Dissertations: May 1, 2023
Dissertations Defended
Anthropology
Davis, Natasha. Rust Belt Industrial Ruination in the Working-Class Imagination: The Descendants. Sponsor: Marilyn Ivy.
Reumert, Anna. Future Returns: Crisis and Aspiration Among Sudanese Migrant Workers in Lebanon. Sponsor: Nadia Abu El-Haj.
Applied Physics
Huang, Heqing. Efficient Optical Modulation and Complete Wavefront Manipulation Using Integrated Photonics. Sponsor: Nanfang Yu.
Art History and Archaeology
Agarwala, Seher. Visualizing Texts, Reading Paintings: Image, Imagination, and Ethics in Sixteenth-Century Golconda. Sponsor: Vidya Dehejia.
Jiang, Angel. In the Manner of Silversmiths: Architecture, Ornament, and the Plateresque in Renaissance Spain. Sponsor: Michael Waters.
Biological Sciences
Keskin, Abdurrahman. Exploring a novel form of gene regulation mediated by mRNA trasncript isoform switching in the context of mammalian development. Sponsor: Marko Jovanovic.
Liu, Lizhi. Non-canonical WDR33 isoforms: characterization, regulation, and functional signifcances in STING-mediated innate immune response. Sponsor: James Manley.
Biomedical Engineering
Doshi, Anjali. Encoding and decoding information within bacterial swarm patterns. Sponsor: Tal Danino.
Koorathota, Sharath. Multimodal deep learning systems for analysis of human behavior, preference and state. Sponsor: Paul Sajda.
Lee, Andy. Modulating the Joint Response to Pathological Mediators. Sponsor: Clark Hung.
Perkins, Sean. Neural decoding leveraging motor-cortex population geometry. Sponsor: Mark Churchland, Qi Wang.
Biomedical Informatics
Rodriguez, Victor. Learning Phenotypes from Partially Labeled, Partially Observed Data. Sponsor: Adler Perotte.
Business
Bailey, Erica. From the Outside-In: Applying a Social View to State Authenticity. Sponsor: Sheena Iyengar.
Carter, James. Diversity (Mis)Management: How Organizational Approaches to Diversity Management Backfire. Sponsor: Modupe Akinola.
Kalvit, Anand. Improved Asymptotics for Multi-armed Bandit Experiments under Optimism-based Policies: Theory and Applications. Sponsor: Assaf Zeevi.
Min Cho, Soo. The Dynamics of Culture in Entrepreneurial Ventures. Sponsor: Paul Ingram.
Mittal, Vrinda. Essays in Private Capital. Sponsor: Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.
Sun, Qianwen. Managing Difficult Conversations. Sponsor: Michael Slepian.
Business: Accounting
Wang, Kunjue. Foreign Currency Adjustments in Executive Compensation. Sponsor: Shivaram Rajgopal.
Business: Decision/Risk/Operations
Gan, Yuanling. Dynamic optimization for markets and networks. Sponsor: Yashodhan Kanoria.
Business: Finance
Sridhar, Sharada. Essays in Household Finance. Sponsor: Daniel Wolfenzon.
Business: Marketing
Cheol Lee, Byung. Consumer Response to Personalized Recommendations. Sponsor: Gita Johar.
Chemistry
Kumar Ray, Korak. The Functional Mechanism of the Bacterial Ribosome, an Archetypal Biomolecular Machine. Sponsor: Ruben Gonzalez.
Rios, Davida. Engineering GPCR-based Living Yeast Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases. Sponsor: Virginia Cornish.
Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics
Giacomini, Beatrice. Uncertainty Quantification for Micro-Scale Simulations of Flow in Plant Canopies. Sponsor: Marco Giometto.
Li, Lechen. A Data-Driven Perspective on Residential Electricity Modeling and Structural Health Monitoring. Sponsor: Patricia Culligan, Raimondo Betti.
Li, Weiyi. Numerical Modeling of Non-Stationary Boundary-Layer Flow in Urban Areas. Sponsor: Marco Giometto.
Classical Studies
Ish-Shalom, Tal. State Formation and Ethnic Identity in the Late-Seleucid Levant (200?63 BCE). Sponsor: Seth Schwartz.
Computer Science
Bernstein, Ryan. Abstractions for Probabilistic Programming to Support Model Development. Sponsor: Jeannette Wing.
Jin, Yaonan. Bayesian Auction Design and Approximation. Sponsor: Xi Chen, Rocco Servedio.
Weng, Lingmei. Improve the effectiveness of performance diagnosis with annotations. Sponsor: Junfeng Yang.
Earth and Environmental Engineering
Amonkar, Yash. Modeling Spatiotemporal Dependence for Integrated Climate Risk Assessment of Energy Infrastructure Systems. Sponsor: Upmanu Lall.
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Balter-Kennedy, Alexandra. Evaluation of ice sheet vulnerability and landscape evolution using novel cosmogenic-nuclide techniques. Sponsor: Joerg Schaefer.
Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Kache, Pallavi. Bridging landscape ecology and urban science to respond to the rising threat of mosquito-borne diseases. Sponsor: Maria Diuk-Wasser.
McKenzie, Patrick. Linking phylogenetic models to population processes, from species trees to genomes. Sponsor: Deren Eaton.
Economics
Awadey, Amanda. Essays on the Economics of Education in Ghana. Sponsor: Miguel Urquiola, Cristian Pop-Eleches.
de Albuquerque Furtado, Bruno. Essays is Statistical Decision Theory and Econometrics. Sponsor: Navin Kartik.
Fu Wong, Yu. Essays on information economics. Sponsor: Qingmin Liu.
Garg, Naman. Essays in Political Economy. Sponsor: Andrea Prat.
Gopal, Bhargav. Essays in Labor Economics. Sponsor: W. Bentley MacLeod; Sandra Black.
Gupta, Sakshi. Essays in Labor and Development Economics. Sponsor: Sandra Black.
Kyung Koh, Yu. Essays in Family Economics. Sponsor: Pierre-André Chiappori, Bernard Salanié.
Larsen-Hallock, Eugene. Essays on subjective expectations in finance. Sponsor: Serena Ng.
Liu, Ou. Essays on Firm Dynamics and Inequality. Sponsor: Martin Uribe, Matthieu Gomez.
Mateen, Haaris. Essays on Cities and Climate Change. Sponsor: Joseph Stiglitz, José Scheinkman.
Olenski, Andrew. Essays on the Economics of Health Care. Sponsor: Pietro Tebaldi.
Rivera, Roman. Essays on the Economics of Policing and Crime. Sponsor: W. Bentley MacLeod, Sandra Black.
Sacher, Szymon. Estimating Structural Models with Bayesian Econometrics. Sponsor: Andrea Prat.
Sakabe, Shogo. Essays on Spatial Economics. Sponsor: David Weinstein.
Seol, BooKang. Essays in Development Economics. Sponsor: Miguel Urquiola.
Sung, Yeji. Macroeconomic Expectations and Noisy Memory. Sponsor: Michael Woodford.
Yu, Lizi. Strategic Alliance and Endogenous Production Network. Sponsor: Jennifer La'O.
Zaremba, Krzysztof. Essays in Health Economics. Sponsor: Douglas Almond.
Zhang, Howard. Essays in Spatial and International Economics. Sponsor: Donald Davis, David Weinstein.
Electrical Engineering
Cea, Claudia. Conformable transistors for bioelectronics. Sponsor: Dion Khodagholy Araghy.
Dahal, Prawesh. Large-scale Investigation of Memory Circuits. Sponsor: Dion Khodagholy Araghy.
James, Aneek. Ultra-Broadband Silicon Photonic Link Design and Optimization. Sponsor: Keren Bergman.
Novick, Asher. Robust and Scalable Silicon Photonic Interconnects and Devices. Sponsor: Keren Bergman.
Wang, Dewei. Algorithm-Hardware Co-design for Ultra-Low-Power Machine Learning and Neuromorphic Computing. Sponsor: Mingoo Seok.
Zanarella, Mateus. Low-loss visible-light integrated photonics: from tunable lasers to frequency combs. Sponsor: Michal Lipson.
English and Comparative Literature
Mcmillan, Brett. Narratives and Neighborhood Change: Writing New York and Chicago in the Twentieth Century. Sponsor: Brent Edwards.
Reeve, Jonathan. The Eye of Modernism: Visualities of British Literature, 1880-1930. Sponsor: Sarah Cole.
Epidemiology
Francesca Moro, Maria. Promoting the rights of persons with psychological disabilities and mental health conditions: An examination of the WHO Quality Rights initiative and other interventions that apply a human rights-based approach to mental health. Sponsor: Sharon Schwartz.
Genetics and Development
Lee, Winston. Integrated Analysis of the Monogenic Architectuure in Retinal and Neurological Diseases. Sponsor: Rando Allikmets.
History
Jakubczak-Gabay, Aleksandra. "Protecting the Jewish daughters:" Sex work, mobility, and belonging between the 1870s and 1939. Sponsor: Rebecca Kobrin.
Lebovich, Andrew. The search for the Straight Path: Islamic Reform and Regional Change in Algeria, Senegal, and Mali in the Twentieth Century. Sponsor: Gregory Mann.
Italian
Bloomer, Catherine. Blameless Defect: A Dantean Model of Disability. Sponsor: Teodolinda Barolini.
Wyatt, Andrew. Drafting Spaces: Four Literary Visions of the Northern Adriatic. Sponsor: Elizabeth Leake.
Mathematics
Álvaro Muñoz Echániz, Juan. Monopoles and Dehn twists on contact 3-manifolds. Sponsor: Francesco Lin.
Kenigsberg, Lea. A Coproduct Structure on Symplectic Cohomology. Sponsor: Mohammed Abouzaid.
Lee, Yu-sheng. CM congruences and anticyclotomic Euler systems. Sponsor: Eric Urban.
Smith, Kevin. C^2 estimates in non-Kahler geometry. Sponsor: Duong Phong.
Uday Deshmukh, Yash. A homotopical description of Deligne?Mumford compactifications. Sponsor: Mohammed Abouzaid.
Yu, Song. Open/closed correspondence and mirror symmetry. Sponsor: Chiu-Chu Liu.
Mechanical Engineering
Petersen, Courtney. Addressing osteoarthritis: analysis of bendable osteochondral allograft treatment and investigations of articular cartilage wear mechanisms. Sponsor: Gerard Ateshian.
Microbiology, Immunology, and Infection
Kornberg, Adam. Gluten induced reprogramming of intraepithelial T cells to induce cytotoxicity in celiac disease. Sponsor: Arnold Han.
Wang, Peter. Understanding and overcoming cancer immunotherapy resistance. Sponsor: Steven Reiner.
Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Najib, Aseel. Common Wealth Land Taxation in Early Islam. Sponsor: Wael Hallaq.
Music
Colonna, Sean. Musical Aesthetics, Drugs, and Subjectivity in Germany, 1770s?1820s. Sponsor: George Lewis.
Music (DMA)
Haddad, Saad. On the Transmigration of the Arab Soul: A Case Study in Contemporary Composition. Sponsor: Georg Haas.
Merivale, Finola. Community Co-Creation and Virtual Reality in Opera: Composing "Out of the Ordinary/As an nGnách". Sponsor: George Lewis.
Younge, Bethany. Body as Music: Mauricio Kagels' 'Repertoire' from 'Staatstheater' and Marina Rosenfeld's 'My Body'. Sponsor: George Lewis.
Nursing
Belloir, Joseph. Minority Stress and Sleep Health in Sexual and Gender Minorities. Sponsor: Walter Bockting.
South, Katherine. Experiences and Outcomes of Healthcare Transition in Cystic Fibrosis. Sponsor: Maureen George, Arlene Smaldone.
Physics
Countryman, Stefan. "Computational Methods in Multi-Messenger Astrophysics using Gravitational Waves and High Energy Neutrinos". Sponsor: Szabolcs Márka.
Jindal, Apoorv. "Transport investigations of superconductivity in few-layered Td - MoTe2". Sponsor: Abhay Pasupathy.
Shabani, Sara. "Spectroscopic study of localized states in twisted transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures and charge transfer driven phenomena in alpha-RuCl3 heterointerfaces". Sponsor: Abhay Pasupathy.
Warner, Claire. Collisional Studies of Ultracold NaCs Molecules. Sponsor: Sebastian Will.
Political Science
Groves, Dylan. Essays on Local Journalism in Tanzania. Sponsor: Donald Green.
Psychology
Fields, Andrea. Parental modulation of fear learning across development. Sponsor: Nim Tottenham.
Social Work
Filippone, Prema. A Mixed Methods Approach to Evaluating the Effects of Intersectional Stigma on the Health Decisions of Vulnerable Women in Masaka region, Uganda. Sponsor: Susan Witte.
Laughney, Caitlin. Examining Earlier Sexual Debut Among Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) in Kazakhstan at Elevated Risk of HIV. Sponsor: Elwin Wu.
Lou, Yifan. End-of-Life Care Discussions with Doctors: Evidence from the United States and China. Sponsor: Jinyu Liu.
Richer, Ariel. Understanding typologies of intimate partner violence and access to services among Black women who use drugs, are involved in the criminal-legal system, and have sex with women and men. Sponsor: Louisa Gilbert.
Slopen, Meredith. The Impact of Paid Sick Leave Mandates on Women's Employment, Wellbeing, and Health. Sponsor: Jane Waldfogel.
Spishak-Thomas, Amanda. Medicaid Estate Recovery and its (Un)intended Consequences on Low-Income Families. Sponsor: Heidi Allen.
Sociology
Aleksanyan, Alexander. States, Selves, and Social Welfare: Three Essays on the American Therapeutic State. Sponsor: Adam Reich.
Statistics
Zhao, Long. Martingale Schrodinger Bridges and Optimal Semistatic Portfolios. Sponsor: Marcel Nutz.
Sustainable Development
Du, Xinming. Essays in Environmental Economics. Sponsor: Douglas Almond.
Gofere, Solomon. Three essays on human capital. Sponsor: Cristian Pop-Eleches, Rodrigo Soares.
TC / Anthropology and Education
Kentor, Corinne. For Me, Us, and Them: Immigrant Families Pursuing Higher Education in Southern California. Sponsor: Nicholas Limerick.
TC / Clinical Psychology
Lake, Kati. Assessing Dissemination and Implementation Science Outcomes for Three Session Interpersonal Counseling (IPC-3) for Student Veterans Experiencing Psychological Distress. Sponsor: Helen Verdeli.
Newman, Mandy. A Qualitative Study of Therapist Dishonesty. Sponsor: Barry Farber.
TC / Comparative and International Education
Falk, Danielle. Educators in Emergencies: The Lived Experiences and Professional Identities of Refugee and National Primary School Teachers in South Sudan and Uganda. Sponsor: Mary Mendenhall.
Kessler, Erika. What Future Are We Studying For? School Engagement and Youth Agency in the Youth Climate Movement. Sponsor: Oren Pizmony-Levy.
Kurakbayev, Kairat. International-Standard Schools as a School Reform Modality in Kazakhstan. Sponsor: Gita Steiner-Khamsi.
Pacifico, Arianna. Refugee inclusion in national education systems: A comparative case study in Turkey and Lebanon. Sponsor: Mary Mendenhall.
TC / Developmental Psychology
Simon, Katrina. Associations among noise exposure, brain, and language development in children. Sponsor: Kimberly Noble.
TC / Economics and Education
Oliobi, Ifeatu. Essays in Economics of Education and Gender in Developing Countries. Sponsor: Alexander Eble.
TC / Educational Leadership
Harari, Rachel. The Silent Leaders of Schools: An Exploratory Case Study of High School Department Chairs in Modern Orthodox Yeshivas. Sponsor: Eleanor Drago-Severson.
TC / Intellectual Disabilities and Autism
Gaspar, Catherine. The Experiences and Involvement Practices of Parents of Color of Preschoolers with Disabilities: An Exploration of Cultural and Ecological Factors During the Kindergarten Transition. Sponsor: Laudan Jahromi.
TC / Philosophy and Education
Moore, Rashad. My Soul's Been Anchored: Tradition & Disruptive Imagining in Historically Black Education. Sponsor: David Hansen.
North, Buddy. Navigating the Harms of Epistemic Life: On the Need to Educate for Intellectual Courage. Sponsor: David Hansen.
Reuter, Eileen. An Integrated Life: Catholic Education of Girls for Motherhood. Sponsor: David Hansen.
Zhao, Xiaochen. Heidegger's Polemos: An Aesthetic Inquiry. Sponsor: Megan Laverty.
TC / Politics and Education
Bloomberg, Jill. Principals and the Path to Equity in Racially Diverse Schools: Sensemaking of Race, Reputation and Policy. Sponsor: Amy Wells.
TC / Science Education
Peltier, Leana. Elementary Teachers:Structures and Agency in Vertical Science Professional Learning Community. Sponsor: Felicia Moore Mensah.
TC / Social-Organizational Psychology
Von Numers, Stephanie. Multiracial Identity Invalidation in the Workplace. Sponsor: Debra Noumair.
Theatre
Gilovich-Wave, Ilana. Bodysnatching in Contemporary Anglophone Drama, 1996-2022. Sponsor: Jean Howard.
Schroering, Abby. Cultivating Collectives: Performance and Ecology for the Anthropocene. Sponsor: Hana Worthen.
Urban Planning
Nguyen, Minh. Immigrant Placemaking and Urban Space: Southeast Asian American San Francisco. Sponsor: Malo Hutson.
Dissertation Proposals Filed
Anthropology
Althoff, Esther. Human-Inse.ct Relations and Material Culture in Western Alaska.
Biomedical Engineering
Chen, Yannan. Tools for uniform labeling, high-throughput imaging, and comparative analysis of large brain samples.
Classics
Koudounis, Nicholas. The Barbaroi of Athens: Analysis of the non-Greek metic experience in 5th-4th century Athens.
Computer Science
Brown, William. Learning in the Presence of Adaptive Behavior.
Chakrabarty, Tuhin. Creative AI through Knowledge-enhanced Models and Human-AI Collaboration.
Stirn, Andrew. Presentation Learning and Inference for Heteroscedasticity, Disentanglement, and Latent Variable Mixture Models with Applications to Computational Genomics Computational Genomc.
Suris Coll-Vinent, Didac. Structured Video Representations.
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Raheja, Garima. Using Real-Time Low-Cost Sensor Networks for Understanding Urban Air Pollution Around the World.
Smith, Sarah. Understanding the Seasonality of Arctic Aerosol Processes.
Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology
Bakhshi, Rupinder Kaur. Evaluating Socio-ecological outcomes of changes in governance and management of forest and non-forest commons.
Economics
Barilla, César. Essays in economic theory.
Bhargava, Palaash. Applications of social and family networks in human capital formation and wealth.
Chalom, René. Essays in industrial organization.
Kundu, Tushar. Topics on the development and evaluation of human capital.
Lemos, Marina. Essays in Public Economics.
Mooers, Victoria. Essays on Applied Networks in Economics.
Pommer Muñoz, Ricardo. Behavior, Climate, and Development.
Zaratiegui, Emilio. Essays in Macroeconomics.
Philosophy
Burns, Samara. "WHO'S AFRAID OF COMPUTER PROOF".
Political Science
Bonini, Beatrice. Gen Z-style Politics: Power & Influence. A study of Social Media Influencers & Political Activism in the Era of Social Media.
Christensen, Aaron. Demand for the state and choice of institutions in Africa.
Sociology
Pullen-Blasnik, Hannah. Places, Technologies, and Transitions: Contested Regulation in Urban Development and the Criminal Legal System.