President’s Postdoctoral Scholar Program Recipients

Camila Olivero Araya, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Monica Cox, Department of Engineering Education, College of Engineering

Camila Olivero Araya is a Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University, where she earned her PhD in Engineering Education in 2025. She received her bachelor’s (2017) and master’s (2019) degrees in Industrial Engineering from Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción in Chile. Her research examines how engineering culture, institutional policies, and mentoring relationships shape faculty experiences, well-being, and professional development. She also studies empathy as a professional skill in engineering teaching and its role in fostering student belonging and learning. Her broader goal is to help advance more supportive, equitable, and sustainable academic environments in engineering. Her work has been presented at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She is a Fulbright awardee, a 2024 Trailblazers in Engineering Fellow, and a participant in the VITAL Visiting Future Faculty Program at the University at Buffalo.

Chad Brunswick, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Megha Sehgal, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences

Chad Brunswick is a behavioral neuroscientist studying the cellular and molecular mechanisms within the brain that underlie cognitive processes such as the storage, modification, and organization of memories. His project at OSU will focus on investigating how subcellular changes at individual neuronal branches allow the brain to organize and integrate multiple different experiences and how this process goes awry in the aging brain. He will specifically examine how immune cells within the brain (known as microglia) interact with individual neuronal branches to drive cellular changes specifically within memory-encoding neurons. Chad is originally from Dayton, Ohio and recently completed his PhD at Penn State University. In his free time, he enjoys reading fiction and is an avid fan of experimental music and progressive rock.

Kazem Dogaheh, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Joel Johnson, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering 

Kazem Bakian-Dogaheh received the BS degree in electrical engineering from University of Tehran in 2017, his MS degree in astronautical engineering and PhD degree in electrical engineering from University of Southern California in 2023, and 2024, respectively. He completed his PhD in the Microwave Systems, Sensors, and Imaging Laboratory (MiXIL) at USC. He is currently doing postdoctoral research in the Hydrology. Land Use and Climate Change Lab (HYLUCC) in Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (EES) at the University of Michigan, since 2025. His research focuses on the emerging field of “Radar Ecology,” which explores the interdisciplinary intersections between the science and technology of radar remote sensing, ecosystem ecology, and computational modeling. His research further builds on the integration of science and engineering as a powerful approach for studying and examining current trends and changes in northern high latitudes and Arctic regions.  

He is the recipient of Toolik Field Station 2026 TUNDRA award, EES Department 2025-2026 Scott Turner Award for Postdoctoral Research,  USPA Permafrost Engineering Education Program (PEEP) 2024 Award, 2023 IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Student Prize Paper Award (3^rd Place), 2022 IEEE Antenna and Propagation Society (AP-S) Fellowship, 2022 Ming Hsieh Institute PhD scholarship, and 2018 – 2022 NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship (NESSF).

He was the founding chair of the IEEE GRSS student branch chapter at USC between 2020 – 2024, for which he received the IEEE GRSS chapter excellence award in 2023.

Mia Hoffman, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jill Heathcock, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, College of Medicine 

Mia Hoffman is a rehabilitation engineer who studies how children interact with assistive technologies to redesign devices and systems that support play, learning, and participation. Grounded in disability studies and human-centered design, her work integrates non-invasive sensing techniques and qualitative methods to understand how young children explore and engage with mobility and access technologies. She will receive her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington in 2026 and earned her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2021.

Raymok Ketema, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Sarah Van Beurden, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences 

Raymok M. Ketema is a first-generation Eritrean American from Berkeley, California, and an incoming President's Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University. She holds a PhD in History, specializing in twentieth-century African history. Her research explores the role of music in Eritrean nation-making, tracing how sound shaped revolutionary consciousness during the independence struggle, how the post-independence state used music preservation practices to promote national identity, and how diaspora communities draw on music to sustain transnational belonging. Her work combines archival research, oral history, and ethnography, and extends to questions of digital heritage, copyright, and the preservation of African cultural memory in the streaming age. She is currently completing her first book, Sounds of Revolution: Music and Liberation in Modern Eritrea.

Manjari Mukherjee, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Hannah Kosstrin, Department of Dance, College of Arts and Sciences

Manjari Mukherjee is a PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts University. Her research focuses on performance history, Jewish and South Asian diasporic studies, and feminist archival practice. Her dissertation, Yahudi Ki Ladki (The Daughter of a Jew): Baghdadi Jews on the Indian Stage and Screen from the 1920s to the 1950s, examines Baghdadi (Iraqi) Jewish actresses in early Hindi cinema, tracing how they navigated racial, religious, and gendered identities within colonial and nationalist contexts. Drawing on oral histories, family archives, studio photographs, and film media across India, Israel, and the United States, her work reconstructs histories from the ground up that often elude institutional archives. Her research has received support from the Center for Humanities at Tufts (CHAT), the Tufts Provost’s Office, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. The American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) has recognized her work with the Po-Hsien Chu International Scholar Award. She has also participated in the Association of Jewish Studies Scholars of Color Fellowship and has published in Theatre Research International, the Jewish Women’s Archive, and most recently in the Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Film. She currently serves as co-convener of the “Performing in/from the Global South” working group at ASTR.

Justin Palmer, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Scott Hayes, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences

Dr. Justin Palmer is a post-doctoral scholar with The Buckeye Brain Aging Lab under the mentorship of Dr. Scott Hayes. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Psychology at Arizona State University and completed his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Arizona with Dr. Lee Ryan. Justin completed his neuropsychology internship at the Louis Stokes VA in Cleveland, with rotations in the Outpatient Neuropsychology Clinic and Spinal Cord Injury Unit. Broadly, his research goal is to better understand the relationship between health and genetic risk factors and age-related cognitive impairment. More specifically, he is interested in studying how levels of fitness and physical activity can impact cognitive functioning using neuropsychological tests and brain integrity using multimodal MRI.

Michelle Pham, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jamie Strange, Department of Entomology, College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences 

Michelle Pham is an urban ecologist who leverages community-engaged research methods to generate conservation solutions that benefit insects and people. She works directly with community leaders, municipal agencies, and grassroots organizations to develop long-lasting habitat which beautifies neighborhoods, improves environmental quality, and supports beneficial insects in cities. Her current work focuses on how urban areas can manage greenspace to support pollinator conservation, integrating community input to yield management recommendations that communities can sustain. She received her B.S. in Environmental Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and her PhD. in Environmental Science from The Ohio State University.

Mayank Tanwar, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Amr Dodin, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, College of Arts and Sciences 

Mayank Tanwar received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2025 and his Bachelor and Master of Technology in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2019. He is broadly interested in understanding and engineering catalytic and electrochemical transformations at the molecular level by employing theoretical and computational approaches. Currently, he is working on developing machine-learned interatomic potentials as well as classical force fields to more accurately and efficiently simulate complex liquid-vapor and electrochemical interfaces with applications in energy storage and catalysis. Click here to learn more about Dr. Tanwar.

Qian Yu, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Ruchika Prakash, Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences 

Qian Yu investigates how modifiable lifestyle factors influence brain health and cognitive performance across the lifespan. Her research integrates experimental interventions, neuroimaging, and population-level analyses to uncover the neural mechanisms linking lifestyle behaviors with executive function and emotion regulation. By combining behavioral paradigms with network-based brain metrics, she aims to characterize how modifiable lifestyle factors alter dynamic neural connectivity underlying neuropsychological functioning.

As a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at The Ohio State University, Dr. Yu will expand her research at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and behavioral intervention science. Her long-term goal is to develop mechanism-driven, scalable mind-body approaches that enhance cognitive resilience and emotional regulation in aging and clinical populations.

Aidah Aljuran, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Anna Babel, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, College of Arts and Sciences 

Aidah Aljuran received her PhD in Linguistics (sociolinguist track) from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research covers three principal areas: (a) language perception and production, (b) language contact, and (c) language and the structure of power, with a commitment to theorization and contextualization through ethnography. In her work with the IsmaꜤili community in Saudi Arabia, she explores how religious groups navigate social structures through language and social practices. Her interdisciplinary investigation—drawing on ethnography, anthropology, history, and gender studies—has been recognized through consecutive Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Awards from University of Pittsburgh. During her postdoc training at OSU, she will work on her first book on Isma‘ili Women in Saudi Arabia: Re-imagining Taqiyya, examining how two generations of Saudi Isma‘ili women—as women play a crucial role in cultivating the practices of Taqiyya—understand and reinterpret taqiyya in light of recent social reforms, and how their perspectives are reflected in their storytelling, narrative construction, social interactions (i.e., concealments and revelations), and social relations. Her work on taqiyya introduces a new topic to sociolinguistics, and complements and extends work on language and power structures, secrecy, language contact, language ideology, and language awareness. Additionally, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the multilayered processes of sociolinguistic perception and production, demonstrating how the perception of linguistic and social signs is intricately connected to broader systems of social practices and social relations.

Adam Burston, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Laura Dugan, Department of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences 

Adam Burston is a Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar with the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. His primary body of research investigates how extremist social movements use innovative tactics and novel technologies to preserve and expand social inequality. In a second body of research, he examines how stigma and stereotypes become imbricated in the fabric of daily life. His research expertise include social movements; qualitative methodology; crime, deviance, and social control; political sociology; and race, gender, & class.

Dr. Burston’s research has been published in top sociology journals. He received his PhD and MA in sociology (technology and society emphasis) from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2025 and 2019 respectively and his BA in psychology, sociology and anthropology from Goucher College in 2016.

Caijiao Dai, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Department of Microbial Infection and Immunity, College of Medicine

Caijiao Dai obtained her PhD Degree in hydrobiology from Huazhong Agricultural University, one of the top 10 universities in biological science in China. Her work investigated the pathogenesis of viral infection and viral/bacterial co-infection using goldfish as a model organism. She has mastered the professional knowledge in the isolation and identification of viruses, the isolation and culture of primary cells, protein expression, and purification. During her doctoral training, she developed an interest in the cross-regulation between antiviral immune pathways and antibacterial immunity signaling pathways, which include virus-induced immunosuppression, signal transduction of interferon, and apoptosis of macrophages. She has gained substantial experience in signal transduction in immune cells during pathogen infection and multi-omics integration analysis in carrying out her cell biology research, with an emphasis on RNA-Seq, metabolism, and microbiome data analyses. Her work has rewarded her with the National Merit Student Award and Outstanding Graduates in 2024 and has been published in leading scientific journals, including Microb Biotechnol, Front Immunol, Microbiol Spectr, and Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. She also successfully finished two patents: CN202111159317.6 (an antimicrobial peptide and its application in aquaculture) and CN113025574A (establishment and application of a largemouth bass brain cell line). The latter has been transferred to Wuhan Qianhu Baodian Company and is currently being produced and used. She has served as the Student Union's president for three consecutive years and is a responsible, kind person. She has also organized a number of public welfare projects, including the conservation of the endangered Yangtze finless porpoise and the rescuing of stray canines. Her activities have gained wider notice, and she was named a "Lei Feng Youth" by the China Leifeng Association.

Rylee Hackley, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Steve Bell, Department of Microbiology. College of Arts and Sciences

Rylee Hackley is a microbiologist and geneticist working in Archaea. She is broadly interested in understanding the regulation of traits related to biological resilience using multi-omics and molecular biology approaches. Her current work aims to leverage long read sequencing to better understand the higher order structure and organization of the genome, and how it changes during response to stress. She received her PhD in Genetics and Genomics from Duke University in 2023, along with a Certificate in College Teaching.

Allison Rickfelder (Litmer), PhD

Faculty Mentor: Casey Pennock, Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, College of Arts and Sciences 

Allison is a physiological ecologist with a research focus on mechanisms underlying biodiversity through interactions among the environment, physiology, and persistence of ectotherms. She often combines field, lab, and modeling techniques to better understand invasion and conservation biology, as well as which factors regulate organisms in natural systems. A major focus of her work is on the thermal physiology of energetics and digestive processes, and how such individual traits influence populations and life-history. Allison is currently working to develop a population model analyzing introduced channel catfish in the San Juan River to inform management and recovery of endangered species. 

Shane Scaggs, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jo Peacock, School of Environmen and Natural Resources, College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Shane Scaggs is an ecological anthropologist whose research explores cooperative networks, landscape mosaics, and ecological communities. His work integrates anthropology, ecology, complex systems, and computational social science to develop models that reveal patterns across these interconnected domains. He received in PhD in Anthropology from The Ohio State University in 2025 and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Belize and Alaska, studying subsistence networks, land use, and biodiversity. His research employs network science, Bayesian statistics, and computational modeling to examine how human-environment interactions shape ecological and social dynamics. Shane will be working in the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences on research at the intersection of sociology, anthropology, environmental and natural resources.

Eric Shershen, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Mandy Slate, Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

Eric Shershen is a community ecologist who specializes in plants, specifically bryophytes (mosses, hornworts, and liverworts). He is broadly interested in what drives community change through time and how different species, especially those rare to a community, respond to environmental stress.  Eric aims to use ecological niche modeling and physiological drought experiments to understand what drives rarity in bryophytes. Through his work with Dr. Slate they hope to better conserve suitable habitat under various climate change scenarios and thus increase protection of bryophytes. Eric received his PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 2025 and his BA in biology and environmental studies from Augustana College in 2018.

Yinan Sun, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Joshua Smyth, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences

Yinan Sun is a researcher at the intersection of health informatics, human-centered design, and AI-driven digital interventions. Her work focuses on how sociocultural factors influence health behaviors, digital health adoption, and AI-assisted interventions, particularly for marginalized communities. She has led research on mobile health (mHealth) technologies, exploring real-time monitoring and behavioral prediction models to improve health outcomes for Native Hawaiian, Filipino, and Pacific Islander (NHFPI) populations. Her participation in human-centered design and machine learning has contributed to projects leveraging wearable biosensors, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and AI-driven personalization to enhance engagement in mobile health applications. Yinan is particularly interested in developing culturally sensitive, AI-powered assistive technologies to improve accessibility and healthcare interventions. Yinan received her PhD in communication and information science from the University of Hawaii Manoa in 2024, her MA in comparative literature from Hiroshima University in 2009, and her BA in Japanese language and literature from Capital Normal University in 2005. Prior to joining Ohio State she was a postdoctoral scholar at George Mason University in the Departmet of Information Sciences & Technology.

Molly Wolfson, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Paul Martini, Department Astronomy, College of Arts and Sciences

Molly Wolfson is a cosmologist studying the universe on the largest scales. She works at the intersection of cosmological data sets and simulations, aiming to better understand the universe’s evolution and composition. Her research has focused on using observations of high-redshift quasars to constrain reionization—the era in cosmic history when the first stars and galaxies ionized the intergalactic medium. She is also a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, which seeks to measure the effect of dark energy on the expansion of the universe. Molly earned her PhD in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2024.

Audra Crouch, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Vanessa Hale, Department of Veterinary Preventive Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine

Dr. Audra Crouch is a traditionally trained microbiologist, who earned her PhD in microbiology from The Ohio State University in 2024 and a BS in biomedical science from Lynchburg College in 2007. 

Per Audra: I honed my professional skills at American Type Culture Collection and as a contractor for the Air Force Research Laboratory, where I gained an appreciation for micro-ecology and environmental microbiology. Audra's research expertise focus on host-associated microbiomes, bioinformatics, and micro-ecology.

Katherine Daiy, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Barbara Piperata, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences

Katherine's research examines how local environments shape host biology through sensitive periods of early development, with a special focus on the microbiome. Her work particularly focuses on how urbanization, nutrition transitions, and other globalized processes affect maternal and child health, maternal and child microbiomes, and non-communicable disease. 

Katherine received her PhD in anthropology from Yale University in 2024 and BA in anthropology with a minor in biology from Texas A&M University in 2018.

She has worked in Argentina with the Chaco Area Reproductive Ecology Project, in Samoa with the Samoan Obesity, Lifestyle, and Genetic Adaptations Project, and currently works with the NSF-funded Ecoculturing the Infant Gut Microbiome Project in Brazil.

Enora Le Flao, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jaclyn Caccese, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, College of Medicine

Enora is a postdoctoral scholar at The Ohio State University, sharing her time between the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and the Human Performance Collaborative. She was trained as a mechanical engineer and quickly turned to biomechanics and the study of sports injuries. After receiving her bachelor's degree from Université de Technologie de Compiègne and an industry stint in France, a PhD from Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, and a first postdoctoral experience at Stanford University, Enora joined The Ohio State University to apply her expertise to human performance. Her primary research interest relates to concussions in athletic and law enforcement populations. Through the use of smart mouthguards and other wearable sensors, she investigates how the number and magnitude of head impacts affect brain health, athletic performance, and overall well-being. She also explores novel methods and technologies to improve recovery from the short and long-term effects of head impacts.

Yuxi (Lucy) Lu, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Marc Pinsonneault, Department of Astronomy, College of Arts and Sciences

Yuxi obtained her PhD in astronomy from Columbia University in 2023 and a BS in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland College Park in 2018. Her doctoral dissertation, "Rewinding the Milky Way in Time," explored the history and evolution of our Galaxy through the lens of stellar populations. She is interested in stellar physics, Galactic archaeology, and the statistical analysis of exoplanet systems. She specializes in deriving stellar ages from large stars surveys (e.g. Kepler, TESS, APOGEE, LAMOST etc.), with a focus on gyrochronology calibration. She’s also interested in Galactic Archaeology, with a focus on radial migration and birth radii inference. 

She is broadly interested in leveraging interdisciplinary approaches and large datasets to reconstruct the formation and evolutionary history of the Milky Way and its planetary systems. Her current work focuses in stellar ages, stellar spin-down, and stellar migration. 

Joseph Maffly-Kipp, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jay Fournier, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, College of Medicine

Joseph Maffly-Kipp is a postdoc whose research focuses on self and identity processes in the context of internalizing disorders—primarily depression. Specific interests include self-identification with depression, susceptibility to unusual beliefs, the effect of identity disturbance on clinical measurement, and the stability of self-views over time. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from Texas A&M University in 2022 and his BS in psychology from Bates College in 2016. 

Prior to joining Ohio State as a postdoctoral scholar, he finished his clinical internship in mood, anxiety, and mindfulness under Jay Fournier’s guidance in 2024.

Lisa Robinette, PhD, MS

Faculty Mentor: Sara Keim, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine (Nationwide Children's Hospital)

Lisa Robinette is a postdoctoral scientist studying nutrition and neurodevelopment in the Center for Biobehavioral Health at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Research Institute. She received her BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2003 and MS and PhD in Human Nutrition from The Ohio State University in 2021 and 2024 respectively. 

Her research focuses on the effects of nutrition and dietary intake on neurodevelopment, with a special interest in children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Prior to returning to academia, she worked for more than sixteen years in the private sector in the field of chemical engineering.

Marcelo Rosales, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jill Heathcock, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, College of Medicine

Marcelo completed his PhD in biokinesiology at the University of Southern California in 2023 and BS in kinesiology and exercise science at the California State University-Northridge in 2016. During his doctoral studies, he conducted research in the Infant Neuromotor Control Laboratory. His dissertation focused on early motor learning in infants, leveraging wearable sensors and eye tracking to better understand developmental processes. In his current postdoc role, he works in the Ohio State Pediatric Assessment and Rehabilitation Laboratory. His current scholarship centers on developing innovative assessment tools for children with upper extremity disabilities, combining high- and low-tech methods such as clinical behavioral assessments, video analysis, Pose Estimation, eye tracking, and behavioral coding. His research bridges motor development, rehabilitation, and technology—driven by a passion for creating accessible, translational tools that support clinicians and families.

Maria Stefaniak, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Michael Lisa, Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences

Maria Stefaniak is a dedicated nuclear physicist focused on exploring the properties of the most elementary nuclear matter and their interactions through heavy ion collisions. She joined Ohio State in 2023, and became a PPSP scholar in 2024, channeling her passion into groundbreaking research. Maria is not only passionate about her research but also about fostering inclusivity in her field. Highly motivated to bring more women into nuclear physics, she actively engages in various committees and discussions, tirelessly advocating for improving the field's inclusiveness.

After departing Ohio State in 2025, Maria transitioned from academic nuclear physics to applied research in fusion energy in the private sector. After years of studying heavy-ion collisions at GSI, CERN, and Brookhaven National Laboratory, she’s recently transitioned to industry to now bring her expertise in detector hardware—design, construction, calibration, and operation in demanding environments—into the effort to make fusion-based power a reality. Her background bridges advanced instrumentation and data-driven discovery: from building and testing detectors to applying machine learning and simulations that guide design choices and interpret results. This foundation allows her to contribute to innovative diagnostics and experimental approaches for fusion research. 

Van Truong, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Barry Shank (retired) and Danielle Fosler-Lussier, School of Music, College of Arts and Sciences

Van My Truong’s work takes a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to contemporary migrant life and culture and has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Social Text and The Independent Weekly, among others, and will appear in the forthcoming anthology of essays entitled Blackstar Rising & the Purple Reign: Pop Culture and the Sonic Afterlives of David Bowie and Prince (Duke UP). Previously, she held an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship. With support from Yale’s Public Humanities Program, she co-founded SOUND HALL, a speaker/performance series and multimedia platform that focuses on sound and music at the intersection of personal memory and public history.  She is currently working on a new archival project focusing on family photographs of the Vietnamese diaspora while completing a book manuscript entitled The Utopics of Migrant Melancholia, which theorizes the utopic imagination in contemporary migrant life. Prior received her PhD in American studies from Yale University in 2020 and BA in writing with a minor in ethnic studies from the University of California San Diego in 1999.

Bürge Abiral, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Anna Willow, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences

Bürge Abiral is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose work brings ethnographic attunement to everyday forms of environmentalism under conditions of economic precarity and political authoritarianism. Her research examines how urbanites with socioeconomic means in Turkey frame everyday actions as revolutionary in the service of creating alternative agroecological futures. This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, the Council for European Studies, and various programs at Johns Hopkins University, including the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute. She received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2023, and she has a BA in Anthropology from Williams College and an MA in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University. Her work is informed by an aspiration to contribute to public debates via community engagement and applied scholarship. 

Dr. Abiral is currently serving as teaching faculty at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL.

Elham Asghari Adib, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Phillip Popovich, Department of Neuroscience, College of Medicine

Elham Asghari Adib will be a new post-doctoral scholar at the Ohio State University. She will join Dr. Phillip Popovich’s lab in January 2023. She completed her BSc in Microbiology at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. She got her PhD in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from the University of Michigan in 2022. For her PhD, she studied an evolutionarily conserved kinase called DLK and its contribution to synaptic loss and inflammation in a model of peripheral nerve injury. She also earned a Masters of Science in Bioinformatics during her PhD training. In the Popovich lab, she will work on neuron-microglia interactions and the mechanisms underlying divergent microglial responses caused by traumatic spinal cord injury. 

Dr. Asghari Adib is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Neuroscience at The Ohio State University.

Hannah Budge, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Shoshana Inwood, School of Environmental and Natural Sciences, College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Hannah Budge is a rural sociologist who is completing/has completed her PhD at Newcastle University (United Kingdom) through a fellowship/grant from the Economic and Social Research Council. She received her Masters Degree in Food and Rural Development also at Newcastle University and her undergraduate degree in Geography from the University of Aberdeen. Leveraging her experiences growing up on a family farm in the Shetland Islands, her PhD research examined the experiences and barriers for Women in the agriculture industry in the Scottish Islands and two Atlantic Canadian Islands. Agriculture is traditionally viewed as a masculine dominated industry, using in-depth qualitive research methods and interviews Hannah examined the roles of women in agriculture in different island contexts and land tenure systems, and the representations of women in leadership positions. A key finding was the degree to which women viewed the availability of childcare as a key barrier for participating in farming and agricultural organizations, impacting women’s visibility and representation in the industry. During the PPSP Hannah plans on building and extending her dissertation research by analyzing the qualitative and quantitative primary data collected from Dr. Inwood and Dr. Becot’s CDC-NIOSH funded “Linking Farm Safety and Childcare” Project. She will analyze the data to: 1) Examine the childcare arrangements used by farm women in a social policy context that provides little support to working parents; 2) Examine the emotional consequences on farm women stemming from keeping the children safe while trying to keep the farm business and farm household afloat. Building on Hannah’s longstanding efforts to understand the role of gender in food and agriculture development this research will produce insights into the socioeconomic factors that can bolster food system resiliency and rural development in the face of climate change and shifting market and demographic challenges.

Dr. Budge is currently a research scientist focused on rural sociology at The James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, U.K.

Marco Chen, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jolynn Pek, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences 

Marco earned his B.S. in Commerce from University of Virginia and Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology along with an M.S. in Statistics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research broadly explores how to model unobserved psychological constructs in a valid and generalizable way for samples that are heterogeneous with respect to background characteristics, such as gender, age, and race. His graduate work with Dr. Daniel Bauer developed latent variable models to evaluate measurement scale items for any differential effectiveness in reflecting the target unobservable construct across levels of background covariates, i.e., measurement bias. His proposed model can account for individual background differences that can influence observed responses irrespective of actual disparities in the underlying constructs of interest, thus improving the validity and fairness of scores on the constructs. This model can be applied to evaluate many items over categorical and continuous background covariates simultaneously and result in superior detection rates of measurement bias. His dissertation work applied a statistical learning method called Bayesian regularization to distinguish change in item measurement effectiveness from change in the true construct across individual ages and other time-varying covariates in longitudinal measurement data. His postdoctoral work will investigate the extent to which university exam item construction could influence how students from different backgrounds respond to the questions. His projects will apply his measurement modeling skills to quantify the influence of item design on exam performance across demographic groups and ultimately promote guidelines of equitable exam design. His work will also consider the general methodological implications of measurement item bias in replicating psychology studies.

Dr. Chen is currenlty a psychometrician at Duolingo based in Pittsburgh, PA.

Maria Copot, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Andrea Sims, Department of Linguistics, College of Arts and Sciences 

Maria Copot works at the intersection of linguistic theory and cognitive science, by means of quantitative methodologies. Their research centers on the subfield of morphology, which is concerned with the structure of humans’ knowledge of words. Humans’ morphological knowledge hinges on committing linguistic input to memory, while simultaneously organizing the memorized chunks in a structured way, so that generalizations can be extracted and used for understanding or producing new words. During their PhD at the Université Paris Cité, Maria’s work used quantitative analysis of corpus and experimental data to probe the structure of human knowledge of words, and resulting human behaviors, by examining the interaction of memory and structured generalizations. While at Ohio State, Maria will work on modeling word systems with the mathematical formalism of network theory. Morphological systems are complex systems characterized by non-deterministic relationships, dependencies and interactions. They therefore can be modeled satisfactorily only if considered as wholes. For a given language, one can construct a network that links words to each other, based on information like their meaning, the way they sound, the contexts they appear in, and their social connotations. This structure can then be used to ask and answer questions about how word systems are organized, how this organization compares across languages, why languages change across time, and the implication of different systemic organizations for how words in a language are stored and processed.

Dr. Copot is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Surrey Morphology Group affiliated with the University of Surrey in Guildford, U.K.

Swathy Krishna, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jill Rafael-Fortney, Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, College of Medicine 

Swathy Krishna earned her Bachelors in Science from the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bengaluru, India. She performed her Masters research in the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad, India, and earned her MSc in 2018. Swathy then entered the Interdepartmental Genetics and Genomics program at Iowa State University. She performed her Ph.D. dissertation research in the lab of Joshua Selsby, Ph.D. focused on metabolic and autophagy abnormalities associated with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Her continued interest in DMD and muscle biology health and disease has brought her to conduct her postdoctoral research at The Ohio State University in the laboratory of Jill Rafael-Fortney, Ph.D. in the Department of Physiology & Cell Biology, Davis Heart and Lung Research Institute and Center for Muscle Health and Neuromuscular Disorders.

Dr. Krishna is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology at The Ohio State University.

Muhedeen Lawal, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Ann Cook, School of Earth Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences

Muhedeen Lawal is a new postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth Science and he is working in the Marine Geophysics Research Group with Dr. Ann Cook. Muhedeen received his PhD in 2023 from the University of Haifa in Israel and his masters degree from University of Perugia in Italy in 2016. During his PhD, Muhedeen developed his expertise in marine geophysics and geographic information systems and which resulted in eight peer-reviewed publications. For his postdoctoral fellowship at Ohio State, Muhedeen plans to work on carbon sequestration in marine sediments and rocks, a socially relevant topic that can help reduce the impact of global climate change. Muhedeen is also passionate about mentoring students from Africa and increasing the number of women on the faculty in African universities.

Dr. Lawal is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University.

Nikita Makarchev, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Oded Shenkar, Department of Management and Human Resources, Fisher College of Business

Nikita’s research focuses on international good governance, anti-corruption policymaking and citizen welfare. At Ohio State University, he plans to examine citizen satisfaction with public services and the effects of service non-delivery on diverse population groups. Methods he uses are primarily mixed, involving interviews/surveys, machine learning and spatiotemporal modelling.

Journals Nikita’s research has appeared in include Environmental Science & Policy, Journal of Contemporary China, Post-Soviet Affairs, International Journal of Water Resources Development, International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Journal of Historical Sociology. Nikita holds a PhD in Development Studies from University of Cambridge, an MSc in Area Studies from University of Oxford and BA in Government from Harvard.

James Tan, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Shaurya Prakash, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering

James Tan grew up in Metro-Detroit, received his Bachelor of Science of Engineering in Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan, and is completing his doctoral studies in Chemical Engineering under Dr. Xiaoxia “Nina” Lin there as well. His expertise is at the interface between engineering and microbiome science, developing technologies that can answer key biological questions regarding bacterial interactions. Specifically, James focused on the utilization of microfluidic droplets (“microdroplets”), which are nanoliter-scale water-in-oil emulsions for the encapsulation of cells that allow for typical microbiological and molecular techniques to be performed massively parallel and at ultra-high throughput with unprecedented resolution. His dissertation work centered around the incorporation of metagenomic analyses with this resolution and throughput. James is a research fellow in the Integrated Training in Microbial Systems program, an interdisciplinary research community at the University of Michigan to centralize cross-department wide efforts to study microbiomes. As a postdoctoral fellow, James will be mentored by Dr. Shaurya Prakash (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) in close collaboration with Dr. Matthew Sullivan (Microbiology) to apply droplet-based, ultra-high-throughput single-cell sequencing to the study of phage-bacteria interactions in ocean microbiomes. James is an active member of his local church and enjoys sport climbing in local indoor climbing gyms and at outdoor crags.

Dr. Tan is currently a lecturer in the Center for Life Sciences Education at The Ohio State University.

Marion Urvoy, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Matthew Sullivan, Department of Microbiology, College of Arts and Sciences 

Dr. Marion Urvoy obtained her engineering degree from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (Toulouse, France) and her Ph.D. in marine biology from the University of Western Brittany (Brest, France). Her thesis investigated the processes structuring the composition and function of marine and estuarine bacterial communities, and their impact on global marine biogeochemical cycles. In particular, she focused on how bacteria communicate (a.k.a. quorum sensing) to coordinate key ecological behaviors in complex systems. As of August 2022, Dr. Urvoy joined OSU and the Sullivan lab as a postdoctoral scholar, where she hopes to study how phages can eavesdrop on bacterial quorum sensing to regulate important processes such as the lysis-lysogeny decision.

Dr. Urvoy is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Microbiology at The Ohio State University.

Adrien Winning, PhD

Faculty Mentor: H. Gerry Taylor, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine (Nationwide Children's Hospital)

Dr. Adrien Winning earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Loyola University Chicago in 2023. She is currently a postdoctoral scientist in the Patient-Centered Pediatric Research Program in the Center for Biobehavioral Health at Nationwide Children's Hospital's Research Institute and a presidential postdoctoral scholar at The Ohio State University. Broadly, Adrien’s research focuses on child and family adjustment to chronic health conditions that affect the central nervous system. Adrien’s current research involves using community-engaged approaches to identify the school readiness needs of families who have a young child with spina bifida.

Dr. Winning is currently a postdoctoral scientist in the Center for Biobehavioral Health at Nationwide Children's Hospital Research Institute in Columbus, OH.

Jasmine Bruno, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Mark Moritz, Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences

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. 

Dr. Bruno is currently serving as a scientific program officer at the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR). Click here to learn more about Dr. Bruno.

Ellen Feiss, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jody Patterson, Department of History of Art, College of Arts and Sciences

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. 

Since departing Ohio State, Ellen has become an assistant professor of art and art history at Providence College. Click here to learn more about Dr. Feiss.

Martín Fuchs, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Scott Schwenter, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, College of Arts and Sciences

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. 

Since leaving Ohio State, Dr. Fuchs has served as a scientific researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin as a member of the Experimental Replication of Historical Reanalysis Processes (EXREAN) project team. Click here to learn more about Dr. Fuchs.

Andrea Garcia, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Mary Fristad, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, College of Medicine

Dr. Andrea Garcia received her PhD in school psychology from the University of Kansas in 2022, an MA in clinical child psychology from the University of Kansas in 2016, a MS in education focused in mental health counseling from the University of Miami in 2010 and a BS in psychology from the University of Miami in 2004. 

Andrea’s research focuses on Interdisciplinary family-centered approaches to address gaps in the integrated care of children and their families from minority and low socioeconomic backgrounds. Her 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. NCH-BH is the largest hospital-affiliated BH service in the country. 

Mubasher Hassan, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Andrzej Kloczkowski, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine (Nationwide Children's Hospital)

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. 

Dr. Hassan was born and raised in Pakistan and completed his PhD from Kongju National University, South Korea (2015-2019). After finishing his PhD, he worked as an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) at The University of Lahore, Pakistan, where he taught courses related to Bioinformatics and supervised student at undergraduate and graduate levels. Dr Hassan is working as Postdoctoral Research Scientist since December 20, 2021, having expertise in Computer Aided Drug Designing (CADD) at The Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine, Nationwide Children’s Hospital (NCH). Dr. Hassan won the most prestigious “President Postdoctoral Scholarship Program (PPSP)” award from The Ohio State University (OSU) in 2022 and “Outstanding Research Award for 2022” from Research Awards Committee Administrator, NCH, Columbus OH. USA. He has published around 160 high-quality research articles in reputable journals.

Click here to learn more about Dr. Hassan.

Laura Hildebrand, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Kentaro Fujita, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences

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, College of Arts and Sciences

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? 

Since leaving Ohio State, Dr. Jordan has worked as a lecturer of human and organizational development at Vanderbilt University, freelanced as an equity researcher and public speaker, and is currently a Mellon Foundation Leading Edge Fellow as part of the American Council of Learned Socieities in Nashville, TN. Click here to learn more about Dr. Jordan.

Emily Moscato, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Cynthia Gerhardt, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine (Nationwide Children's Hospital)

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.

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.

Since ending her PPSP position, Dr. Moscato is serving as an assistant professor and Principal Investigator in the Center for Biobehavioral Health at Nationwide Children's Hospital's Research Institute. Click here to learn more about Dr. Moscato.

Sebastian Stockmaier, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Gerald Carter, Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

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.

Dr. Stockmaier is currently an assistant professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in Knoxville, TN. Click here to learn more about Dr. Stockmaier.

Marcus Vinicius Merfa e Silva, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jonathan Jacobs, Department of Plant Pathology, College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences 

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. 

Since leaving Ohio State, Dr. Vinicius Merfa has served as an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Click here to learn more about Dr. Vinicius Merfa.

Zachariah Addison, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Nandini Trivedi, Department of Physics, College of Arts and Sciences

Zachariah Addison was a postdoc in the Department of Physics working in the condensed matter theory groups of Nandini Trevedi and Mohit Randeria. Dr. Addison received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in Music from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before receiving his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania this past summer. His research interests focus on the understanding of the dynamics of electrons in materials and how they lead to interesting electrodynamic phenomena encoded in a material’s optical properties. He has focused on the topic of dispersive currents that give rise to interesting optical properties: circular dichroism and spatially dispersive photo-galvanic effects which are measurable with new experimental techniques that can map out the local fluctuations in the conductivity of a system. These optical phenomena can probe the inherent topological properties of the electronic dynamics in a material whether by imaging states protected by topological invariants or by measuring topological related k-space functionals like the Berry curvature. The optical properties themselves are governed by Maxwell's equations, a set of wave equations that can have its own topological properties. Topological photonic crystals manifest topologically protected states with interesting properties: the chiral modes in a photonic Chern Insulator or the corner states in a two-dimensional photonic higher order topological insulator. He seeks to find new topological phenomena associated with a higher order multipole expansion of the charge and current densities. In linear response these terms can give rise to new interesting and/or topological phenomena in the photonic modes of the crystal itself. By studying these new and interesting electrodynamic phenomena, his research ensures a better understanding and control over the dynamics of electrons and photons in quantum condensed matter physics.

Dr. Addison is currently an assistant professor of physics at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA.

Augusta Atinuke Irele, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Simone Drake, Departments of English and African American and African Studies, College of Arts and Sciences

Augusta Atinuke Irele is a scholar of postcolonialism, transnationalism and diaspora. Her research focuses on articulations of global Black belonging and unbelonging in contemporary African migrant narratives. Her dissertation project, “Narratives of the New Diaspora: Migration and Transnationalism in Contemporary African Literature” was driven by the question of how Afro-descendant diasporic and continental African authors use their work to engage in transnational conversations about multivalent modes of collective belonging. Her interdisciplinary approach pulled from postcolonial studies, trauma theory and diaspora studies to theorize about migrant racialization in new diaspora experiences. Augusta’s research has been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays program. Her work has been published in the Journal of the African Literature Association and in Displaced: Literature of Indigeneity, Migration, and Trauma, published by Routledge. She has also presented her work at several conferences, including the American Comparative Literature Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Modern Language Association and the African Studies Association. In addition to her academic writing, Augusta has published articles for the Blackademia and SisterPhD blogs. She is also one of the coordinators for Blackademia’s quarterly book chats. She received her BA from Bryn Mawr College and a joint PhD in Africana Studies and Comparative Literature & Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Atinuke Irele is currently vice president of training, learning + curriculum at The Posse Foundation based in New York, NY.

Samantha Benincasa, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Laura Lopez and Adam Leroy, Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, College of Arts and Sciences

Samantha Benincasa received her Masters and PhD in Physics from McMaster University where she specialized in the use of computer simulations to study galaxy evolution. She is currently a CCAPP and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) fellow at Ohio State’s Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics. She is a theoretical astrophysicist whose work focuses on how stars form and galaxies assemble. 

At Ohio State she will work to interpret cutting-edge telescope observations through the lens of her state-of-the-art galaxy simulations. Her research interests focus around the relationship between stars and cold, dense gas in galaxies, as well as synthetic observations of galaxy simulations.

Dr. Benincasa is the recipient of several fellowships, including the President's Postdoctoral Scholars Program award, a Center for Cosmology and Applied Physics (CCAPP) Fellowship, and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Graduate Research Scholarship.

Marta Bornstein, PhD, MPH

Faculty Mentor: Alison Norris and William Miller, Division of Epidemiology, College of Public Health

Marta Bornstein received her PhD in Community Health Sciences at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. Within public health, Bornstein is committed to scholarship that embodies the true vision of reproductive rights: helping people achieve their reproductive goals, whether that is preventing or achieving pregnancy. Bornstein’s research focuses on identifying the factors that shape how individuals assess their risk for certain health outcomes (e.g., unintended pregnancy) and how, and to what extent, that risk motivates them to implement preventive behaviors (e.g., contraceptive use) under different circumstances. Bornstein has specifically focused her research on under-served populations in the U.S., such as women in methadone treatment, and internationally (primarily in sub-Saharan Africa) in settings where women often face barriers to exercising reproductive agency. Bornstein is currently working on the UTHA study in Malawi, where she uses quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the interrelatedness and health impacts of a spectrum of reproductive experiences, including both unintended pregnancy and infertility. Her work as been published in academic journals, including Social Science and Medicine, Women’s Health Issues, and Contraception. Prior to her doctorate, Bornstein worked in public health on issues ranging from HIV/STD prevention to maternal health infrastructure. She earned her MPH from Tulane University and BA from Beloit College.

Dr. Bornstein is currently an assistant professor of health promotion at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, SC.

Andrea Fetters, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Karen Goodell and Elizabeth Marschall, Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

Andrea earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Saint Mary’s College and her PhD with a Teaching Minor in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Pittsburgh. She is broadly interested in plant-microbe insect interactions. Her dissertation research focused on pollen-associated viruses and how certain plant traits and mating system, community-level interactions and landscape attributes contribute to the size of the pollen virome. In graduate school, Andrea was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship and was involved in outreach programs in the Pittsburgh Public School district and diversity initiatives. At The Ohio State University, she will investigate mutualistic plant-arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi-pollinator interactions in a reclaimed surface mine habitat under the guidance of Drs. Karen Goodell, Alison Bennett and Frances Sivakoff in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology.  Andrea’s overall goal is to understand whether the plant-fungal mutualism influences the plant pollinator one via the promotion of attractive floral traits and whether it can also mitigate the effect of heavy metal soil pollution on the plant-pollinator mutualism, via the promotion of the same attractive floral traits. Understanding how species interactions are connected is currently essential, given the burgeoning rate at which humans alter the environment and perhaps forever change species’ ecological and evolutionary trajectories.

Dr. Fetters is currently a postdoctoral associate in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jacob Hopkins, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Alison Bennett and Bryan Carstens, Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

Jacob Hopkins is a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Alison Bennett’s laboratory.  Jacob earned his Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from Indiana University, where he worked as an undergraduate lab technician for Dr. James D. Bever.  Following the completion of his undergraduate studies, he completed a PhD degree in the lab of Dr. Benjamin Sikes at the University of Kansas.  His work has resulted in publications in the Journal of Scientific Data (2016), Oecologia (2020) and FEMS Microbiology Ecology (2020).  Currently, Jacob studies the effects of prescribed fires and other land management techniques on soil fungal communities and their function in ecosystems.  This work uses fire recurrent, or pyrophilic ecosystems, as models to predict the effects of fire and climate change in less fire tolerant systems.  His work with Dr. Bennett will continue this research by studying how interactions between climate and fire influence fungal community structure through selection for specific traits.  Jacob also has a passion for teaching, outreach and scientific mentorship.  During his time in Dr. Bennett’s laboratory, he will improve his abilities in these areas by co-teaching statistical seminars with Dr. Bennett, developing scientific outreach modules and mentoring students from the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) and The Metro Early College School.

Dr. Hopkins is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology at Indiana University Bloomington.

Abhishek Mishra, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Matt Anderson and Matt Sullivan, Department of Microbiology (College of Arts and Sciences) and Department of Microbial Infection and Immunity (College of Medicine)

Abhishek earned his Integrated BS and MS degree, followed by his PhD, at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, India. He explored the ecological and evolutionary aspects of biological dispersal during his graduate work. At The Ohio State University, his primary project aims to investigate the genetics and evolution of the common human fungal pathobiont, Candida albicans, under the mentorship of Dr. Matthew Anderson and Dr. Matthew Sullivan. His focus is on the causes and phenotypic correlates of pathogenesis in this microbe, which is both a common component of the human microbiome and a major cause for nosocomial infections worldwide. For his work, Abhishek plans to utilize a diverse combination of experimental and computational tools, including quantitative genetics, transcriptional networking and experimental evolution.

Dr. Mishra is current an associate at McKinsey & Company. Prior to this position, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Genomic Science Innovation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Click here to read more about Dr. Mishra.

Daniel Nicholson, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Vincent Roscigno, Department of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences

D. Adam Nicholson earned his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Kansas with a minor in Peace and Conflict Studies and has gone on to complete his PhD in Sociology at Indiana University- Bloomington. The overall goal of his work is to identify the causes and consequences of poverty and inequality in the United States. More specifically, he seeks to understand the political and economic factors that drive both poverty and ethno-racial differences in poverty and the factors in play that either perpetuate or attenuate inequality in various forms. While previous work has sought to explain poverty through individual-level behaviors, his work focuses largely on structural explanations. Cross-national work demonstrates that social policy plays a key role in shaping poverty outcomes. Adam applies insights from this line of work to examine poverty at both the national and state levels, finding large variations in how individuals are “penalized” for risk characteristics, such as low education, single motherhood, or unemployment. Applying this approach to the examination of ethno-racial inequalities, Adam finds that neither reducing nor completely eliminating the prevalence of these risks in Black and Latino households would reduce Black and Latino poverty below that of white households. This points to the importance of work that focuses on the structural causes of poverty and inequality. In related work, Adam has examined electoral politics, political polarization and racial inequalities in support for social movements. While he primarily leverages quantitative research methods, he also has extensive experience with experimental surveys. At The Ohio State University with his mentor Dr. Vincent Roscigno, he plans on extending his work on poverty to more specific foci surrounding racial exclusion, systemic institutional disadvantage and discrimination in particular.

Dr. Nicholson is currently the deputy director of social policy at Niskanen Center in Washington D.C. and co-founder of Atlas Data Analytics and Consulting.

Alexander Stephan, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Bernard Gaudi and Christopher Kochanek, Department of Astronomy, College of Arts and Sciences

Alexander P. Stephan earned his BA in Physics at the University of Chicago in 2014 and received his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics by the University of California, Los Angeles in the summer of 2020. In 2018, Dr. Stephan received the Michael A. Jura Memorial Graduate Award, given in memory of late UCLA professor Mike Jura, a founder of the field of modern white dwarf pollution research. In 2020, Dr. Stephan received the Rodger Doxsey Travel Prize to present his dissertation at the 235th AAS Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dr. Stephan is interested in a wide range of astrophysical problems in connection with the long-term evolution of stars and planets undergoing complex gravitational interactions, while considering the changes stars undergo as they age. His research predicted, for example, the presence of a population of binary stellar merger products in the Galactic Center, the existence of “Temporary Hot Jupiters", or the pollution of white dwarf stars by gas giant planets, all of which have been confirmed by observations over recent years. Apart from scientific research, Dr. Stephan is also deeply involved in science outreach and student mentoring. In particular, for several years he led and co-organized graduate student outreach groups and events at UCLA that aim to improve the science education at schools with children from weaker socio-economic backgrounds, such as the graduate student outreach group “Astronomy Live!" and the yearly on-campus science fair “Exploring Your Universe". Dr. Stephan has also aided in mentoring several students who worked with Professor Smadar Naoz on a variety of projects, from a wide variety of background. With these outreach and mentoring activities Dr. Stephan aims to promote a greater inclusion of under-represented minorities and women in the natural sciences and academia in general.

Dr. Stephan is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Vanderbilt University. Click here to read more about Dr. Stephan.

Grace Zhou, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, College of Arts and Sciences

Grace H. Zhou is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research brings detailed ethnographic engagement to questions of labor, care and transnational exchange across Asia, particularly where China’s Belt and Road Initiative finds traction in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Her research has been awarded fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and Stanford Humanities Center among others. She received her BA and MA from Columbia University, and her PhD from Stanford University. In addition to her academic scholarship, she is also a poet and writes about settler colonialism, diasporic experience and ethnographic encounters across genres.

Dr. Zhou is currently a lecturer of social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Previous to this role, Dr. Zhou was an Irish Research Council (IRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Anthropology Department at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

René Arvola, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Guramrit Singh and Sharon Amacher, Department of Molecular Genetics, College of Arts and Sciences

René earned her BS in Biochemistry from Purdue University and her PhD in Biological Chemistry from the University of Michigan. As a graduate student, her research focused on dissecting the molecular mechanisms of Pumilio, a developmentally critical regulator of messenger RNAs (mRNAs). In graduate school, René was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and held multiple roles in science outreach organizations that promote diversity in STEM. She is currently a co-mentored postdoctoral researcher in the labs of Dr. Guramrit Singh and Dr. Sharon Amacher in the Department of Molecular Genetics. Her research focus is studying how mRNA quality control is regulated in vivo during development, using zebrafish as a model system. Her goal is to better understand the context specific nature of mRNA regulatory processes and how these can impact development and potentiate disease.

Dr. Arvola is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Molecular Genetics at The Ohio State University.

Shanna Hamilton, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Dmitry Terentyev, Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, College of Medicine

Shanna received her BSc in Biochemistry from Swansea University, UK, and her PhD in Medicine and Biophysics from Cardiff University, UK, where she investigated mutations in the ryanodine receptor associated with cardiac disease and ventricular arrhythmias. Under the mentorship of Dr. Dmitry Terentyev in the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, she now studies the regulation of calcium dynamics and mechanisms of arrhythmia in multiple cardiac disease models. Shanna has developed novel molecular tools to measure calcium, reactive oxygen species and potassium within different compartments of the cardiac myocyte. Her overall goal is to fill significant gaps in our understanding of how calcium signaling and oxidative stress control cardiovascular physiology, in order to design better therapeutic strategies for patients.

Dr. Hamilton is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Arizona.

Kathryn Kroeper, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Steven Spencer, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences

Kathryn Kroeper earned her BA from Rutgers University with an exceptional record and has gone on to complete her PhD in social psychology at Indiana University. The central goal of her research is to identify and mitigate unfair inequities between members of traditionally advantaged and disadvantaged social groups. More specifically, she seeks to understand how people and organizations can structure social environments to provide everyone with the equal opportunity to flourish. Her research is grounded in social identity threat theory. According to the theory, people belonging to socially stigmatized groups reasonably worry that—because of their social identity (e.g., their race, gender, class, or age)—they will be devalued or dismissed in particular settings. Over time, identity-related worries stoke anxiety, sap motivation and undermine performance, which perpetuate opportunity gaps in academic and workplace settings. In some of Kathryn’s research, she identifies situational cues—like norms, values, beliefs, policies and practices—that give rise to social identity-related worries. In her other research, Kathryn leverages these insights to design, implement and evaluate interventions aimed at changing identity-threatening environments into identity-safe settings where people of all backgrounds can thrive. Kathryn’s research examines these social issues from a variety of perspectives (targets, perceivers and organizations), using multiple methods (experiments, surveys, interviews and audit studies). Her work is interdisciplinary, appearing in peer-reviewed psychological, educational and legal outlets. At Ohio State, she plans to extend this line of work with Steven Spencer, one of the original theorists behind social identity threat theory.

Dr. Hamilton is currently an assistant professor of psychology at Sacred Heart University and principal investigator of the Understanding Nurturing, Inclusive, and Transformative Environments (UNITE) lab.

Allen Mallory, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Natasha Slesnick and Claire Kamp Dush, Department of Human Sciences, College of Education and Human Ecology

Allen received his bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Cognitive Science from Case Western Reserve University, his master’s degree in Couple and Family Therapy from Kansas State University, and he will complete his PhD in Human Development and Family Science in August 2020 at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on risk and protective factors for the health and well-being of sexual and gender minority people. His dissertation research examines how intersections of race, sexual orientation and gender discrimination relate to the long-term mental health of sexual minority youth and adults. This research is in part funded by Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship through the National Institute of Mental Health. He has co-authored twelve publications in and one book chapter, four of which he is first author. At The Ohio State University, he will build upon his dissertation research to examine how couples’ dynamics can help to mitigate the negative association between stigma and health among racially, ethnically and gender diverse same-sex couples. Ultimately, Allen’s goal is to produce high quality and rigorous research that can be translated to inform policy, improve the well-being of sexual and gender minority people and be useful for a lay audience.

Dr. Mallory is currently an assistant professor oin the Department of Human Sciences at The Ohio State University.

Katie McGrath, PhD

Faculty Mentors: Debra Guatelli-Steinberg, Department of Anthropology (College of Arts and Sciences) and John Bartlett, Department of Biosciences (College of Dentistry)

Kate McGrath is a biological anthropologist interested in how early life stress affects growth and development. She received her BS in Anthropology from the College of Charleston in 2010. From 2011-2012, she was an imaging contractor at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. She received her PhD in Human Paleobiology from The George Washington University in 2018 where she studied stress-related dental defects in great apes, focusing on wild mountain gorillas with associated life history information. Upon finishing her PhD, she moved to France as an EU-funded Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at Université de Bordeaux, where she continued her analyses of skeletal stress markers in great apes. Kate is currently using the method she developed in her PhD to quantify dental stress markers in contemporary and fossil human teeth. This is important because the visual depth of defects is often used as a proxy for stress severity experienced during early life. However, her 2019 study shows that the majority of variation in defect depth among great apes actually relates to variation in enamel growth rates, with faster-growing canines having shallower defects at the population level. This builds on her 2018 paper demonstrating clear species differences in defect depth among great apes, with the faster-developing mountain gorillas having shallower defects than other species. Recent results further support this relationship – Neanderthals have been shown to have faster growth rates in their anterior teeth, and they also have shallower defects compared to three different H. sapiens samples. At Ohio State, she worked with Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg and John Bartlett, directly testing the hypotheses that arose from her earlier work, like whether defect depth correlates with enamel and somatic growth rates at the population level. She studied dental defects and asymmetry in a diverse sample, including contemporary humans, human ancestors and nonhuman primates.

Dr. McGrath is currently an Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology at the State University of New York College at Oneonta..

Joe Sharick, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Jennifer Leight, Department of Biomedical Engineering (College of Engineering) and Larry Kirschner, Department of Internal Medicine (College of Medicine)

Joe received his BSE in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University and his MS and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University. His research interests are centered around engineering new in vitro and in vivo models of cancer to accelerate the development of new cancer treatments and tailor treatment plans for individual patients. His PhD thesis work focused on the development of optical metabolic imaging, a novel method for detecting lethal drug-resistant subpopulations of cells hidden within a patient’s tumor. By collaborating across disciplines with surgeons, oncologists and pathologists, he demonstrated that this technique could predict how individual pancreatic cancer patients would respond to treatment after surgery. Joe’s research was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the NSF. Joe is currently a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University, co-mentored by Dr. Jennifer Leight in the Biomedical Engineering Department and Dr. Larry Kirschner, a member of the Molecular Biology and Cancer Genetics Program at the Ohio State Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is developing new biomaterials functionalized with fluorescent biosensors and using them to study how thyroid cancer cells become metastatic. Joe plans to then translate this biomaterial as a predictive technology in the clinic to determine the metastatic potential of individual patient tumors.

Dr. Sharick is currently a Commercial Translational Architect at the Office of Innovation and Economic Development, The Ohio State University.

Rosie Shrout, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, College of Medicine

Rosie Shrout earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2019. Prior to her doctoral training, Rosie worked as a Health Policy Analyst at Excellus BlueCross BlueShield where wrote empirically-based reports on the public health impact of chronic illness, as well as a Research Program Assistant at Johns Hopkins University where she studied the toll chronic illness took on patients and their families. This work experience informed Rosie’s graduate research on how stress experienced by couples with chronic illness wears on their relationships and can impact both partners’ health, which earned her a competitive dissertation fellowship and the award for the most Outstanding Graduate Student Researcher at UNR in 2019. As a postdoctoral scholar, Rosie will draw on biological and psychological research to address how stress and chronic illness influence the autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system and the immune system in patients and their partners. Stress in couples’ relationships heightens their risk for early mortality and morbidity, including inflammation-related disorders such as cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome and diabetes. Her work will address how the consequences of stress are intensified among couples with chronic illness, providing insight into their long-term health, with the goal of informing future interventions for those most at risk. Rosie’s program of research will have broad transdisciplinary impact on how chronic stress and illness impact health, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding into the biobehavioral pathways that enhance or harm patients’ and their partners’ longevity and quality of life.

Dr. Shrout is currently an assistant professor of human development and family studies at Purdue University.

Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Margaret Newell, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences

Deondre Smiles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and is a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. His research interests include Indigenous geographies, science and technology studies and tribal cultural resource protection/preservation. His current dissertation research focuses on historical and contemporary disrespect and disturbances of deceased Indigenous bodies and Indigenous burial grounds in his home state of Minnesota. Deondre is involved in various Indigenous-related organizations and initiatives in academia; he has served in multiple leadership positions with the Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, including an upcoming term (2020-2021) as the Specialty Group’s chair, as well as serving as the President of Ohio State’s Indigenous Community of Graduate and Professional students for three years (2017-2020). Deondre has published in leading journals such as Geoforum and the International Journal of Listening and also has served as a book reviewer for publications such as American Indian Quarterly, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal and Great Plains Quarterly. Besides his forthcoming PhD in Geography from The Ohio State University, Deondre holds a bachelor’s degree in Geography from Saint Cloud State University, and a master’s degree in Liberal Studies/Global Indigenous Studies from the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

Dr. Smiles is an assistant professor of indigenous studies at Bemidji State University and also holds an adjunct professor position at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

Tianlin Wang, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Joel Johnson, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering

Tianlin Wang received his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2020 from the University of Michigan. His research contributes directly to the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System NASA (CYGNSS) Earth Venture mission, a constellation of eight satellites in Earth orbit used for sensing wind speeds over the ocean. His research interests include applied electromagnetics, microwave remote sensing and radio frequency (RF) circuits. Dr. Wang’s project will focus on extending CYGNSS measurements into the measurement of soil moisture and inundation over land surfaces.

Dr. Wang is a research technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

Kristina Wicke, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Laura Kubatko, Department of Mathematics, College of Arts and Sciences

Kristina obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biomathematics from the University of Greifswald in Germany. She is currently a PhD candidate in Biomathematics at the University of Greifswald and will graduate in early summer 2020. Her research focus lies in mathematical phylogenetics, i.e. the mathematical study (and theory) of the evolutionary history and relationships among groups of species. At Ohio State, she will analyze the effect of discordance between species and gene histories on phylogenetic diversity indices and its impact on biodiversity conservation.

Dr. Wicke is an assistant professor of mathematical sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Jenny Barker, MD, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Christopher Breuer, Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine (and Nationwide Children's Hospital)

Jenny earned her BS from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and her MD and PhD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She is a resident in the Integrated Plastic Surgery Residency Program at Ohio State. Jenny is currently in the midst of a three-year research sabbatical being performed at the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Nationwide Children's Hospital. She would like to focus on applying tissue engineering methodology to improve the outcomes of plastic surgery patients. Her long-term career objective is to be a surgeon-scientist focused on translational research in the field of wound healing.

Dr. Barker is an assistant professor of pediatric plastic and reconstructive surgery at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, OH.

Andreas Fiedler, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Siddharth Rajan, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering

Andreas received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the Humboldt-University of Berlin. In March 2015 he started working on his doctorate at the Leibniz-Institut für Kristallzüchtung (Leibniz Institute for Crystal Growth). His research focuses on the characterization of the formation and the influence of defects on the properties of ß-Ga2O3 – a promising material for power electronics. While working on his PhD, he contributed to nine articles, gave eight contributed talks and two poster presentations at international conferences. Andreas was elected as the representative for severely disabled persons to help them represent and defend their rights.

Dr. Fiedler is currently a Group Lead in the Electrical Characterization department at Leibniz-Institut für Kristallzüchtung.

Jeremy Henderson, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Juan Alfonzo, Department of Microbiology, College of Arts and Sciences

Jeremy received his BS in Biochemistry from Ohio State University and his PhD in Microbiology from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently a postdoctoral research scientist under the mentorship of Dr. Juan D Alfonzo in the Department of Microbiology and the Center for RNA Biology at Ohio State. His research focuses on the mechanisms of RNA modification and editing within the human parasite Trypanosoma brucei. He is also studying a pair of enzymes that appear to co-activate one another – a first of its kind discovery that has equally broad impact on our understanding of molecular mechanisms within general biology.

Dr. Henderson is currently Development Scientist I at New England Biolabs in Ipswich, MA.

Kelly Karch, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Vicki Wysocki, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, College of Arts and Sciences

Kelly earned a BA in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Franklin and Marshall College and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research uses novel mass spectrometry (MS)-based approaches to study histone proteins, which are crucial for regulation of many nuclear processes including transcription, DNA damage repair and maintenance of chromatin structure. She has developed MS methodology to detect and quantify ADP-ribosylation, a post-translational modification involved in DNA damage detection and repair as well as hydrogen deuterium exchange (HDX) methodology coupled to top-down and middle-down MS to monitor histone protein dynamics in solution.

Dr. Barker is currently a freelance medical writer and science educator.

Wasiur R. Khuda Bukhsh, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Eben Kenah, Division of Biostatistics, College of Public Health

Wasiur holds a bachelor’s degree in statistics from the University of Calcutta, a master’s degree in statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute and a PhD from the Technische Universitat Darmstadt. His thesis work focused on developing model reduction techniques for agent-based and queuing systems with applications in communication networks. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at Ohio State. He is interested in applications of probability theory, statistical inference and survival analysis to problems in epidemiology, biology and other branches of science. His goal is to design better public health interventions.

Dr. Khuda Bukhsh is an assistant professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nottingham in the U.K.

Katherine Mifflin, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Phillip Popovich, Department of Neuroscience, College of Medicine

Katherine completed her BSc Hons in Neuroscience at Dalhousie University, during which time she studied chronic pain in a pediatric population. She earned her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Alberta, where she studied the sex differences, exercise interventions and chronic pain in a murine model of multiple sclerosis. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar working with Dr. Phillip Popovich at Ohio State. Her research focuses on exploring the potential relationship between gut dysbiosis and the development of infection after high level spinal cord injuries.

Dr. Barker is a research scientist in the Department of Neuroscience at The Ohio State University.

Marliese Nist, PhD, RNC-NIC

Faculty Mentor: Tondi Harrison, College of Nursing

Marliese earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of  Virginia and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Ohio State. She will complete her PhD program in Ohio State’s College of Nursing in August 2019. Marliese is passionate about caring for preterm infants and their families. Her research aims to optimize preterm infant neurodevelopment. For her dissertation, she is using a non-experimental, longitudinal approach to examine inflammatory mediators of stress exposure and neurodevelopment in preterm infants. As a postdoctoral scholar, Marliese will continue to develop her program of research through training in intervention research.

Dr. Nist is an assistant professor in the College of Nursing at The Ohio State University.

Nicole Pfiester, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Sanjay Krishna, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering

Nicole received her BS in Physics from Purdue University, where she was first introduced to semiconductors through research on generative adversarial network (GaN) nanowire growth via molecular beam epitaxy. She received an MS in Electrical Engineering and the first Joint-PhD in Electrical Engineering and Materials Science Engineering from Tufts University. While working on her PhD, Nicole was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and Future Leader of Engineering Fellow. Her research interests include photonic and optoelectronic devices, with an emphasis on leveraging materials engineering and nanostructures to improve their performance. She won several funding competitions and an award for her contributions to undergraduate education.

Dr. Pfiester is an assistant professor of physics, optical engineering, and nanoengineering at the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, IN.

Steven Prohira, PhD

Faculty Mentor: John Beacom, Departments of Physics and Astronomy, College of Arts and Sciences

Steven received his Masters and PhD in Physics from the University of Kansas. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in at Ohio State’s Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. His research has primarily focused on radio-based detection techniques for high-energy particles, such as cosmic rays and neutrinos. He helped to develop a firmware trigger for the Telescope Array Radar (TARA) experiment in central Utah, which sought to detect cosmic-ray air showers using a radar technique. In 2018, Steven led the most ambitious experiment to date to test the feasibility of radar detection of high energy particle cascades in dense material

Dr. Prohira is currently a MacArthur Fellow and an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS.

Andrea Rissing, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Douglas Jackson-Smith, School of Environment and Natural Resources, College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Andrea received her BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College and her PhD in Anthropology from Emory University. She is a cultural and economic anthropologist whose research interests focus on critical agrarian studies, sustainable food systems, alternative economies and political economies of industrial agriculture in the United States. She uses social science theories and methods to analyze farmers’ livelihood strategies and the innovations that can arise when multiple approaches to growing food encounter each other. At Ohio State, she will explore the socio-economic factors that lead some beginning farmers to leave agriculture while other new farmers, running apparently similar operations, continue to farm.

Dr. Barker is an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.

Lisa Barrow, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Bryan Carstens, Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, College of Arts and Sciences

Lisa Barrow earned a BS in Zoology with a minor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida in 2009, and her PhD in Biological Science (Ecology and Evolution) at Florida State University in 2016. Early in her undergraduate career, while at the Florida Museum of Natural History, she developed an interest in evolutionary biology and the importance of natural history collections for studying biodiversity across space and time. Her dissertation research focused on spatial genetic structure in North American amphibians across different scales, from species tree estimation of a genus of frogs, to phylogeography and population genetics of a disjunct species complex, to a targeted comparison of four frog species across the Southeastern U.S. coastal plain. This work combined fieldwork with emerging genomic technologies and paleoclimate niche modeling to investigate the influence of historical processes and contemporary landscape on population divergence. Lisa was awarded a 2016 National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Research Using Biological Collections) under the direction of Dr. Chris Witt at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, University of New Mexico (UNM), and Dr. Staffan Bensch at Lund University, Sweden. She expanded her research program to haemosporidian blood parasites, a globally distributed and diverse group including avian malaria. At UNM, Lisa led a diverse team of students studying avian host-parasite community dynamics. Lisa will join Dr. Bryan Carstens’ lab in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at The Ohio State University in fall 2018, where she will expand her work on amphibian evolution, phylogeography and conservation.

Dr. Barrow is an assistant professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and curator of herpetology at the Museum of Southwestern Biology in Albuquerque, NM.

Randi Bates, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Laura Justice, Department of Educational Studies, College of Education and Human Ecology

Randi Bates is a Registered Nurse (RN) and certified Family Nurse Practitioner. She earned her BS in Nursing in 2008 and MS in Nursing in 2015, both from The Ohio State University. She will complete her PhD in Nursing at Ohio State in December 2018. She is a Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Fellow of the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Nursing Research and a Nurse Leader Scholar of the Jonas Foundation. As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from the Dominican Republic, she served as health advisor (2008-2010) and as a first responder RN after the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Randi’s dissertation research, which is being conducted at the College of Nursing Biomedical Laboratory, focuses on understanding environmental influences of early childhood self-regulation, a key component of health development. One aspect of her research is to determine if hair cortisol can be used to measure chronic stress in very young children. She has pioneered an innovative study measuring cortisol concentration in the hair of toddlers and their mothers. Randi’s research has led her to the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, where she is collaborating with Dr. Laura Justice, a clinically certified speech-language pathologist. As a Presidential Postdoctoral Scholar, she will continue her work with Dr. Justice, researching early chronic stress, child development and language and literacy development through observational and interventional studies.

Dr. Bates is currently an assistant professor in the College of Nursing at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, OH.

Enrico Berkes, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Bruce Weinberg, Department of Economics, College of Arts and Sciences

Enrico Berkes holds an MA in International Economics from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies of Geneva and an MS in Mathematics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich. He earned his PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. He is an urban and innovation macroeconomist studying how innovative activities interact with urban structure and its characteristics. His research has focused on how a more diverse urban environment promotes the production of inventions that are more unconventional in nature and how innovative activities affect the spatial distribution of income. Enrico will join the Department of Economics at The Ohio State University where he will work with Dr. Bruce Weinberg on projects taking advantage of a novel data set of detailed micro data about the beneficiaries of grants in a sample of U.S. universities. The data offer a unique opportunity to understand how knowledge diffuses and which factors affect its dissemination. Of particular interest are understanding how the presence or absence of underrepresented ethnic and racial groups affect the type of research performed in academic institutions and which mechanisms might hinder their professional development and affect their placement in the labor market. The UMETRICS data project offers a unique opportunity to answer these questions with a new level of accuracy. Enrico previously worked in the research department of the International Monetary Fund. While there, he co-authored a paper that studies the relationship between financial development and growth.

Dr. Berkes is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in Baltimore, MD.

Nicholas Boyer, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Anthony Brown, Department of Neuroscience, College of Medicine

Nicholas Boyer attended Clemson University for four years, initially majoring in biomedical engineering. He graduated with a BS in Biochemistry. After graduation, he studied age-related macular degeneration as a tech in the lab of Dr. Yiannis Koutalos at Medical University of South Carolina for two and one-half years. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his doctoral studies. Working under the mentorship of Dr. Stephanie Gupton, he studied the function of the ubiquitin ligase TRIM67 in brain development and axon guidance. 

Dr. Boyer is currently a freelance medical writer and science communication consultant.

Maria-Veronica Ciocanel, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Adriana Dawes, Departments of Mathematics and Molecular Genetics, College of Arts and Sciences

M. Veronica Ciocanel received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from Brown University. She is interested in using mathematical techniques such as dynamical systems, stochastic processes and numerical simulation to understand how proteins move and organize to ensure proper cell function. Her thesis work focused on how spatial differentiation is achieved in early developing organisms, for example, in the oocytes of the frog. Her work proposed novel methods for analyzing microscopy data and suggested biological mechanisms involved in the dynamics of messenger RNAs. Maria-Veronica joined the Mathematical Biosciences Institute at Ohio State as a postdoctoral fellow in 2017, working with Dr. Adriana Dawes, Departments of Mathematics and Molecular Genetics. She is exploring how motor proteins and filaments are transported and organized into patterns to maintain contractile rings in the worm reproductive system. The research uses agent-based modeling and tools that draw from topological data analysis to quantify simulation results and experimental data. She is also collaborating with Dr. Anthony Brown’s lab, Department of Neuroscience, to model axonal transport kinetics that are key in ensuring appropriate neural communication. She will be working at Ohio State with Dr. Dawes to construct a new mutant strain of the worm C. elegans using CRISPR/Cas9. This strain will express an unconventional motor protein that they believe is essential for proper ring channel maintenance in developing oocytes. She is also planning to expand an undergraduate mathematical contest for modeling that she founded at Ohio State and will train students to use mathematical modeling to address real-world problems.

Dr. Ciocanel is an assistant professor of mathematics and biology at Duke University in Durham, NC.

Katarzyna Danis-Włodarczyk, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Daniel Wozniak, Department of Microbial Infection and Immunity, College of Medicine

Katarzyna Danis-Włodarczyk earned her bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Wroclaw in Poland. In 2010, she joined the Laboratory of Pathogen Biology and Immunology at the University of Wroclaw where she began working with bacteriophages, earning a master’s degree in Biology/Microbiology. Her study of biotechnology led to research focused on the characterization of bacteriophages and their antimicrobial enzymes. She was awarded an EU-funded Erasmus scholarship for a six-month study at the Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen in Belgium. After receiving a second Erasmus scholarship, she joined the Laboratory of Gene Technology at KU Leuven, Belgium. In 2015, she visited the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Ireland, where she worked with CF lung epithelium cell lines, focusing on phage therapy. In 2016, she defended two separate PhDs to become Doctor of Bioscience Engineering, KU Leuven, Belgium, and Doctor of Biological Sciences, specialization Microbiology, University of Wroclaw, Poland. Katarzyna was also awarded a highly competitive postdoctoral fellowship at KU Leuven, focusing on the engineering of phage endolysins, EPS depolymerases and recombinant fusion proteins with antimicrobial/anti-biofilm/wound healing peptides. She also participated in several international thematic courses and workshops. In 2017, she visited the Laboratory of Host Pathogens Interactions, also at KU Leuven, and the Burn Wound Unit in Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels, Belgium, where she tested the efficiency of engineered phage endolysins on cell lines infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa clinical isolates. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher in the Departments of Microbiology and Microbial Infection and Immunity at The Ohio State University, focusing on phage therapy against P. aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus.

Dr.Danis-Włodarczyk is currently affiliated with KU Leuven in Leuven, Belgium.

Taban Salem, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Mary Fristad, Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health (College of Medicine) and Psychology (College of Arts and Sciences) and Nationwide Children's Hospital

Taban Salem graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Currently she is a doctoral candidate in the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Mississippi State University, completing her doctoral internship with Stony Brook University. Taban’s research interests include investigating unique ways in which depressed and anxious individuals process emotional information and examining how this knowledge can be translated to make clinical treatments more accessible and effective. Much of her research to date has focused on reward devaluation theory (Winer and Salem, 2016), which posits that some depressed individuals actively avoid prospective rewards—rather than simply failing to approach them—potentially because reward cues have repeatedly been paired with negative emotions such as disappointment or rejection. For her dissertation, Taban experimentally examined if changes in beliefs about the causes of depression influence beliefs about psychotherapy or acceptance of a psychotherapy referral. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Childhood Mood Disorders Lab under the mentorship of Mary Fristad, Taban will work with data from the Longitudinal Assessment of Manic Symptoms, a multi-site study examining longitudinal relationships among the course of symptoms, outcomes and neural mechanisms associated with different clinical trajectories in youth with symptoms characterized by behavioral and emotional dysregulation. Taban’s career goal is to lead an independent research program testing integrative models of depression to better understand relationships among cognitive, behavioral and physiological phenomena that have separately been linked to depressive symptoms. She hopes to develop cross-cutting assessment methods that could identify problematic cognitive and behavioral patterns early on in their trajectory, which could ultimately give rise to targeted interventions to prevent these factors from triggering and/or perpetuating depressive symptoms and related health consequences.

Dr. Salem is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Millsaps College and a licensed clinical psychologist at Killebrew Psychological Services in Ridgeland, MS.

Sam Sommers, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Elizabeth Hewitt, Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences

Samantha Sommers received her BA with High Honors in English and American Studies from Wesleyan University in 2009 and her MA in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2014. She will receive her PhD in English from UCLA in summer 2018. Samantha is a literary critic specializing in nineteenth-century American and African American literature, book history, print culture studies and the history of reading. Her dissertation project, “Reading in Books: Theories of Reading from Nineteenth-Century American Fiction,” turns to depictions of reading in The Sketch-Book (1820), Wieland (1798), Hope Leslie (1827), Clotel (1853) and Moby-Dick (1851) to challenge contemporary theories that over-determine the relationship between reading and the formation of the liberal subject. Seeking an alternative to this model, “Reading in Books” utilizes the collected intertexts, citations and procedures for reading on display in these novels as a set of raw materials for deriving multiple and competing theories of reading as an activity that facilitates social, rather than self, formation. She has received fellowship support from The McNeil Center for Early American Studies, American Antiquarian Society, The Library Company of Philadelphia, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UCLA Graduate Division, Department of English at UCLA and Wesleyan University. At The Ohio State University, under the mentorship of Elizabeth Hewitt, Department of English, she will focus on revising “Reading in Books,” preparing articles for publication and working with rare books and manuscript material in Ohio State’s Special Collections.

Dr. Sommers is an assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Hartford, CT.

Terrin Tamati, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Derek Houston, Department of Otolaryngology, College of Medicine

Terrin Tamati received a BA in Linguistics and Portuguese from The Ohio State University in 2008. She completed her MA in Linguistics in 2011 and PhD in Linguistics in 2014, both from Indiana University, while working in the Speech Research Laboratory. Terrin obtained a postdoctoral research position at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands. A consistent focus of her research has been the role of talker variability in speech perception and spoken word recognition. She has worked on projects examining how listeners perceive and understand speech by multiple talkers with different voices and accents. She is particularly interested in the perceptual, linguistic and cognitive mechanisms used in speech perception in these highly variable, adverse conditions and what skills may underlie individual differences in speech perception, for example in second language learners or hearing-impaired populations. Currently, Terrin is applying her research interests to cochlear implant users, who must rely on a signal that is heavily reduced in acoustic-phonetic detail, resulting in a particular difficulty understanding speech in real-world, adverse conditions, including conditions with high talker variability and a great deal of individual differences in speech perception skills. As part of her research, Terrin is also interested in developing new, more realistic test materials for assessing real-world speech perception skills of cochlear implant users in the research lab or clinic.

Dr. Tamati is an assistant professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science in the College of Arts and Sciences in Columbus, OH. Prior to her faculty appointment at Ohio State she served as a research assistant professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Vandrbilt University.

Adam Thomas, PhD

Faculty Mentor: John Brooke, Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences

Adam Thomas received a BA (Hons) in International History from the University of Leeds (U.K.) and an MA in Modern History from University College London. He earned a PhD in History, with a certificate in Critical Theory, from the University of California, Irvine, in 2016. He served as a junior faculty fellow at The Ohio State University Center for Historical Research and as a visiting assistant professor of American Studies and Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University. His research interests include race, gender, slavery, emancipation, childhood, kinship and memory in the U.S., Caribbean and Atlantic world. Adam is currently working on his first monograph, a comparative-transnational study of two 1831 slave rebellions: the Southampton County uprising in Virginia and the “Baptist War” in Jamaica. This project, tentatively titled “An Unparalleled Time: Rebellion, Emancipation, and Memory in the Atlantic World,” reveals significant connections and similarities between the events, questioning the different place each holds in popular memory. Disparities in how the rebellions are understood today reveal much about contemporary unwillingness to recognize the efficacy of Black revolutionary politics. Adam is also writing an article that examines same-sex sexual abuse in the context of slavery in Jamaica. Adam’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Council on Library and Information Resources, American Antiquarian Society, American Philosophical Society, Virginia Historical Society, University of California and the University of Texas. His work has appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Caribbean History, Black Perspectives and edited collections.

Dr. Thomas is a lecturer of social sciences at LaGuardia Community College and social studies teacher at Summit Academy Charter High School in Brooklyn, NY.

Erin Westgate, PhD

Faculty Mentor: Lisa Libby, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences

Erin Westgate received her PhD in social psychology from the University of Virginia in 2018, where she worked with her advisor, Timothy D. Wilson, on the challenges and benefits of enjoying your own thoughts. Prior to graduate school, she spent two years at the University of Washington researching implicit cognition and alcohol use after receiving her undergraduate degree from Reed College. Erin is a social psychologist interested in social cognition and emotion. She has published in the areas of thinking, emotion, implicit attitudes, sexual prejudice, procrastination, social media and alcohol use. While much of her early research focused on the conditions under which people enjoy (or do not enjoy) their own thoughts, she has since extended that work to the larger question of why people become bored, in general. What is boredom, why we do we experience it, and what happens when we do? There has been a great deal of interest in this topic in recent years, but no overarching theoretical perspective fully captured this phenomenon. She has developed such a model–the Meaning and Attentional Components model of boredom–that explains the causes and consequences of this unpleasant state. At Ohio State, she will be working with Lisa Libby, Department of Psychology, to develop a novel model of the role that mental imagery plays in emotion and how adopting a third (versus first-person) perspective shapes the specific emotions people feel.

Dr. Westgate is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL.