Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Kaitlin Kimmel

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In the 1980s, newborns with complex congenital heart disease (CCHD) began to survive into adulthood in larger numbers than ever before due to advances in cardiothoracic surgery and cardiovascular medicine. Growing up, many were told they would either be fixed, once they reached adulthood, they would die in childhood, or that their prognoses were unknown. Now that the first generation of CCHD children has survived into adulthood, there is a gray area between cure and death. Kaitlin will conduct ethnographic interviews with CCHD adults who have undergone major cardiac hospitalizations, […]

Christina Marie Hamilton

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Marine-atmosphere gas exchange plays a major role in the global carbon cycle. A key parameter of oceanic CO2 uptake and sequestration is the biological carbon pump (BCP). The BCP is composed of planktonic organisms that fix CO2 in photosynthesis, converting it to food and tissue. The biomass of these organisms turns over about once every week, exporting the carbon they contain away from the ocean-atmospheric interface to greater oceanic depths as they are consumed and expelled in the form of particulate organic carbon aggregates. This process, known as sedimentation, is […]

Patrick Donnelly-Shores

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Current Bio: Since graduation Patrick has been a front-lines enviornment activist in the desert Southwest. Now he is Nevada State Director at the Center for Biological Diversity. He works with a team of attorneys and scientists to defend the imperiled species, public lands, water and climate of Nevada from the resource pillagers in the Trump administration and their corporate cronies who are destroying the biodiversity that makes life on Earth possible to turn a quick buck. Haas Scholars Project: Solar energy is often proclaimed a solution to climate change, and […]

Sikai Song

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Ethnobotany is defined as the scientific study of the traditional knowledge and customs of a people concerning plants and their medical, religious, and other uses. Given that many active compounds used in pharmaceutical drugs today are extracted from plants, understanding indigenous knowledge regarding medicinal plant use is invaluable to deepen existing knowledge regarding various pharmacological uses of high-value medicinal plants, conservation, and sustainable resource management. My research seeks to document and catalogue the high-value medicinal plants used by the Tamang people in remote villages in rural Sindhupalchok, Nepal, as well […]

Leah Grant

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My project will investigate the foodways of three distinct populations who occupied Fort Davis, Texas, during the second phase of the forts active period from 1867-1891. While permitting issues will not allow for excavation this summer, there are alternatives to excavation. One collection of artifacts was previously excavated from the enlisted mens barracks; I will examine the food related artifacts from this excavation. Additionally there is a set of artifacts that were collected while digging a drainage ditch at the fort. These artifacts come from several distinct areas of the […]

Robert Chen

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In the burgeoning field of genetic engineering, living systems are engineered to perform desired functions such as fighting cancer, sensing harmful chemicals, or producing useful compounds. However, cellular processes are unpredictable and genes do not always act as expected. In order to find a gene’s optimal setting, scientists currently need to search through “libraries”–large numbers of genetic variants–which is labor and time-intensive. Robert’s research centers on developing a new technology called MiCodes, or Microscopy Codes, which will speed up our ability to perform library screening under the microscope by barcoding […]

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

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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

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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

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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 […]