Dissertations: June 28, 2021

DISSERTATIONS DEFENDED

Anthropology

• Assali, Hadeel. Prophecies of Palestine: Geology and intimate knowledge of the Subterranean. Sponsor: Mahmood Mamdani.
• Sabiston, Leslie. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and the fear of indigenous (dis)order: A new medico-legal alliance for capturing and managing indigenous life in Canada. Sponsor: Audra Simpson.

Art History and Archaeology

• Fiske, Courtney. "Rethinking" postminimalism: Gordon Matta-Clark's creative energetics, 1968-72. Sponsor: Branden Joseph.
• van Oppen, Brian. Radiant bodies: Living with Etruscan bronze candelabra. Sponsor: Francesco de Angelis.

Astronomy

• Jansen, Tiffany. Measuring the properties of short-period exoplanets from phase curves. Sponsor: David Kipping.

Biological Sciences

• Chirathivat, Napon. Zc3h13: A master regulator of epigenetic modifications during early development. Sponsor: Michael Shen.
• Benavidez, Justin. Regulation of HLH-2/E2A during C. elegans gonadogenesis. Sponsor: Iva Greenwald.

Biomedical Engineering

• Zhao, Hanzhi. The impact of cortical perturbations on neurovascular dynamics. Sponsor: Elizabeth Hillman.
• Patel, Kripa. Developing SCAPE microscopy for real-time, volumetric imaging at the point-of-care. Sponsor: Elizabeth Hillman.
• Golman, Mikhail. Toughening mechanisms for the attachment of architectured materials: The mechanics of the tendon enthesis. Sponsors: X. Edward Guo and Stavros Thomopoulos.
• Duffy, Michael. The osteocyte primary cilium is a mechanoresponsive organelle that regulates cytoskeletal adaptation and coordinates mechanotransduction with adenylyl cyclases. Sponsor: X. Edward Guo.

Biostatistics

• Chen, Yuan. Statistical and machine learning methods for precision medicine. Sponsor: Yuanjia Wang.

Business

• Jun, Youjung. The effects of virtual reality (VR) on consumers' reality. Sponsor: Gita Johar.
• Lu, Jiaqi. Managing stochastic uncertainty in dynamic marketplaces. Sponsors: Awi Federgruen and Yashodhan Kanoria.
• Dovman, Polina. Essays in passive investing and asset pricing. Sponsor: Tano Santos.
• Qian, Pengyu. Online decision making in networked marketplaces. Sponsor: Yashodhan Kanoria.
• Hwang, Jiwon. Entrepreneurship and incarceration. Sponsor: Damon Phillips.

Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies

• Halpin-Healy, Tyler. The discovery, structure determination, & tool development of Tn6677. Sponsor: Samuel Sternberg.
• Viragova, Sara. Phenotypic dissection and therapeutic manipulation of cell differentiation programs in the salivary gland epithelium and human Adenoid Cystic Carcinomas. Sponsor: Piero Dalerba. 
• Chowdhury, Sreyan. Engineered bacteria for cancer immunotherapy. Sponsor: Tal Danino.
• Ha, Elizabeth. Adipocyte-specific Tribbles-1 regulates plasma adiponectin and lipoprotein metabolism in mice. Sponsor: Robert Bauer. 
• Boyle, Lia. A precision medicine approach to understanding KIF1A associated neurological disorder. Sponsor: Wendy K. Chung. 
• Jones, Sunny. Multi-omic precision oncology pipeline to identify master regulator vulnerabilities in gastroesophageal tumors. Sponsor: Andrea Califano.
• Rapp, Micah. Visualizing cell surface interactions using cryogenic electron microscopy. Sponsor: Lawrence Shapiro.

Chemical Engineering

• Kapelner, Rachel. Effect of protein charge and charge distribution on protein-based complex coacervates. Sponsor: Allie Obermeyer.

Chemical Physics

• Carbone, Matthew. Dynamical processes in the condensed phase: Methods and models. Sponsor: David Reichman.
• Coskun, Dilek. Computational methods for the calculation of electrochemical properties and pKa predictions. Sponsor: Richard Friesner.
• Kloss, Benedikt. Numerically exact quantum dynamics of low-dimensional lattice systems. Sponsor: David Reichman.
• Conrad-Burton, Felisa. Singlet fission: A twisted tale. Sponsor: Xiaoyang Zhu.
• Lange, Malte. Wave function-based electronic structure theory for solids. Sponsor: Timothy Berkelbach.

Chemistry

• Lee, Sumin. Rh (III)-catalyzed alkene difunctionalization for the synthesis of various nitrogen-containing compounds. Sponsor: Tomislav Rovis. 
• Fu, Tianren. Applications of machine learning to single-molecular junction studies. Sponsors: Colin Nuckolls and Latha Venkataraman.

Computer Science

• Elvezio, Carmine. XR development with the relay and responder pattern. Sponsor: Steven Feiner.
• Xiao, Chang. Bridging the gaps between people, mobile devices, and the physical world. Sponsor: Changxi Zheng.

Earth and Environmental Engineering

• Kim, Derek. Structure and property correlations of surface-active agents in the control of colloidal behavior in home/personal care and biochemical systems. Sponsor: Ponisseril Somasundaran.

Earth and Environmental Sciences

• Tweed, Lucy. Coupling the thermodynamics, kinetics and geodynamics of multiphase reactive transport in Earth’s interior. Sponsor: Marc Spiegelman.

East Asian Languages and Cultures

• Estep, Chloe. Envisioning classicism: Poetry, media, and the making of (pre-) modern China. Sponsor: Lydia Liu.
• Pang, Carolyn. Memorializing the gods: A study of the ritual practices of Izanagi-ryū. Sponsor: Michael Como.
• Kung, Ling-Wei. The great convergence: Information circulation, international trade, and knowledge transmission between early modern China, inner Asia, and Eurasia. Sponsor: Gray Tuttle.

Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology

• Fuong, Holly. Social animals detecting danger: How social relations influence antipredator behavior in a noisy forest. Sponsor: Marina Cords.

Economics

• Ravindran, Dilip. Essays in information and behavioral economics. Sponsor: Navin Kartik.
• Pessina, Lorenzo. Essays in public economics. Sponsors: Michael Best and Wojciech Kopczuk.

Electrical Engineering

• Park, Soo Young. Near-infrared optical spectroscopic system for characterizing cardiac substrates. Sponsor: Christine Hendon.
• Luo, Yi. End-to-end speech separation with neural networks. Sponsors: Nima Mesgarani and John Paisley.

English and Comparative Literature

• Ray, Montana. Performance as translation in the Americas: Ana Mendieta's feminist ethnographies, 1973-81. Sponsor: Brent Edwards.
• Gear, Nolan. Spectatrices: Women's writing in the age of moviegoing, 1925-1945. Sponsor: Matthew Hart.
• Lundy, Timothy. Archepollycyes: Fiction and political institution around Philip Sidney. Sponsor: Julie Crawford.
• Myers, Bernadette. Urban ecology and the early modern English stage. Sponsors: Jean Howard and Lauren Robertson.
• Kelley, Elleza. Sites of inscription: Writing in and against post-plantation geographies. Sponsors: Brent Edwards and Farah Griffin.

Environmental Health Sciences

• Gibson, Elizabeth. Statistical and machine learning methods for pattern identification in environmental mixtures. Sponsor: Julie Herbstman, Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou.

Epidemiology

• McKetta, Sarah. Structural sexism in the United States and patterns of women's alcohol use in recent decades. Sponsor: Katherine Keyes.

French and Romance Philology

• Rogg, Aline. Creole gatherings: Race, collecting, and canon-building in New Orleans (1830-1930). Sponsor: Madeleine Dobie.

Genetics and Development

• Loker, Ryan. Diversification of cell types by transcription factors. Sponsor: Richard Mann.

Germanic Languages

• Kalal, Peter. As written: Literary configurations of musical ineffability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sponsor: Oliver Simons.
• Parks, Evan. Missed encounters: Paul Celan at the edge of philosophy. Sponsors: Clemence Boulouque and Oliver Simons. 
• Franke, Alwin. In the beginning was the sign: Literary modernism and mathematical modernity in Carl Einstein and Robert Musil. Sponsor: Oliver Simons.
• Schweiger, Sophie. Acting bodies. The role of gestures in German drama, film, and performance. Sponsor: Oliver Simons.
• Watzka, Michael. Writing scenes and telling time: Post-war German journal literature, between diary and the news(papers). Sponsor: Oliver Simons.

History

• Glasserman, Aaron. Hui nation: Islam and Muslim politics in modern China. Sponsor: Madeleine Zelin.
• Subramanian, Divya. Global townscape: The rediscovery of urban life in the late twentieth century. Sponsor: Susan Pedersen.
• Padilla-Rodriguez, Ivón. Undocumented youth: The labor, education, and rights of migrant Latinx children in twentieth-century America. Sponsor: Mae Ngai.
• Marris, Caroline. The Silver Sea' and the nation-state: The multifaceted geopolitics of the early modern English channel. Sponsor: Christopher Brown.
• Heniford, Kellen. Slavery is slavery: Early American mythmaking and the invention of the free state. Sponsor: Stephanie McCurry.

Italian

• Lopez, Christina. The Questioni d’Amore reconsidered: Contextualizing Boccaccio’s amatory manual. Sponsor: Teodolinda Barolini.
• Arrigoni, Carlo. Giovanni Verga and the crisis of truth. Sponsor: Elizabeth Leake.
• Latin American and Iberian Cultures
• Allen-Mossman, Anayvelyse. Labor, race & visuality in Argentina's sugar industry 1868-1904. Sponsor: Graciela Montaldo.
• Méndez, Alexandra. Curating the Americas: Library practices and early histories of the New World between Spain & Venice. Sponsor: Seth Kimmel, Alessandra Russo.

Mechanical Engineering

• Shi, Lei. On the mechanical experiments and microstructure-based time-dependent on linear modeling of the human cervix. Sponsor: Kristin Myers.
• Lei, Lei. Understanding and representing the kinetics of gas-phase reaction systems in mixtures. Sponsor: Michael Burke.

Microbiology, Immunology, and Infection

• Diez, Simon. Guanosine nucleotides link cell wall synthesis to protein translation. Sponsor: Jonathan Dworkin.

Music

• Cancel-Bigay, Mario. Sounds that fall through the cracks, and other silences and acts of love: Decoloniality and anticolonialism in Puerto Rican Nueva Canción and Chanson Québécoise. Sponsor: Kevin Fellezs.
• Fantinato Geo de Siqueira, Maria. Resonances of land: Silence, noise, and extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon. Sponsor: Ana María Ochoa.
• Ivanova, Velia. The musical heritage of incarceration: The curation, dissemination, and management of the Lomax collection prison songs. Sponsor: Ellie Hisama.
• Hamilton, Julia. Political songs in polite society: Singing about Africans in the time of the British abolition movement, 1787 to 1807. Sponsor: Elaine Sisman.

Music (DMA)

• Kouyoumdjian, Mary. Creating with ghosts: Identity and artistic purpose as Armenian diaspora. Sponsor: George Lewis.
• Yildirim, Onur. Phonetics-based techniques in my compositional methodology, and two compositions: ŠÀ {karāz} for large ensemble and eschaton according to bēl-rē’u-šu for percussion trio. Sponsor: Bradford Garton.
• Neurobiology and Behavior
• Zhuravleva, Viktoriya. Stress-induced downregulation of Rab35 disrupts intracellular trafficking of AD-related proteins. Sponsor: Clarissa Waites.
• Zimnik, Andrew. The generation of complex reaching behavior. Sponsor: Mark Churchland.
• Heath, Sarah. Circuit mechanisms underlying chromatic encoding in drosophila. Sponsor: Rudy Behnia.
• Bittner, Sean. Bridging data, theory, and experiment in computational neuroscience. Sponsor: John Cunningham.

Nutritional and Metabolic Biology

• Wiessner, Gregory. Roles of retinoid signaling in urothelial progenitor cells. Sponsor: Cathy Mendelsohn.

Operations Research

• Zhang, Xingyu. Discrete optimization problems in mechanism design. Sponsors: Shipra Agrawal and Jay Sethuraman.
• Grand-Clement, Julien. Robust, interpretable and scalable sequential decision-making. Sponsors: Carri Chan and Vineet Goyal.

Pathobiology and Molecular Medicine

• Johnson, Kendra. Non-apoptotic caspase-8 signaling mediates retinal angiogenesis. Sponsor: Carol Troy.

Pharmacology and Molecular Signaling

• Morgenstern, Travis. Development of next-generation voltage-gated calcium channel inhibitors using engineered nanobodies. Sponsor: Henry Colecraft.

Physics

• Sutton, Kathryn. MicroBooNE's first search for the MiniBooNE anomalous excess under a photon-like hypothesis with high-sensitivity search for neutrino-induced neutral current delta production and radiative decay. Sponsor: Georgia Karagiorgi.
• Brill, Aryeh. Advancing blazar science with very-high-energy gamma-ray techniques. Sponsor: Gustaaf Brooijmans.
• Wang, Bigeng. Lattice calculation of the mass difference between the long- and short-lived K mesons for physical quark masses. Sponsor: Norman Christ.
• Wieteska, Jedrzej. Strain effects on phase transitions in 2H-NbSe2 and Ca3Ru207. Sponsor: Abhay Pasupathy.
• Cianci, Davio. A deep-learning-based muon neutrino CCQE selection for searches beyond the standard model with MicroBooNE. Sponsor: Georgia Karagiorgi.

Religion

• Rahman, Ebadur. QurÕanic narratives in contemporary commentary traditions in the English language: How do muslims interpret the QurÕan today. Sponsor: Katherine Ewing.
• Arnold, Edward. Tsongkhapa’s coordination of Sūtra and tantra: Ascetic performance, narrative, and philosophy in the creation of the Tibetan Buddhist self. Sponsor: Robert Thurman. 
• Athias-Robles, Hillel. Occupying space: The public life of Africana religions in New York. Sponsor: Katherine Ewing.

Slavic Languages

• Gluck, Michael. I want to be honest': The rhetoric of sincerity in Soviet Russian literature, 1953-1970. Sponsor: Valentina Izmirlieva.

Sociology

• Huang, Tiffany. Race, diversity, and inequality in college admissions through the lens of the independent educational consultant. Sponsors: Maria Abascal and Thomas DiPrete.
• Greene, Joss. Gender bound: Prisons, trans lives, and the politics of violence. Sponsor: Tey Meadow, Bruce Western.

Sociomedical Sciences

• McMahon, Caitlin. The patient as consumer: In whose interest? The role of health consumer rhetoric in shaping the U.S. health care system, 1969-1991. Sponsor: Merlin Chowkwanyun.
• Abu-Odeh, Desiree. Sexual violence and responses to it on American college campuses, 1952-1980. Sponsor: David Rosner.

Statistics

• Bakhshizadeh, Milad. Phase retrieval in the high-dimensional regime. Sponsors: Victor de la Pena and Arian Maleki.
• Dudeja, Rishabh. High-dimensional asymptotics for phase retrieval with structured sensing matrices. Sponsor: Arian Maleki. 
• Wang, Zhi. Statistical learning for process data. Sponsors: Jingchen Liu and Zhiliang Ying.
• Chu, Chi Wing. Semiparametric inference of censored data with time-dependent covariates. Sponsor: Zhiliang Ying.

Sustainable Development

• Cui, Zhihan. Behavioral decision making for sustainable development. Sponsor: Geoffrey Heal.
• TC / Comparative and International Education
• Doan, Linh. Academic dishonesty as social process. Sponsor: Oren Pizmony-Levy.

TC / Educational Policy

• Duff, Megan. A detour in school improvement journeys: A mixed methods analysis of school change during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sponsor: Priscilla Wohlstetter.

TC / English Education

• Maxwell, Joyce. The paradox of /'nige/: ex·cite·able acts, ex·cess·able moments. Sponsor: Janet Miller.
• Hawkins, Lora. Big learning in small communities: Exploring with YPAR in international schools. Sponsor: Robert Fecho.
• Offenhauer, Alexa. Reading in first-year college composition. Sponsor: Janet Miller.

TC / History and Education

• Strome, Eric. Herbert Baxter Adams and the seminary in historical & political science at Johns Hopkins in the emergence of the American university. Sponsor: Cally Waite.

TC / Kinesiology

• Goodwin, Ashley. Oxygen uptake kinetics in skeletal muscle using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS): Evaluating healthy responses of muscle deoxygenation. Sponsor: Carol Garber.

TC / School Psychology

• Hamo, Amarelle. Health habits in caregivers of young children with ASD: Key factors, facilitators, and barriers. Sponsor: Marla Brassard.

Urban Planning

• Baird-Zars, Bernadette. Team rules: How city officials tweak urban futures through 'gray institutions' of daily practice in land use, permitting and enforcement. Sponsor: Elliott Sclar.
• Maaoui, Magda. Mixité de façade: How historically disinvested neighborhoods negotiate inclusionary zoning in Paris and New York. Sponsor: Lance Freeman.

DISSERTATION PROPOSALS FILED

Anthropology

• Hoffman, Emily. Other people's children: The meanings of child protection in eastern Oklahoma.
• Ibraheem, Aamer. Politics (re) incarnated: Syrians' struggle for belonging in the occupied Golan Heights.
• James, Alyssa. Continuous, future tense: History, landscape, and identity in the revival of coffee production in Martinique.
• Maier, Alexander. Paper-work: Migrant labor, documentation, and legality in postsocialist Moscow.

Biomedical Engineering

• Aurup, Christian. A system for monitoring focused ultrasound-mediated neuromodulation with functional ultrasound imaging in the central nervous system.
• Karageorgos, Grigorios Mario. High frame rate imaging of arterial wall and blood flow dynamics for atherosclerosis diagnosis and monitoring.
• Lee, Andy. Modulating the cartilage and synovium response to pathological mediators following injury.
• Varghese, Nevin. Pharmacological interventions to reduce electrophysiological deficits following blast traumatic brain injury.

Business

• Gan, Yuanling. Dynamic optimization for markets and networks.

Classics

• Ianni, Emma. When language fails: Tragedy and Thucydides.
• Pérez Díaz, Cristina. Classical reception and the making of meaning.

Computer Science

• Alhindi, Tariq. Pragmatics infused models for argumentation and misinformation detection.
• Lin, Chengyu. Enabling efficient secure computation: Blockchain, PIR and beyond.
• Liu, Jen-Shuo. Using gaze to analyze and improve performance in VR and AR manual tasks.

Earth and Environmental Sciences

• Creel, Roger. Reconstructing and understanding the sea level response to past warming.
• Giles, Sarah. Evaluation of the timing, origin, and potential global connections of mid-Ediacaran phenomena in South Australia and eastern California.
• Moseley, Lauren. Assessing the drivers of oxygen variability, circulation, and export in the subpolar North Atlantic using an optimized ocean model.
• Witte, Carson. Investigating near-surface ocean heating and mixing processes in the presence of surface material.
• Wong, Suki. Air-sea carbon fluxes: Seasonal variability in an estuary, and long-term trends in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
• Yu, Congyu. Paleo-informatics.

East Asian Languages and Cultures

• Bertozzi, Nicolle. As the swallow builds its nest: Artisan knowledge and materiality in premodern Japan.
• Huang, Tianyuan. Enigmatic bodies: Gender, power, and medical knowledge in Japan, 1600-2000.
• Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
• Earl, Alexis. How socially dynamic individuals with conflicting interests maintain stable cooperative societies.

Economics

• Ahsan, Omar. The impact of COVID-19 restrictions on businesses and workers.
• Coombs, Kyle. Essays in applied microeconomics & public economics.
• Larsen-Hallock, Eugene. Information frictions and financial markets.

English and Comparative Literature

• Belafi, Veronica. Resource poetics & the American avant-garde (1910-1970).
• Hubbard, Shannon. Cultural neoimperialism in service of market expansion: The role of American educational institutions in the production of 1960s and 1970s African literature.

French and Romance Philology

• Mohammed, Nadrah. Feminist transfers: Emotional discourses of activism and the other.

Germanic Languages

• Egger, Isabelle. Deficient human being. Aesthetics of imperfection in Karl Philipp Mortiz, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.
• Hoffman, Christopher. The poetics of contemplation in 20th century German literature and thought.
• Wagner, Nathaniel. Chronotypes of contemporary German literature, film, and music.

History

• Buckley, James. Political knowledge and scholarly time in early modern France.
• Faulkner, Amanda. Insiders and outsiders: Individuals and community in the Dutch world, 1609-1715.
• Nadel, James. Jewish speculation: Russian Jews and financial investment in late imperial Russia, 1870-1917.
• Spooner, Amelia. Formally Free: Regulating labor after slavery in the French empire, 1848-1914.

Italian

• Borgarello, Anna. Bifocal narratives. The self and the other in contemporary literature.
• Modabber, Angelica. The aesthetics of salvation and statebuilding in Guarino Guarini's works.

Materials Science and Engineering

• Hui, Zeyu. Continuum model simulations for understanding the transport processes in LIB/LMB electrodes.
• Jin, Tianwei. Batteries for light-weighting vehicles: Towards structural batteries.
• Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
• Ugurlu, Ali. Crisis and critique: Ottoman-Turkish social thought in the age of capital.

Nursing

• Idnay, Betina Ross. Improving eligibility prescreening for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias clinical trials with natural language processing.

Political Science

• Larkin, Colleen. The dynamics of narrative contestation in grand strategy.
• Riaz, Zara. Linked cooperation: Resource management and community mobilization.

Psychology

• Pinelli, Federica. Epistemic and relational effects of shared relevance and shared creation.

Slavic Languages

• Kelley, Claudia. Mediums and mediators of the unknown, dead, and forgotten: An examination of mystery and social dynamics in Polish and Russian romanticism.
• Lawton, Max. Forms of phenomenology in 20th-century prose: A typology.