Dissertations Defended: July 2026

September 08, 2026

ASTRONOMY

Marguerite Epstein-Martin
Compact objects in the accretion disks of active galactic nuclei
Advisor: Zoltan Haiman

Matthew Scoggins
Strange signatures across the cosmos: From the first massive black holes to engineered structures
Advisor: Zoltan Haiman
 

CHEMISTRY

Liam Farley
Tuning transition metal reactivity via artificial metalloenzyme engineering
Advisor: Tomislav Rovis

Andrew Johns
Mapping the substrates of tyrosine phosphatases with photo-crosslinking chemistry
Advisor: Neel Shah
 

EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Jae Won Lee
Deep stratospheric intrusions from daily to seasonal timescales: Impacts on ozone transport and dry-air intrusions
Advisor: Yutian Wu

George Lu
Modeling and observations of ice flow
Advisor: Jonathan Kingslake
 

EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Iris Kim
Entanglements of kinship: Zainichi Koreans, diaspora, and Cold War divisions, 1950s–1990s
Advisor: Theodore Hughes

Dan Nguyen
The classicist clerisy of Nguyen Cochinchina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Advisor: John Phan

Alexander Sogo
Healing all under heaven: Buddhist health and ritual rulership in ancient Japan
Advisor: Michael Como
 

PHYSICS

Adithya Gungi
Towards a computational basis for planning and goal-directed behavior
Advisor: Kiyohito Iigaya

Eleanor Woodward
A search for long-lived dark photons in displaced dielectron vertex final states with the ATLAS detector
Advisor: John Parsons

Weijun Yuan
Dipolar quantum matter with ultracold NaCs molecules
Advisor: Sebastian Will
 

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Ella Bayi
Beyond the trees: The politics of deforestation governance
Advisor: Maria Victoria Murillo
 

STATISTICS

Charles Windolf
An interpretable modeling toolkit for high-density extracellular electrophysiology
Advisor: Liam Paninski

Harry Xi
Testing goodness of fit of time-series models with sample splitting and comments on outlier detection
Advisor: Richard Davis