Phillips. The strange commodity of cultural exchange: Martha Graham and the State Department on tour, 1955–1987. Sponsor: Eric Foner.

Nathan Laughlin Pilkington. An archaeological history of Car-thaginian imperialism. Sponsor: William V. Harris.

Stephen Jude Sullivan. A social history of the Brooklyn Irish, 1850–1900. Sponsor: Kenneth T. Jackson.

Linda Ann Tvrdy. Constitutional rights in a common-law world: The reconstruction of North Carolina legal culture, 1865–1874. Sponsor: Eric Foner.

Toru Umezaki. The Free Univer-sity of New York: The new left’s self-education and transborder activism. Sponsor: Eric Foner.

Timothy Ming-Chih Yang. Market, medicine, and empire: Hoshi Pharmaceuticals in the interwar years. Sponsor: Carol Gluck.

IEOR: Industrial Engineering

Rodrigo Arnaldo Carrasco. Resource-cost-aware scheduling problems. Sponsors: Clifford S. Stein and Garud N. Iyengar.

IEOR: Operations Research

Krzysztof Marcin Choromanski. Tournaments with forbidden substructures and the Erdös-Ha-jnal conjecture. Sponsor: Maria Chudnovsky.

Arseniy Kukanov. Stochastic models of limit order markets. Sponsor: Rama Cont.

Alexander Daniel Michalka. Cutting planes for convex objective nonconvex optimization. Sponsor: Daniel Bienstock.

Zhiwei Qin. Optimization algo-rithms for structured machine learning and image processing problems. Sponsor: Donald Gold-farb.

Xingbo Xu. Financial portfolio risk management: Model risk, robustness, and rebalancing error. Sponsor: Paul Glasserman.

Ana Cecilia Zenteno Langle. Mod-els for managing surge capacity in the face of an influenza epidemic. Sponsor: Daniel Bienstock.

Italian

Steven James Baker. Political Petr-archism: The rhetorical fashioning of community in early modern Italy. Sponsor: Jo Ann Cavallo.

Nicola Di Nino. Spiritual voices: Antonia Pozzi, Cristina Campo, and Margherita Guidacci. Sponsor: Paolo Valesio.

Akash Kumar. Sì come dice lo Filosofo: Translating philosophy in the early Italian lyric. Sponsor: Teodolinda Barolini.

Lynn Erin MacKenzie. Dante’s manhoods: Authorial masculinities before the Commedia. Sponsor: Teodolinda Barolini.

Zane D. R. Mackin. Dante Prae-dicator: Sermons and preaching culture in the Commedia. Sponsor: Teodolinda Barolini.

Ileana Moreno-Viqueira. Invisible mathematics in Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili. Sponsor: Paolo Valesio.

Valentina Nocentini. Il palcosceni-co della guerra di Libia: Protago-nisti, retorica, nazione, 1911–1912. Sponsor: Elizabeth Leake.

Latin American and Iberian Cultures

Mauricio Andres Castillo. Avant-garde and socialist dream-worlds in Latin America: Global and local designs, 1919–1939. Sponsor: Carlos J. Alonso.

Mónica de la Torre. Nobody there: Acousmatics and an alternative economy of meaning in Latin American poetry of the 1970s. Sponsor: Carlos J. Alonso.

Mathematics

Andre Rubens Franca Carneiro. A geometric construction of a Calabi quasimorphism on projective space. Sponsor: Dusa McDuff.

Daniel Disegni. p-adic heights of Heegner points on Shimura curves. Sponsor: Shou-Wu Zhang.

Alexander Palen Ellis. Odd sym-

metric functions and categorifica-tion. Sponsor: Mikhail Khovanov.

Andrew Lawrence Fanoe. Proper-ties of Hamiltonian torus actions on closed symplectic manifolds. Sponsor: Dusa McDuff.

Luis E. Garcia. Singular theta lifts and near-central special values of Rankin-Selberg L-functions. Spon-sor: Shou-Wu Zhang.

Kristen Elyse Hendricks. Localiza-tion and Heegaard Floer homolo-gy. Sponsor: Robert Lipshitz.

Zachary Alexander Maddock. Del Pezzo surfaces with irregularity and intersection numbers on quotients in geometric invariant theory. Sponsor: Aise Johan de Jong.

You Qi. Hopfological algebra. Sponsor: Mikhail Khovanov.

Yu Wang. Local regularity of the complex Monge-Ampère equation. Sponsor: Duong H. Phong.

Yanhong Yang. Purity of the strat-ification by Newton polygons and Frobenius-periodic vector bundles. Sponsor: Aise Johan de Jong.

Fan Zhou. Sato-Tate problem for GL(3). Sponsor: Dorian Goldfeld.

Mechanical Engineering

Edwin S. Ahn. Addressing stability robustness, period uncertainties, and startup of multiple-period repetitive control for spacecraft jitter mitigation. Sponsor: Richard W. Longman.

Shan-Ting Hsu. Effect of laser-in-duced crystallinity modification on degradation and drug release of biodegradable polymer. Sponsor: Y. Lawrence Yao.

Jin Ho Kim. A microfluidic ap-proach to selection and enrich-ment of aptamers for biomolecules and cells. Sponsor: Qiao Lin.

Emil Jose Sandoz-Rosado. The tribological behavior of graphene and its role as a protective coating. Sponsor: Elon J. Terrell.

Gen Satoh. Modification and integration of shape memory alloys through thermal treatments and dissimilar metal joining. Sponsor: Y. Lawrence Yao.

Hongliang Wang. Laser surface texturing, crystallization, and scribing of thin films in solar cell applications. Sponsor: Y. Lawrence Yao.

Microbiology, Immunology, and Infection

Lindsie Adela Goss. Threonine phosphorylation regulates two-component systems involved in cell-wall metabolism. Sponsor: Jonathan Dworkin.

Mowgli Clearwater Holmes. The intracellular kinetics of HIV-1 replication. Sponsor: Saul J. Silverstein.

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies

Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular. Afterlife of empire: Muslim-Ottoman relations in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovi-na, 1878–1914. Sponsor: Mark A. Mazower.

Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi. Revolutions and Rough Cuts: Bodily technologies for regulating sexuality in contemporary Iran. Sponsor: Hamid Dabashi.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary. Religions of doubt: Religion, critique, and modernity in Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin. Sponsor: Hamid Dabashi.

Arthur Dale Dudney. A desire for meaning: Kha-n-i A

-rzu-’s philology

and the place of India in the eigh-teenth-century Persianate world. Sponsor: Frances W. Pritchett.

Elaine Marie Fisher. A new public theology: Sanskrit and society in seventeenth-century south India. Sponsor: Sheldon Pollock.

Rebecca Gould. The political aesthetic of the medieval Persian prison poem, 1100–1200. Sponsor: Muhsin Jassim al-Musawi.

Elizabeth Eva Johnston. Reading science in the early writings of Leopold Zunz and Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi: On beginnings of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Nahda. Sponsor: Gil Anidjar.

Omar Khalid Khalifah. Nasser in the Egyptian imaginary. Sponsor: Noha Radwan.


Yasmine Khayyat. Memory in ruins: The poetics of Aṭlāl in Leba-nese wartime and postwar cultural production. Sponsor: Muhsin Jassim al-Musawi.

Dina A. Ramadan. The aesthetics of the modern: Art, education, and taste in Egypt, 1903–1952. Spon-sor: Timonthy Mitchell.

Linda Sayed. Sectarian homes: The making of Shi’i families and citizens under the French man-date, 1918–1943. Sponsors: Hamid Dabashi and Rashid Khalidi.

Kadir Ustun. The new order and its enemies: Opposition to military reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1789–1807. Sponsor: Rashid Khalidi.

Music

Beau Denny Bothwell. Song, state, Sawa: Music and political radio be-tween the United States and Syria. Sponsor: Ellie M. Hisama.

Mahir Cetiz. Listening experience and musical construction: Spectro-morphological analysis of Enfilade: Lamento-Cambiata. Sponsor: Alfred W. Lerdahl.

Scott Michael Gleason. Princeton theory’s problematics. Sponsor: Joseph Dubiel.

Sean Russell Hallowell. The déplo-ration as musical idea. Sponsor: Giuseppe Gerbino.

Nicholas Andreas Higgins. Confu-sion in the Karnatic capital: Fusion in Chennai, India. Sponsor: Chris-topher Washburne.

Music (D.M.A.)

Mario Diaz de Leon. Mansion: Inner cosmologies, thresholds, and contacts. Sponsor: George E. Lewis.

Damon Russell Holzborn. Building mobile instruments for improvised musical performance. Sponsor: George E. Lewis.

Neurobiology and Behavior

Christine Marie Constantinople. Subcortical inputs governing cortical network activity. Sponsor: Randy M. Bruno.

Elizabeth Erin Crouch. Adult neu-ral stem cells and their perivascu-lar niche. Sponsor: Fiona Doetsch.

Andrew Jacob Pixley Fink. Explor-ing a behavioral role for presynap-tic inhibition at spinal sensory-mo-tor synapses. Sponsor: Thomas M. Jessell.

Saul Sen Kato. Temporal process-ing by Caenorhabditis elegans senso-ry neurons. Sponsor: Laurence F. Abbott.

Maxim Valerievich Nikitchenko. Inference of neural connectivity and convergence acceleration methods. Sponsor: Liam Paninski.

Pia-Kelsey Tiu O’Neill. Long-range synchrony between medial prefrontal cortex, thalamus, and hippocampus underlies working memory behavior in mice. Spon-sor: Joshua A. Gordon.

Christopher James Peck. Space and value in the primate amygdala and basal forebrain. Sponsor: C. Daniel Salzman.

Zev Benjamin Rosen. Dopaminer-gic control of hippocampal neural circuitry. Sponsor: Steven A. Siegelbaum.

Carl Edward Schoonover. Strength and dendritic organization of thalamocortical synapses onto ex-citatory layer 4 neurons. Sponsor: Randy M. Bruno.

Brikha Raj Shrestha. Role of the immunoglobulin superfam-ily member basigin in sensory neuron dendrite morphogenesis in Drosophila. Sponsor: Wesley B. Grueber.

Qing Wang. Neuronal diversifica-tion within the retina: Generation of crossed and uncrossed retinal ganglion cells. Sponsor: Carol A. Mason.

Gregory Duncan Wayne. Self-mod-eling neural systems. Sponsor: Laurence F. Abbott.

Nursing

Nicole Faerman Geller. Examining bullying, harassment, and hori-zontal violence (BHHV) in student nurses. Sponsor: Elaine L. Larson.

Young Ji Lee. Online health infor-mation-seeking behaviors of His-

panics in New York City. Sponsor: Suzanne Bakken.

Njoki Ng’ang’a. Manager and pro-vider perspectives of the work envi-ronment experienced by associate clinicians, nurses, and midwives who deliver emergency obstetric care in Tanzania. Sponsor: Mary Woods Byrne.

Annie Jill Rohan. Pain-associated stressor exposure and cortisol values at thirty-seven postmenstru-al weeks for premature infants in neonatal intensive care. Sponsor: Mary Woods Byrne.

Nutritional and Metabolic Biology

Katherine Jean Wert. Gene therapy provides long-term visual function in a preclinical model of retinitis pigmentosa. Sponsor: Stephen Tsang.

Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine

Rosa Leonora Andrea de Vries. Be eaten to stay healthy: Elucidating the mechanisms of mitochondri-al quality control by mitophagy. Sponsor: Serge Przedborski.

Yige Guo. Molecular mechanisms of mitotic spindle assembly and accurate chromosome segregation. Sponsor: Yinghui Mao.

Angela Yuanyuan Jia. The role of microRNAs in bladder urothelium development and tumorigenesis. Sponsor: Carlo Cordon-Cardo.

Kimberly Shauntae Point du Jour. The role of phospholipase D1 in trafficking and processing of am-yloid precursor protein. Sponsor: Gilbert Di Paolo.

Pharmacology and Molecular Signaling

Matthew Lê-Khắc. Structure-based design of small molecule inhib-itors of HIV-1 entry. Sponsor: Wayne A. Hendrickson.

Minji Kim Uh. Notch signaling determines lymphatic cell fate and regulates sprouting lymphangio-genesis. Sponsor: Jan Kitajewski.

Mi Wang. The role of GM-CSBF/IL-3/IL-5 receptor common ß ğ subunit (CBS) in HSPC expansion, monocytosis, and atherosclerosis.

Sponsor: Alan R. Tall.

Minerva Yue Wong. Dopamine modulates corticostriatal inputs during motor command signaling. Sponsor: David Sulzer.

Philosophy

Adrian Avery Terence Archer. The rational significance of desire. Sponsor: Katja Vogt.

Dehlia Hannah. Performative experiments: Case studies in the philosophy of art, science, and technology. Sponsor: Lydia Goehr.

Harold Barnes Ingram Jr. The pos-sibility of mutual benefit from ex-change between the philosophy of language and second-language-ac-quisition research and pedagogy. Sponsor: Achille C. Varzi.

Chloe Layman. Descartes’s slight and metaphysical doubt. Sponsor: Patricia Kitcher.

Ariadna Pop. Making sense of faultless disagreement. Sponsor: Katja Vogt.

Physics

Alessandro Buzzatti. Jet quench-ing in quark gluon plasma: Flavor tomography at RHIC and LHC by the CUJET model. Sponsor: Miklos Gyulassy.

Yujiao Chen. Charged particle multiplicity and open heavy flavor physics in relativistic heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Col-lider. Sponsor: Brian A. Cole.

Gary Chia Li Cheng. Precision search for muon antineutrino disappearance oscillations using a dual baseline technique. Sponsor: Michael H. Shaevitz.

Bin Choi. The light response of the XENON100 time projection chamber and the measurements of the optical parameters with the xenon scintillation light. Sponsor: Elena Aprile.

Hung The Dang. The study of transition metal oxides using dynamical mean field theory. Sponsor: Andrew J. Millis.

Solomon George Shamsuddin Osman Endlich. The effective field theory approach to fluid dynamics.


Sponsor: Alberto Nicolis.

Mina Fazlollahi. Inferring tran-scriptional and post-transcriptional network structure by exploiting natural sequence variation. Spon-sor: Szabolcs Márka.

Ali Masoumi Khalil Abad. Topics in vacuum decay. Sponsor: Erick J. Weinberg.

Gunes Demet Senturk. Observa-tional properties of gigaelectron-volt-teraelectronvolt blazars and the study of the teraelectronvolt blazar RBS 0413 with VERITAS. Sponsor: Thomas Brian Humen-sky.

Dustin Henry Urbaniec. A mea-surement of the jet multiplicity in di-lepton final states of ttbar events. Sponsor: Gustaaf H. Broo-ijmans.

Eric Vazquez. Control study of two-particle correlations in heavy ion collisions at RHIC-PHENIX. Sponsor: William A. Zajc.

Junpu Wang. The effective field theory approach to fluid dynamics, modified gravity theories, and cos-

mology. Sponsor: Alberto Nicolis.

Xiuyuan Yang. Cosmology with weak lensing peaks. Sponsors: Lam Hui and Morgan May.

Hantao Yin. Precision lattice calcu-lation of kaon decays with Möbius domain wall fermions. Sponsor: Robert D. Mawhinney.

Tae Hyun Yoon. An atom trap trace analysis (ATTA) system for measuring ultra-low contami-nation by krypton in xenon dark matter detectors. Sponsor: Tanya Zelevinsky.

Liuyan Zhao. Chemical vapor deposition grown pristine and chemically doped monolayer graphene. Sponsor: Abhay Pasup-athy.

Political Science

Gordon N. Bardos. Ethnoconfes-sional nationalism in the Balkans: Analysis, manifestations, and management. Sponsor: Timothy M. Frye.

Candace Hortensia Blake. Choos-ing an international legal regime:

How much justice would you trade for peace? Sponsor: Andrew J. Nathan.

Simon Collard-Wexler. Under-standing resistance to foreign occupation. Sponsor: Virginia Page Fortna.

Gustavo de las Casas. National-ism-as-technology and peace in Europe, 1815–1914. Sponsor: Jack L. Snyder.

Felix Hans Gerlsbeck. Experimen-tal democracy: Collective intelli-gence for a diverse and complex world. Sponsor: Melissa Schwartz-berg.

Suzanne Katzenstein. Why sur-render sovereignty? Empowering nonstate actors to protect the status quo. Sponsor: Jack L. Snyder.

Katherine Lyn Krimmel. Special interest partisanship: The trans-formation of American political parties. Sponsor: Ira Katznelson.

Virginia Oliveros. A working ma-chine: Patronage jobs and political services in Argentina. Sponsor: Maria Victoria Murillo.

Sayres Steven Rudy. Citizen-sub-jectivity, experiential evaluation, and activist strategies: Explaining Algerian violence and Polish peace under authoritarian rule. Sponsor: Mark Kesselman.

Shiau-Chi Shen. Democracy and nation formation: National identity change and dual identity in Tai-wan, 1991–2011. Sponsor: Andrew J. Nathan.

Kaori Shoji. When do party leaders democratize? Analyzing three reforms of voter registration and candidate selection. Sponsor: Rob-ert Y. Shapiro.

John Joseph Sivolella. Do politics matter to this watchdog? The effects of ideology on civil enforce-ment at the United States Securi-ties and Exchange Commission. Sponsor: Robert Y. Shapiro.

Oscar M. Torres-Reyna. Origins and use of presidential polling in Mexico. Presidential approval in Mexico. Government spending and public opinion in Mexico. Sponsor: Robert Y. Shapiro.


Andrej Tusicisny. Reciprocity and prejudice: An experiment of Hindu-Muslim cooperation in the slums of Mumbai. Sponsor: Jack L. Snyder.

Psychology

Eleni Kanellopoulou. Beyond regret: Cognitive strategies for healthier eating and weight loss. Sponsor: Kevin Ochsner.

Karen Jeanne Kelly. Metacognition of emotion recognition. Sponsor: Janet Metcalfe.

Maria Konnikova. The limits of self-control: Self-control, illuso-ry control, and risky financial decision-making. Sponsor: Walter Mischel.

Jennifer Ashley Silvers. Behavioral and neural bases of emotion reg-ulation in childhood and adoles-cence. Sponsor: Kevin Ochsner.

Religion

Susan Patricia Andrews. Repre-senting Mount Wutai’s past: A study of Chinese and Japanese miracle tales about the Five Ter-race Mountain. Sponsor: Chun-fang Yu.

Todd Stephen Berzon. Classifying Christians: Ethnography, discov-ery, and the limits of knowledge in late antiquity. Sponsor: Elizabeth Castelli.

Joshua Even Eisen. Stammaitic activity versus Stammaitic chronol-ogy: Anonymity’s impact on the legal narrative of the Babylonian Talmud. Sponsor: David Weiss Halivni.

Benjamin Yen Yi Fong. The death drive revisited: A reexamination of psychoanalytic drive theory and its implications for critical theory. Sponsor: Mark Taylor.

Joseph Mark McClellan. Poisoned ground: The roots of Eurocen-trism: Teleology, hierarchy, and anthropocentrism. Sponsor: Rob-ert Thurman.

Heather Christine Ohaneson. Free to play: An analysis in aesthetic, ethical, and religious movements. Sponsor: Wayne Proudfoot.

Gregory Adam Scott. Conversion by the book: Buddhist print culture

in early Republican China. Spon-sor: Chun-fang Yu.

Frank Griffin Shepard. The sickness unto life: Nietzsche’s di-agnosis of the Christian condition. Sponsor: Wayne Proudfoot.

Michelle Janet Sorensen. Mak-ing the old new again and again: Legitimation and innovation in the Tibetan Buddhist Chöd tradition. Sponsor: Robert Thurman.

Hamsa Michael Stainton. Poetry and prayer: Stotras in the religious and literary history of Kashmir. Sponsor: John Stratton Hawley.

Gheorghita Zugravu. Kassia the Melodist and the making of a Byz-antine hymnographer. Sponsor: John Anthony McGuckin.

Slavic Languages

Alison Beth Annunziata. Sen-timentalism made strange: Shklovsky, Karamzin, Rousseau. Sponsor: Irina Reyfman.

Andrew Benjamin Hicks. Negotiat-ing the scope of postwar Stalin-ist novels. Sponsor: Catharine Thiemer Nepomnyashchy.

Katharine Mansfield Holt. The rise of insider iconography: Visions of Soviet Turkmenia in Rus-sian-language literature and film, 1921–1935. Sponsor: Valentina Izmirlieva.

Jack Faust Matlock Jr. Leskov into English: On translating Church Folks. Sponsor: Catharine Thiemer Nepomnyashchy.

Steven Brett Shaklan. Doomed to irony, condemned to laughter: The structure and function of irony in the prose fiction of Nikolai Gogol. Sponsor: Cathy L. Popkin.

Social Work

Astraea Augsberger. Youth participation in child welfare deci-sion-making: A focused ethnogra-phy. Sponsor: Vicki Lens.

Catherine Elizabeth Carlson. Three essays analyzing the impact of community and neighborhood factors on intimate partner vio-lence against women in Uganda. Sponsor: Denise Burnette.

Kim Lisa Glickman. Complicat-ed grief treatment: What makes

it work? Sponsor: M. Katherine Shear.

Amy Sheila Kapadia. Race-ethnic discrimination, major depression, and alcohol use disorder among U.S.-born and immigrant minori-ties: Using a nationally representa-tive sample to test the moderating relationships of cultural and social factors. Sponsor: Ellen P. Lukens.

Daniel Barnett Kaplan. Home health care for persons with cogni-tive impairment: The influence of home health-care agency character-istics on the relationship between consumer cognitive impairment status and service volume and cost. Sponsor: Denise Burnette.

Leyla Karimli. Financial asset accumulation by poor adolescents participating in child savings accounts in low-resource commu-nities in Uganda. Sponsor: Fred M. Ssewamala.

Yamile M. Martí Haidar. What is the experience of foster care moth-ers? Sponsor: Ellen P. Lukens.

Colleen McGinn. “Every day is dif-ficult for my body and my heart.” Forced evictions in Phnom Penh, Cambodia: Women’s narratives of risk and resilience. Sponsor: Denise Burnette.

Ofira Schwartz-Soicher. The role of the neighborhood fast-food environment in weight status of inner-city children. Sponsor: Julien O. Teitler.

Joyce YongHee Shim. Family leave policy and child health: Evidence from nineteen OECD countries from 1969 to 2010. Sponsor: Jane Waldfogel.

Alex Smolak. Multilevel factors as-sociated with uptake of biomedical HIV prevention strategies in the Muslim world: A study of Central Asia, India, and Mali. Sponsor: Nabila El-Bassel.

Gretchen Thomas Sofocleous. Sex-ual and nonsexual juvenile offend-ers: Developmental antecedents and behavioral outcomes. Sponsor: Julien O. Teitler.

Sociology

Jennifer Mari Kondo. The spatial and temporal diffusion of muse-ums in New York City, 1910–2010. Sponsor: Peter S. Bearman.

Joscha Phillipp H. Legewie. School context, peers, and the educational achievement of girls and boys. Sponsor: Thomas A. DiPrete.

Anna Karoline Mitschele. Identity and social structure in early mod-ern politics: How opportunities induced witch trials in Scotland, 1563–1736. Sponsor: Peter S. Bearman.

Daniel Navon. Genomic designa-tion: New kinds of people at the intersection of genetics, medicine, and social action. Sponsor: Gil Eyal.

Emine Öncüler. Globalization and the networks of expertise in Turkey: The politics of autism. Sponsor: Gil Eyal.

Anna Elisabet Zamora. A structur-al explanation for anti-immigrant sentiment: Evidence from Belgium and Spain. Sponsor: Saskia Sassen.

Sociomedical Sciences

Abigail Alice Edgecliffe-Johnson. Caught pregnant: Wresting and relinquishing control over mother-hood in Manchester, UK. Sponsor: Carole S. Vance.

Claire Ellen Edington. Beyond the asylum: Colonial psychiatry in French Indochina, 1880–1940. Sponsor: Ronald Bayer.

Brian Burroughs Johnson. The politics of affliction: Crisis, the state, and the coloniality of mater-nal death in Bolivia. Sponsor: Kim Hopper.

Nora J. Kenworthy. What only heaven hears: Citizens and the state in the wake of HIV scale-up in Lesotho. Sponsor: Richard Parker.

Sahar Sadjadi. Diagnosing the self: An ethnography of clinical man-agement of gender in children. Sponsor: Carole S. Vance.

Statistics

Ying Liu. Kernel-based association measures. Sponsor: Tian Zheng.

Radka Picková. Generalized vola-tility-stabilized processes. Sponsor: Ioannis Karatzas.

Bo Qian. Credit risk modeling and analysis using copula method and changepoint approach to survival


data. Sponsor: Zhiliang Ying.

Subhankar Sadhukhan. On opti-mal arbitrage under constraints. Sponsor: Ioannis Karatzas.

Gongjun Xu. Statistical inference for diagnostic classification mod-els. Sponsors: Jingchen Liu.

Junyi Zhang. Estimation and testing methods for monotone transformation models. Sponsor: Zhiliang Ying.

Sustainable Development

Xiaojia Bao. Three papers on environment-related decision-mak-ing and development in China. Sponsor: Upmanu Lall.

Kyle Chuan Meng. Essays in the economics and political economy of climate change. Sponsor: Ber-nard Salanié.

Nicole Su-lin Ngo. Three essays on the environment and health in cities. Sponsor: Douglas Almond.

Teachers College: Anthropology and Education

Rehenuma Asmi. Language in the mirror: Language ideologies, schooling, and Islam in Qatar. Sponsor: Hervé H. Varenne.

Amina Tawasil. The howzevi (seminarian) women in Iran: Con-stituting and reconstituting paths. Sponsor: Hervé H. Varenne.

Teachers College: Applied Anthro-pology

Grace L. Chao. Elite status in the People’s Republic of China: Its for-mation and maintenance. Sponsor: Charles C. Harrington.

Carole Lynn Hutchinson. Growing toward the sun: How the good-food movement catapulted a small New York City third-sector organization into rapid growth, success, and many challenges. Sponsor: Hervé H. Varenne.

Katharine Anne Keenan. Imag-ining a new Belfast: Municipal parades in urban regeneration. Sponsor: Hervé H. Varenne.

Kelly M. Nims. The Goffal speaks: Coloured ideology and the perpetu-ation of a category in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Sponsor: George C. Bond.

Sayaka Uchikawa. “Less is not enough”: The dilemma of alter-native primary schooling oppor-tunities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Sponsor: Lambros Comitas.

Ariela Tanya Zycherman. The changing value of food: Localizing modernity among the Tsimané In-dians of lowland Bolivia. Sponsor: Lambros Comitas.

Teachers College: Applied Behav-ioral Analysis

Claire Cahill. Actions and names: Observing responses and the role of multiple stimulus control in incidental language acquisition. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

Lisa Danielle Gold. A function-al analysis on the effects of an observational intervention using a peer-yoked contingency game board on the induction of observa-tional performance, observational acquisition, and naming. Sponsor: Jessica Singer-Dudek.

Jessica Adele Neu. The effects of observation of learn units under reinforcement and correction conditions on the rate of learning math algorithms by fifth-grade stu-dents. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

Derek Jacob Shanman. The relation between components of naming and conditioned seeing. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

Lisa Dawn Tullo. The functional relation between the onset of naming and the joining of listener to untaught speaker responses. Sponsor: R. Douglas Greer.

Teachers College: Behavioral Nutrition

Christie Lauren Custodio-Lums-den. The Diet and Early Childhood Caries (DECC) study: Validation of a novel ECC risk-assessment tool and investigation of diet-related ECC risk factors. Sponsor: Randi L. Wolf.

Tomoko Jane Iwaki. Gateway to green: The family experience of community-supported agriculture. Sponsor: Isobel R. Contento.

Elena J. Ladas. Dietary intake among children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Sponsor: Randi L. Wolf.

Lorraine Nicole Mull. Associations

among measures of weight status, energy-balance-related behaviors, and psychosocial mediators in urban upper-elementary-school children. Sponsor: Isobel R. Contento.

Kathleen Joyce Porter. Bringing nutrition education programs from outside sources into the classroom: The experience of New York City public elementary schools. Spon-sor: Isobel R. Contento.

Marguerite Marie Zaharek. Beliefs about diet and colorectal cancer prevention in an urban population. Sponsor: Randi L. Wolf.

Teachers College: Clinical Psy-chology

Monica A. Brooker. The role of relatedness and expressive flexi-bility in the prediction of compli-cated grief. Sponsor: George A. Bonanno.

Debaki Chakrabarti. The investi-gation of helping behavior in the virtual world. Sponsor: Elizabeth Midlarsky.

Monica Carmela Ghailian. As-sociation between adversity and prosociality in children exposed to trauma in four sites in west Africa. Sponsor: Lisa J. Miller.

Dmitri Aaron Young. Predictors of obesity in adults: The roles of demographic factors, body dissatis-faction, depression, and life stress. Sponsor: Elizabeth Midlarsky.

Teachers College: Cognitive Stud-ies in Education

James Grant Atkins. The effect of explicit teaching of comprehension strategies on reading compre-hension in elementary school. Sponsor: Joanna P. Williams.

Kara Kilmartin Carpenter. Strategy instruction in early-childhood math software: Detecting and teaching single-digit addition strategies. Sponsor: Herbert P. Ginsburg.

Shih-Chieh Douglas Huang. Grounded learning experience: Helping students learn physics through visuo-haptic priming and instruction. Sponsor: John B. Black.

Na Li. Designing better scaffolding in teaching complex systems with

graphical simulations. Sponsor: John B. Black.

Samuel Dov Mandelman. Explor-ing the Aurora Battery, a gifted identification tool, in a small sam-ple of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grad-ers. Sponsor: John B. Black.

Dana Lenore Pagar. The effects of a grouping by tens manipulative on children’s strategy use, base ten understanding, and mathematical knowledge. Sponsor: Herbert P. Ginsburg.

Satyugjit Singh Virk. Learning STEM through integrative visual representations. Sponsor: John B. Black.

Teachers College: Comparative and International Education

Karen Bryner. Piety projects: Islamic schools for Indonesia’s ur-ban middle class. Sponsor: Lesley Bartlett.

Tricia A. Callender. Thank you for not coming? Polity, politics, and policy: How education stake-holders interpret post-apartheid education policies for immigrants in South Africa—The case of Cape Town. Sponsor: Hope Jensen Leichter.

Yue Lin. A sociocultural approach to the study of motivation and attitudes toward the learning of Mandarin Chinese in the United States: Secondary school students’ perceptions. Sponsor: Maria E. Torres-Guzman.

Teachers College: Counseling Psychology

Lauren Marie Appio. Poor and working-class clients’ so-cial-class-related experiences in therapy. Sponsor: Laura Smith.

Cristina Dorazio. The impact of ethnic identity on attitudes toward counseling for Italian-Americans. Sponsor: Laura Smith.

Rachel Haeyoung Kim. Differ-ential impact of racial microag-gressions on Asian Americans: Relationship to perpetrator and power status. Sponsor: Derald Wing Sue.

Kolone Ruth Leilani Scanlan. The relationship of cultural affiliation and cultural congruency to depres-sion, anxiety, and psychological


well-being among native Hawaiian college students. Sponsor: George V. Gushue.

Teachers College: Economics and Education

Kristen Marie Bucceri. Are early commitment programs the answer to gaps in college enrollment and outcomes by income? The case of Oklahoma’s Promise. Sponsor: Judith Scott-Clayton.

Peter Michael Crosta. Essays on the economics of education: Structured transfer programs, enrollment patterns, and efficiency at community colleges. Sponsor: Thomas R. Bailey.

Mehmet Alper Dincer. Education policy issues in Turkey. Sponsor: Francisco Rivera-Batiz.

Maria Emma Garcia Garcia. What we learn in school: Cognitive and noncognitive skills in the educational production function. Sponsor: Henry M. Levin.

Dong Guo. The labor market returns to school quality in China. Sponsor: Francisco Rivera-Batiz.

Ji Yun Lee. Private tutoring and its impact on students’ academic achievement, formal schooling, and educational inequality in Ko-

rea. Sponsor: Henry M. Levin.

Olga Rodríguez. Examining the effects of academic English as a second language pathways at the community college: A mixed methods study. Sponsor: Thomas R. Bailey.

Steven Troy Simpson. Essays on the economics of education. Spon-sor: Judith Scott-Clayton.

Di Xu. Three essays on the impact of cost-saving strategies on student outcomes. Sponsor: Thomas R. Bailey.

Teachers College: Educational Leadership

Thomas Eric Haferd. Do I want to work with you in the future? Does status moderate the process by outcome interaction in ongoing workplace relationships? Sponsor: Craig Richards.

Teachers College: English Education

Alison Villanueva. Implementing a district-wide professional develop-ment initiative: What it means to educate for the twenty-first centu-ry. Sponsor: Ruth Vinz.

Teachers College: History and Education

James Edward Alford Jr. For alma mater: Fighting for change at historically black colleges and uni-versities. Sponsor: Cally Lyn Waite.

Teachers College: Intellectual Disabilities and Autism

Young Seh Bae. Word-problem solving of students with autistic spectrum disorders and students with typical development. Sponsor: Linda Hickson.

Fanglin Jasmine Lai. The relation-ships between parenting stress, child characteristics, parenting self-efficacy, and social support in parents of children with autism in Taiwan. Sponsor: Linda Hickson.

Teachers College: Kinesiology

Aimee Marie Layton. Ventilatory mechanics in endurance athletes. Sponsor: Carol Ewing Garber.

Teachers College: Mathematics Education

Megan Elizabeth Gibson. Moti-vation and study habits of college calculus students: Does studying calculus in high school make a dif-ference? Sponsor: Bruce R. Vogeli.

Berglind Gísladóttir. Social capital and adolescents’ mathematics achievement: A comparative analysis of eight European cities. Sponsor: Bruce R. Vogeli.

Heather Tiana Gould. Teachers’ conceptions of mathematical mod-eling. Sponsor: Bruce R. Vogeli.

Andrea Hernandez-Duhon. Explor-ing algebra-based problem-solving methods and strategies of Span-ish-speaking high school students. Sponsor: Erica N. Walker.

Björg Jóhannsdóttir. The math-ematical content knowledge of prospective teachers in Iceland. Sponsor: Erica N. Walker.

Derege Haileselassie Mussa. Tetra-hedra and their nets: Mathematical and pedagogical implications. Sponsor: Bruce R. Vogeli.

Teachers College: Mathematics Education

Hasan Shafiq. Examining the effects of gender, poverty, atten-dance, and ethnicity on algebra, geometry, and trigonometry per-formance in a public high school. Sponsor: Alexander P. Karp.

Teachers College: Measurement and Evaluation

Chen-Miao Carol Chen. Examining uncertainty and misspecification of attributes in cognitive diagnos-tic models. Sponsor: Lawrence T. DeCarlo.

Sunhee Kim. Dealing with sparse rater scoring of constructed responses within a framework of a latent class signal detection model. Sponsor: Lawrence T. DeCarlo.

Jessica Patricia Marini. An item response theory approach to causal inference in the presence of a pre-intervention assessment. Spon-sor: Matthew S. Johnson.

Kerry McCloskey Matlosz. Bayes-ian multidimensional scaling for ordinal preference data. Sponsor: Matthew S. Johnson.

Jon-Paul Noel Paolino. Penalized joint maximum likelihood esti-mation applied to two parameter logistic item response models. Sponsor: Matthew S. Johnson.


Brian Francis Patterson. Examin-ing the impact of examinee-select-ed constructed response items in the context of a hierarchical rater signal detection model. Sponsor: Lawrence T. DeCarlo.

Kyoko Judy Tanaka. A Bayesian multidimensional scaling model for partial rank preference data. Sponsor: Matthew S. Johnson.

Rui Xiang. Nonlinear penalized estimation of true Q-matrix in cog-nitive diagnostic models. Sponsor: Matthew S. Johnson.

Teachers College: Physical Dis-abilities

Jennifer Lynn Montgomery. A case study of the Preventing Aca-demic Failure Orton-Gillingham approach with five students who are deaf or hard of hearing: Using the mediating tool of cued speech. Sponsor: Robert E. Kretschmer.

Michelle A. Veyvoda. An investiga-tion into the skill set of speech-lan-guage pathologists working with profoundly deaf children: A study in context. Sponsor: Robert E. Kretschmer.

Teachers College: Politics and Education

David Lee Wright. The 26th Amendment as a teachable mo-ment: Young adult voter turnout in United States elections, 1972–2006. Sponsor: Jeffrey Henig.

Teachers College: School Psychology

Elizabeth Andrea Belanfante. The cognitive and demographic variables that underlie note-taking and review in mathematics: Does quality of notes predict test perfor-mance in mathematics? Sponsor: Stephen T. Peverly.

Christina Stark Laitner. Beyond cognition: Examination of Iowa Gambling Task performance, negative affective decision-making, and high-risk behaviors among incarcerated male youth. Sponsor: Stephen T. Peverly.

Leah Anne McGuire. A com-parative analysis of the revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale scores of traumatized youth with and without PTSD relative to

nontraumatized controls. Sponsor: Philip A. Saigh.

Erica Michelle Miller. Peer sexual harassment in middle school: Classroom and individual factors. Sponsor: Marla R. Brassard.

Teachers College: Science Education

David Edward Randle. An analysis of interactions and outcomes asso-ciated with an online professional development course for science teachers. Sponsor: O. Roger Anderson.

Phillip Michael Stewart Jr. Learn-ing the rules of the game: The nature of game and classroom sup-ports when using a concept-inte-grated digital physics game in the middle school science classroom. Sponsor: Ann E. Rivet.

Teachers College: Social-Organiza-tional Psychology

Mekayla Kolean Castro. From the mouths of men: A model of men’s perception of social identity threat toward women in the workplace and endorsement of identity safety behaviors. Sponsor: Caryn J. Block.

Avina Gupta. Employee percep-tions of managers who express an-ger: Could a high-quality relation-ship buffer women from backlash? Sponsor: Caryn J. Block.

Yunzi Tan. Variant conflict man-agement: Conceptualizing and investigating team conflict man-agement as a configural construct. Sponsor: Peter T. Coleman.

Teachers College: Sociology and Education

Allison Kaye Roda. Where their children belong: Parents’ percep-tions of the boundaries separating “gifted” and “nongifted” education-al programs. Sponsor: Amy Stuart Wells.

Miya Tamiko Warner. Small high schools and big inequalities: Course-taking and curricular rigor in New York City. Sponsor: Amy Stuart Wells.

Teachers College: Teaching of Social Studies

Aviv Abraham Cohen. Conceptions of citizenship and civic education: Lessons from three Israeli civics classrooms. Sponsor: William Gaudelli.

Timothy James Patterson. Stories of self and other: Four in-service social studies teachers reflect on their international professional development. Sponsor: William Gaudelli.


Jay Matthew Shuttleworth. Teach-ing sustainability as a social issue: Learning from three teachers. Sponsor: Anand Reddy Marri.

Ashley Michelle Taylor. Pedagogy for Latino/a newcomer students: A study of four secondary social studies teachers in New York City urban newcomer schools. Sponsor: Anand Reddy Marri.


Dennis Joseph Urban Jr. Toward a framework of inclusive social stud-ies: Obstacles and opportunities in a preservice teacher education pro-gram. Sponsor: William Gaudelli.

Theatre

Minou Clare Arjomand. Theatre on trial: Staging postwar justice in the United States and Germany. Sponsor: W. B. Worthen.

Darragh Gerard Martin. The mas-ter of the rebels: Teenage encoun-ters with Shakespeare, 1944–2012. Sponsor: W. B. Worthen.

Shilarna Stokes. Playing the crowd: Mass pageantry in Europe and the United States, 1905–1935. Spon-sor: Arnold Aronson.

Urban Planning

John Clancy Powers Jr. “Un-traded interdependencies” as a useful theory of regional economic devel-opment: A comparative study of innovation in Dublin and Beijing. Sponsor: Susan Fainstein.


Announcements

KEVIN HOLT, M.A. ’11, African-American Studies, and a doctoral candidate in Music, was awarded a predoctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation.

LEN MILLER, M.A. ’09, American Studies, has been appointed associate headmaster of The Hill School in Pottstown, Pa.

CHRISTINE MCHONE, ’11GS and an M.A. can-didate in Anthropology, received a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship.

NANCY STULA, M.A. ’87, M.PHIL. ’89, PH.D. ’97, Art History and Archaeolo-gy, was appointed executive director of the William Benton Museum of Art at the University of Connecti-cut.

CHRISTINE DENNY, M.A.’08, M.PHIL. ’09, PH.D. ’12, Biological Sci-ences, received a National Institutes of Health Direc-tor’s Early Independence Award.

LOUIS BRUS, PH.D. ’69, Chemistry, received the Welch Award in Chemistry from the Welch Founda-tion.

PAM EDDINGER, ’82BC, M.A. ’85, M.PHIL. ’87, PH.D. ’99, East Asian Lan-guages and Cultures, was named president of Bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts.

DAVID STRICKLER, M.A. ’77, Economics, was appointed by the Library of Congress to serve as a copyright royalty judge with a specialty in economics.

LUCY KAYLIN, M.A. ’85, English and Comparative Literature, was appointed editor-in-chief of the U.S. edition of O, The Oprah Magazine.

Kevin HoltChristine McHoneNancy StulaLen Miller


MARK ROTENBERG, ’79LAW, M.A. ’80, M.PHIL. ’81, History, joined Johns Hopkins University as vice president and general counsel.

EZRA TESSLER, M.A. ’09, M.PHIL. ’12, and a doctoral candidate in History, was awarded an Eisenhow-er-Roberts Fellowship from the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College.

VELI YASHIN, ’08CC, M.A. ’10, M.PHIL. ’11, and a doctoral candidate in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, won the Horst Frenz Prize for best presentation by a graduate student at the an-nual meeting of the Ameri-can Comparative Literature Association.

ORIT HILEWICZ, M.A.’13 and a doctoral candidate in Music, received the Found-ers Prize for New Scholars from the International So-ciety for the Study of Time.

DR. BHASWATI BHAT-TACHARYA, M.A. ’89, Pharmacology, received a Fulbright Scholar grant to lecture and conduct research at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India.

CARL HABER, ’80CC, M.A. ’82, M.PHIL. ’83, PH.D. ’85, Physics, re-ceived a MacArthur Fellow-ship for his work on recon-structing audio recordings of historical and cultural significance.

Christine DennyPam EddingerLouis BrusMark Rotenberg


JOSEPH DIESCHO, M.A. ’86, M.PHIL. ’87, PH.D. ’92, Political Science, was appointed executive direc-tor of the Namibia Institute for Public Administration and Management.

ALONDRA NELSON, asso-ciate professor of sociology, was the co-winner of the 2012 Distinguished Contri-bution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association for Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimina-tion.

Professors HERVÉ M. JACQUET and DUONG H. PHONG of the Department of Mathematics, as well as PROFESSOR BARBARA G. TVERSKY of Teachers College, were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Four Columbia faculty were awarded Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: MARK CHURCHLAND, assistant professor of neu-roscience; WEI MIN, assis-tant professor of chemistry; SIMHA SETHUMADHA-VAN, associate professor of

computer science; and WEI ZHANG, assistant profes-sor of mathematics.

Announcements

Alondra NelsonDuong H. PhongCarl Haber


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Documents

Bringing Pedagogy into the 21st Century...Link back to contents page 2 Superscript CONTENTS From the Dean 1 Bringing Pedagogy into the 21st Century 2 Alumni Profile: Judith Shapiro,