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President’s Postdoctoral Scholar Program Recipients

2022 Award Recipients

Jasmine Bruno, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Mark Moritz, Department of Anthropology 

Jasmine Bruno specializes in integrating qualitative and quantitative social science and sustainable agricultural development to link research and action. Her work supports processes that engage diverse stakeholders to work side-by-side to jointly seek solutions to socio-environmental challenges. Specifically, she examines how people and places experience and adapt to change, generating knowledge to inform actions that support improved livelihoods, wellbeing, and environmental protections in the face of social and climate change. Click here to learn more about Dr. Bruno.

Ellen Feiss, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jody Patterson, Department of History of Art

E. C. (Ellen) Feiss specializes in modern and contemporary art of Europe and the Americas in imperial and global contexts, and art theory and method. Her work draws on feminist and historical materialism and critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality. She studies claims for art’s social utility: its revolutionary potential, or as added value in processes of reform, movement work, or procedures of justice. She also writes broadly about art after 1960. She received her Ph.D from UC Berkeley in 2022. Click here to learn more about Dr. Feiss.

Martin Fuchs, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Scott Schwenter, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Martín Fuchs is a linguist working at the intersection of semantics & pragmatics, language variation and change, and psycholinguistics. His research uses a combination of experimental methods and corpus studies to understand patterns of synchronic variation rooted in larger principles of semantic change, aiming to explain how and why pairings of forms and meanings change in some ways but crucially not in others. His work also addresses how these principles of meaning variation and change are based on the cognitive architecture of the linguistic and conceptual systems, clarifying the role of specific communicative and cognitive pressures in the advancement of these diachronic processes. The empirical focus of his research has been the tense-aspect system of Spanish, where he looks at how speakers of different dialectal varieties express the same temporal meanings through different grammatical markers depending on properties of the linguistic and extralinguistic context. Click here to learn more about Dr. Fuchs.

Andrea Garcia

Faculty Mentor: Mary Fristad, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health
Andrea Garcia’s research program at Nationwide Children’s Hospital-Behavioral Health (NCH-BH) is embarking on an ambitious roll-out of a measurement based clinical assessment tool (MBCAT) in acute and ambulatory settings.

Mubasher Hassan, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Andrzej Kloczkowski, Department of Pediatrics

Mubasher Hassan received his PhD in Biology/Biological Sciences from South Korea with honorary certificate. His research expertise is related to Molecular Modeling and Docking, Pharmacophore modelling, Virtual Screening and Dynamic Simulation. Click here to learn more about Dr. Hassan.

Laura Hildebrand, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Kentaro Fujita, Department of Psychology
Laura Hildebrand received her B.A. in Psychology and English from Hendrix College and her M.S. and PhD. in Psychology from Purdue University. Laura’s research takes a solution-focused approach that examines not only obstacles to diversity and inclusion (e.g., prejudice), but also how we can overcome such obstacles using theoretically-driven strategies. Specifically, her research asks: What strategies reduce the activation and application of bias, in both others and ourselves? How do these strategies influence feelings of belonging, safety, and inclusion among marginalized group members? And how do subtle manifestations of bias perpetuate and reinforce non-inclusive environments? 
Click here to learn more about Dr. Hildebrand.

Megan Jordan, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Rachel Skaggs, Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy
Megan Jordan’s research largely centers on the social psychological experience of activist burnout and its consequences on activists’ personal lives and the longevity of their activism. The questions that drive her work include: What does burnout look like in social movements? How does race and gender impact activist burnout experiences? What are strategies activists employ to cope with burnout and keep going? 
Click here to learn more about Dr. Jordan.

Emily Moscato, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Cynthia Gerhardt, Department of Pediatrics
Emily Moscato, PhD, earned her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 2022. Emily’s research interests focus on risk and resilience factors that promote school readiness and psychosocial outcomes for children with neurological vulnerability and chronic illness. Her current work involves partnering with families and other stakeholders to develop a digital health intervention for parents of very young children with cancer. 
Click here to learn more about Dr. Moscato.

*Recent Accomplishment: Dr. Emily Moscato was recently awarded the Drotar-Crawford Postdoctoral Fellowship Research Grant from the American Psychological Association Division 54. The grant will provide $10,000 over two years to partner with caregivers to adapt and pilot a digital health parenting resource for caregivers of preschool aged childhood cancer survivors. Young childhood cancer survivors are an understudied group who are at known risk for neurodevelopmental effects from their treatment. Although parent-directed early interventions are promising in other populations, there are no tailored interventions for this group. This project will inform a future NIH funding application to support this line of research.

Sebastian Stockmaier, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Gerald Carter, Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology
Sebastian Stockmaier is a behavioral ecologist with a background in immunology and infectious disease biology. He is broadly interested in how host behaviors affect pathogen transmission within and between species and how pathogens affect host social behaviors. Sebastian aims to use high-resolution proximity sensors to describe dynamic contact networks between vampire bats and their livestock hosts (and their potential effect on cross-species transmission). 
Click here to learn more about Dr. Stockmaier.

*UPDATE: Dr. Stockmaier is currently an Assistant Professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Marcus Merfa Vinicius, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jonathan Jacobs, Department of Plant Pathology
Marcus Vinicius Merfa recieved his Ph.D. in Plant Pathology at Aurburn University, his M.S. degree in Genetic and Molecular Biology from Universidade Estadual de Campinas, and his Bachelor of Science degree in Biotechnology from Universidade Federal de São Carlos. His research interests focus on exploring the bacterial molecular factors that play a role on the interactions between plant pathogenic bacterium and plant hosts. He is particularly interested in understanding which genes are important for the adaptation and lifestyle of these pathogens. Currently, Marcus is working to determine whether and how bacterial quorum sensing (QS) communication among Xanthomonas spp. shape the leaf microbial community to mediate bacterial survival and disease development. His work has rewarded him with outstanding awards and has been published in leading scientific journals including Science Advances, ISME Journal, Nano Letters, Phytopathology, among others. Besides, Marcus has also served as a peer reviewer for publications in journals such as Frontiers in Microbiology, Molecular Plant Pathology and Plant Disease. In his free time, he enjoys listening to music and watching series and movies. 
Click here to learn more about Dr. Vinicius.