Judy Schafer
My research will investigate the reported phenomenon of increasing numbers of unaccompanied Central American youth migrating to the United States from May 2011 to July 2013. I will examine these questions: Why are these children migrating alone? Will this overall trend continue? Or is there a push/pull factor that is influencing this recent surge? What can be done to make this journey safer for these children? My study begins in the detention facilities and immigration courts of Arizona and Texas, then continues as I travel southbound through Mexico and by […]
S. Zayd Enam
In this project we plan on using parallelized computation to build realistic sparse coding models for neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1). Sparse coding is a stimulus encoding technique used by V1 neurons that aims to minimize the number active neurons required in encoding any input image. Due to computational constraints, previous sparse coding models have been limited in their ability to match the biology of lateral geniculate nucleus projections to V1. Our models will allow us to better describe recorded biological data and provide further evidence that V1 […]
Minda Murphy
Northern Uganda is in the early years of recovery following a twenty year civil war which devastated the region. For an entire decade of that war, nearly two million people from Acholiland were forcibly displaced from their homes and detained in internment camps, living as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), refugees in their own country. With the vast majority of the camps now closed, and the Acholi community working to rebuild villages, homes, and infrastructure, new challenges have arisen. Minda’s work in Acholiland will seek to identify the barriers of access […]
Laura Carolina Rodriguez-Adjunta
Salmonella is the leading source of food-borne diseases in the United States. Infection by Salmonella Typhimurium causesdiseases ranging from self-limiting gastroenteritis to life-threatening systemic infection, provoking around 1.3 billion cases every year worldwide. Moreover, no vaccine to prevent salmonellosis exists. Recently, 19 small noncoding bacterial RNAs (sRNAs) located in salmonella SPIs were discovered, of which IsrC is one of the newest forms. Bacterial sRNAs regulate the expression of their target genes in pathogenesis, essentially contributing to bacterial invasiveness. My research will focus on the interaction between IsrC and its predicted […]
Brendon McNicholas
Research in alternative energy has become increasingly urgent in recent years due to constantly increasing pollution and depletion of traditional energy sources. One of the most compelling devices in the field is the fuel cell, a means for converting hydrogen and oxygen into useful energy. To contribute to the advancement of the field of alternative energy, this thesis aims to further the characterization of an oxygen reduction catalyst for a PEM fuel cell. Literature has shown that certain first-row transition metal corrole complexes are active for catalytic oxygen reduction, and […]
Trevor Hadden
Although historians have studied Elizabethan Englands social and aesthetic transformations of the built environment, little attention has been paid to the labor of its craftspeople. Scholarship on Elizabethan architecture and decorative arts has privileged the study of stylistic trends, written records of patronage, and named surveyor-architects. This approach fails to register the ways in which artificers participated in the visuality of the early modern period. To understand the production practices of Elizabethan artificers and to recognize how these workers shaped material culture, Trevor is pursuing a close examination of select […]
Zoë Pollak
Current Bio: Zoë is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (MSt in English from Oxford [2016]) writing a dissertation on small forms in 19th century poetry. Haas Scholars Project: More than once, Marilynne Robinson has invoked Henry Thoreau’s Walden (1854) as an influence on her novel Housekeeping (1980). Zoë’s project investigates the philosophical resonances between these two texts written in the tradition of American Romanticism. Rather than wed Walden to history and read Housekeeping as a modern-day (and specifically feminist) response, Zoë develops a […]
Rachel Gottfried-Clancy
On November 18, 2011 federal law #12,528 created the National Truth Commission (Commiso Nacional da Verdade, CNV) in Brazil. The truth commission was created to examine the events carried out by the government, Foras Armadas, during the countrys military dictatorship and produce an official, truthful account of the period. The hope was that by embarking on a collective search for truth, the Brazilian population would work towards national reconciliation, and in the process strengthen their democracy. However, one year after the commission began, criticisms flood the process: many argue that […]
Sara Sol Linck-Frenz
Collapsing the Frame delves into the space between two categories contemporary and commercial dance to ask how the moving body functions as a site both for composing and deconstructing normative conceptions of embodiment, physicality, identity, and sociality. By researching the particular case of commercially produced choreographies, the project not only problematizes the categorical divide between high culture and popular/commercial culture, but intends to ask how dance productions that cross this boundary function as corporeal and public experimentations with collective identities. Through a comparative analysis of three sites of dance practice […]
Thatcher Combs
Thatchers research explores the relationship between the increasing social legitimacy of the LGBT movement in the U.S. and their marginalization of transgender voices. He will examine the historical reasons for the fracturing of the “T” from the LGBT community and its effects on the transgender community. Thatcher will examine the archives at the GLBT Historical Society beginning in 1973 and ending with current national debates on marriage equality, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and conduct in-depth interviews with transgender people. While this project […]