Dissertations: September 2025
ART HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
Anne Ochmanek
Conceptualism and the connexionist world: The art of Hannah Weiner, Eduardo Costa, and Christine Kozlov
Advisor: Branden Joseph
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Aubrianna Decker
Development of an optical pooled screen to investigate regulators of ferroptosis sensitivity
Advisor: Jellert Gaublomme
Eliza Jaeger
Investigating the evolution and function of telencephalic neural circuits in the salamander brain
Advisor: Maria Tosches
Yasmin Ramadan
Evolution of neuronal fate specification: A tale of two nematodes
Advisor: Oliver Hobert
Matthew Johnson
Roles of the MRX complex in the repair of replication-dependent double-strand breaks
Advisor: Lorraine Symington
CHEMICAL PHYSICS
Nicholas Olsen
Pristine gold-tape exfoliation of transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers
Advisor: Xiaoyang Zhu
CLASSICAL STUDIES
Giulia Bertoni
Cloth-gestures on Roman sarcophagi
Advisor: Francesco de Angelis
EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
Bret Schumacher
Probing alkali-ion battery safety hazards using calorimetric techniques
Advisor: Daniel Steingart
Jasper Baur
Towards operational UAS-based landmine detection: Vegetation, validation, and geophysical application
Advisor: Frank Nitsche
EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES
David Borgonjon
Left-wing Chinese-language literature of Indonesia, 1945–1965
Advisor: Lydia Liu
ECOLOGY, EVOLUTION, AND ENVIRONMENTAL BIOLOGY
Laura Plimpton
Heterogeneity across scales: Linking movement, contact, and landscape to canine distemper virus transmission in New York City raccoons
Advisor: Maria Diuk-Wasser
ECONOMICS
Gevorg Beknazar-Yuzbashev
Essays on economics of media
Advisor: Andrea Prat
ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Shannon Hubbard
Disciplining development: US universities and humanist worldmaking in the Black Atlantic
Advisor: Gauri Viswanathan
Conor Macvarish
Scenes of infinite decay: Description, ecology, and the Victorian weird
Advisor: James Adams
FRENCH
Jeanne Devautour
Writing in décalage: Fractured memory and generational distance in diasporic voices from Argentina and Vietnam
Advisor: Souleymane Diagne
LATIN AMERICAN AND IBERIAN CULTURES
Javiera Irribarren Ortiz
Descolonizar la imaginación: Alter-nativas en cómics especulativos de Brasil y Chile
Advisors: Bruno Bosteels and Orlando Bentancor
MUSIC
Nicola Leonard Hein
Auto-cybernetization and cybernetic listening: Improvising machines and the philosophy of technology
Advisor: Joseph Dubiel
PHILOSOPHY
Chuyu Tian
The measure of all things: Foundations of Aristotle’s ethics
Advisor: Wolfgang Mann
Ching Hei Yau
Five-dimensionalism
Advisor: Achille Varzi
PHYSICS
Michael Aitken
Quantifying peptide-specific immune surveillance via HLA-I in viral infection and cancer
Advisor: Raul Rabadan
Ilia Komissarov
Quantum geometry and localization in crystalline and disordered solids
Advisor: Raquel Queiroz
Malcolm Wells
Quantitative high-resolution HX-MS to discover protein energetic landscapes
Advisor: Anum Glasgow
SOCIOLOGY
Daria Franklin
Field under constraint: Soviet literary journals and autonomy in Soviet literary life
Advisor: Peter Bearman
STATISTICS
Luhuan Wu
Advances in probabilistic machine learning: Scalable inference, conditional generation, and invariance modeling
Advisors: David Blei and John Cunningham
THEATRE
Ali Yalgin
Minerals on Stage: Twenty-first century theatre and extractivism
Advisor: Hana Worthener
Jehbreal Jackson
Enfleshing the void: Capturing the Black kin-aesthesis of Haitian Vodou in George Balanchine’s “Agon”
Advisor: William Worthen