Dissertations: August 2025

Astronomy    

Karen Perez
Deep searches for pulsars in our galaxy's field and center
Advisor: Jules Halpern

Biological Sciences     

Lena Street
Investigating RNA binding protein mediated post-transcriptional regulation via large-scale protein-protein interaction mapping and an increased throughput technology           
Advisor: Marko Jovanovic

Chemical Physics

Ethan Vo    
Correlated phenomena in extended systems and surface catalysis       
Advisor: Timothy Berkelbach

Hai Mi Nguyen    
Exact and approximate numerical methods for simulating open quantum systems      
Advisor: David Reichman

Chemistry     

Jessica Yu  
Doping two-dimensional layered materials      
Advisor: Xavier Roy        

Bereket Zekarias
Surface engineering in quantum dots: From ligand binding affinity to photocatalysis  
Advisor: Jonathan Owen

Earth and Environmental Sciences  

Miriam Nielsen   
Interactions between soil moisture and precipitation in a changing world      
Advisors: Katherine Marvel and Benjamin Cook

Tess Jacobson      
Dynamical climate drivers of fire in western North America and beyond  
Advisor: Richard Seager        

Samuel Bartusek
Extreme heat in a warming world: Causes, changes, and air quality connections
Advisors: Yutian Wu and Mingfang Ting

Caroline Juang    
Drivers of enhanced wildfire activity across the western United States since the 1980s       
Advisor: Park Williams

East Asian Languages and Cultures 

Komei Sakai         
Wrath of the rising sun: The gods of war and military rituals in Premodern Japan          
Advisor: D. Max Moerman         

Tianyuan Huang 
Making way for uncertainty: Gender, power, and the epistemology of illness in Japan, 1585 - 1953    
Advisor: Gregory Pflugfelder           

Guoying Gong      
Writing home and empire from the margins: Longing and belonging in Du Fu's (712-770) poetry    
Advisor: Wei Shang

Nicolle Bertozzi  
Lu Ban’s ruler and Shōtoku’s saw: An intellectual history of carpentry in Premodern Japan   
Advisors: David Lurie and Gregory Pflugfelder

English and Comparative Literature

Joseph Romano  
“Steryngs of the Will”: Issues of volution in late fourteenth-century English literature 
Advisor: Eleanor Johnson        

Aya Labanieh       
Postcolonial paranoia: Conspiracies and their afterlives in Middle Eastern literature and media     
Advisors: Joseph R. Slaughter and Bruce Robbins

Germanic Languages       

Sandra Chiritescu          
Bobes, mames, and daughters: Uncovering twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Jewish and American Yiddish feminist genealogies           
Advisor: Jeremy Dauber

History   

Conor Wilkinson
Plants, insects, people, and power: An ecological history of Africa's Great Lakes region          
Advisor: Rhiannon Stephens

Political Science  

Lauren Futter      
Essays on public goods provision and federalism        
Advisor: Michael Ting         

Marnie Ginis        
Production complexity as appropriation protection    
Advisor: Nikhar Gaikwad

Psychology   

Jacob Edwards    
Play with the changes: Innate rules for learned vocal communication in songbirds        
Advisor: Sarah Woolley

Religion 

Connor Martini   
The evidence of things not seen: Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence in an enchanted universe     
Advisor: Courtney Bender

Statistics       

Navid Ardeshir    
Two problems in geometry: Structural insights into interpolating estimators in overparameterized models and advances in Gaussian entropic inequalities       
Advisor: Arian Maleki

Ian Kinsella          
Decoupling compression and demixing: A modular penalized matrix decomposition framework for calcium and voltage imaging data           
Advisor: Liam Paninski