GSAS Student Successes: Fall 2019
GSAS students regularly earn awards and fellowships, publish, and receive recognition for outstanding work. GSAS is proud to share their accomplishments.
Emily Bayer, PhD Candidate in Biological Sciences, received the inaugural International Birnstiel Award for Doctoral Studies in Molecular Life Sciences. Investigating neurons that occur in both the male and female nematode worm C. elegans, she showed that sex-specific differences in structure and function emerge through the pruning of synaptic connections, which can be disrupted by starvation and a resulting chain of molecular signals. Emily’s findings were reported in several distinguished journals – including Nature – and covered by The Washington Post.
Adji Bousso Dieng, PhD Candidate in Statistics, has been awarded the Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning, and also has been named a Rising Star in Machine Learning by the University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning. Her doctoral work is about unsupervised learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence. Specifically, she designs algorithms for fitting deep generative models and combines probabilistic modeling and deep learning to embed structure into deep generative models. These types of models have many real-world applications with regard to natural language processing, vision, and in a range of sciences.
Samyak Ghosh, PhD Candidate in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, is the recipient of the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Fellowship and the Kumkum Chatterjee Memorial Fellowship in Indian History, 2019-2020. Ghosh works on the practice of political culture in early modern northeast India. For his dissertation, he is studying a set of bureaucratic, literary, and legal texts written in Assamese, Sanskrit, and Bengali.
Naeem Mohaiemen, who defended his dissertation in Anthropology last month, completed two films during his doctoral fieldwork on world socialism and postwar ennui. Tripoli Cancelled was recently reviewed in Humanities, and Two Meetings and a Funeral was reviewed in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism. Mohaiemen's dissertation looked at the remnants of the Bangladesh communist party and how they navigated a lost moment of transnational solidarity across the Nonaligned Movement, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Sino-Soviet axis. Mohaiemen worked as a visual artist for a decade before entering graduate school. His films earned him a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2018 Turner Prize nomination.
If you have been featured in the news, published, or have received other recognition, or know a fellow GSAS student who has been, please let us know! Please email us at [email protected] or fill out this form.