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Sponsored research is a critically important part of Wellesley’s role as a research college.
Our faculty include world-class scholars, researchers, and creators, and we fully support their work and its power to shape the future and our core mission of providing the finest undergraduate education.
Antimicrobial peptides are small protein molecules that kill bacteria, and they may be promising alternatives to traditional antibiotics, which can easily succumb to bacterial resistance. As part of an ongoing collaboration, members of the Radhakrishnan and Elmore labs are integrating computational and experimental techniques to design and characterize novel antimicrobial peptides with increased potency by modeling and measuring the physical interactions between the peptides and the bacterial molecules they target.
In the past two years, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, have revolutionized the software industry. These models could be particularly valuable in the natural and social scientists by enabling scientists who are not expert programmers to turn descriptions into computer programs. However, current models do not support the programming languages or practices commonly used by scientists.
This project aims to make AI programming tools accessible for scientists. To understand scientists' needs, Anderson and Teich will run qualitative and quantitative studies of how scientists write programs. These findings will help them develop benchmarks and models for text-to-code generation that focus specifically on the programming paradigms used by scientists. This grant will also fund an investigation of how students who learn to program in science courses interact with AI programming tools. By harnessing AI to make programming easier for scientists, this project aims to accelerate scientific discovery and allow more people to participate in scientific work.
We study two proteins, hERG and KvLQT1, found in heart muscle cells. These two proteins form ion channels, tunnels through the cell membrane that allow ions to move into or out of the cell in a selective and controlled way. The movement and balance of ions set the pace of a normal human heartbeat. When the pace is disrupted, people can experience irregular heartbeats, heart damage, or sudden cardiac death. We think that hERG and KvLQT1 function less well when they are connected or bound to each other. This could increase the chance of irregular heartbeats. Thus we are interested in what cellular signals tell hERG and KvLQT1 to bind or to release. We have shown that the final signal step in the "fight or flight" response of organisms chemically alters hERG and KvLQT1 proteins. This chemical change seems to cause the two proteins to release each other. In this proposal we will study the multiple places where this chemical change can happen in both hERG and KvLQT1. We think we will see different levels of binding depending on the extent and location each protein is altered. We will also study whether these chemical changes cause more or less hERG and KvLQT1 to be present in the cell membrane. An increase in protein amount in the cell membrane would allow more ions to flow, helping maintain a normal heartbeat. Overall our work may connect protein-protein interactions to the rhythmic functioning or malfunctioning of human hearts.
This project will focus on how to educate the next generation of data scientists and software engineers to implement their technical expertise informed by sound ethical principles. This interdisciplinary research project will investigate pathways to making ethics of technology–computational, data-driven technology–a fundamental part of the liberal arts curriculum for undergraduate students.
An important element of the project is an annual, cross-listed 300-level course that Walsh and Mustafaraj will co-teach, titled "Seminar: Methods for Ethics of Technology". This course will give the students the tools to become active participants in the research. Furthermore, the project also involves our alums in eliciting their perspectives as professionals in the tech industry.
My project uses the visual culture of hunting to highlight the ways that mobility and migration shaped art and architecture during the formative decades when Muslims first became a major imperial power in the late seventh and early eighth centuries CE. In particular, I focus on works of art produced throughout the Umayyad caliphate, which was ruled from Syria and stretched from Spain to Tajikistan at its height.
Expanded image description: Alexander Brey at the early Islamic bathhouse of Qusayr 'Amra in eastern Jordan. The interior is decorated with murals depicting scenes of hunting alongside mythological and religious subjects. Inscriptions name the patron of the murals as the crown prince al-Walid ibn Yazid, who ascended to the throne in 743 CE.
Extracellular ATP and ADP are mediators of purinergic signaling in cell-to-cell communication in virtually every tissue. Autocrine and paracrine purinergic signaling contributes to normal cellular functions such as immune cell chemotaxis and cell volume regulation, and purinergic signaling also contributes to pathology in injury, infection, sepsis, and a number of diseases. Notably, extracellular ATP and ADP mediate purinergic signaling between cells with both short-term and long-term effects. However, it has been a challenge to study the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which ATP and ADP control distinct signaling events because their levels are spatially heterogeneous and purinergic signaling can vary significantly from cell-to-cell. Clearly, direct measurements of extracellular nucleotides are needed, but current methods are not well adapted to measuring fluctuations in the low extracellular nucleotide concentrations expected in live specimens. To overcome this barrier, we will use protein engineering to develop high affinity cell-surface sensors that can be used to resolve the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of ATP and ADP release, clearance, and purinergic receptor activation. To demonstrate the application of our sensors and also guide their optimization, we will study neuron-glia purinergic signaling in the brain. In particular, we will use our sensors to learn how metabolic state affects the function of microglia, the resident immune cells in the brain, in regulating the regional purinergic dynamics that impact local neuronal activity. The proposed series of multiplexed imaging studies that pair our purinergic sensors with sensors of downstream signaling should directly visualize core elements of neuron-glia purinergic communication in an integrated manner. This should provide valuable insight into novel mechanisms responsible for the coupling between brain energy metabolism and excitability. Furthermore, the genetically-encoded tools developed through this proposal should be broadly applicable to deeper study of any purinergic system.
With tunable direct-bandgaps, high defect tolerance, and low embodied energy, metal halide perovskites have emerged as game-changing materials for low-cost and high-efficiency multijunction solar cells to meet our current and emerging energy demands. However, despite this promise, the performance of multijunction perovskite solar cells remains limited, due in large part to instabilities and recombination losses in the wide bandgap (>1.67 eV) perovskites needed for devices to be successful. Working with a team at the National Renewable Energy Lab, we are attempting to characterize and overcome these current limitations. Through in situ structure and optoelectronic property characterization, we monitor the formation of perovskite semiconductors and relate this to structural and performance stability of these new materials as a function of processing condition. Ultimately, our results advance the development of stable wide bandgap perovskites for high-efficiency photovoltaics and de-risk the development of these new renewable energy technologies.
This book project explores the many famines that devastated South Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century and how photographs aided in the constitution of British colonial policies around famine, land, and agricultural labor. Uniting art historical analysis with political ecology and environmental and food studies, I aim to illuminate the fraught convergence of economic liberalism and colonial humanitarianism around the issue of famine in colonial India.
Brain structure and function are sensitive and responsive to environmental conditions and individual experiences such as nutrition, gut microbiome, household environment and levels of stress. The main goals of this multi-scale, and multi-modal study is to comprehensively characterize the development of executive functions over the first 1000 days of life in two African cohorts (South Africa and Malawi) to identify developmental patterns, windows for intervention, and inform on therapeutic agents. Here at Wellesley, we will characterize the gut microbiome collected over the first two years of life and link the acquisition of the microbiome to executive functions.
Despite affecting nearly 20% of infants in the United States, there is no cure for atopic dermatitis/eczema. Some parents feed their infants human milk in an effort to protect the infant from developing this disease, but the efficacy of this intervention is unclear. This project will determine if the presence of specific bacterial genes or bacterial metabolic products in the intestinal tract during early life in two different infant cohorts, while the immune system is still fully developing, can protect the infant from atopic dermatitis/eczema. Much of this work will be carried out by students at Wellesley College and undergraduate students at Michigan State University. Performing this research in two different regions of the US will be especially advantageous, since subtle differences in medical or cultural practices, or simply geographic differences in microbial exposure, may alter HMO metabolizing gene repertoires independent of breastfeeding behavior. This research will dramatically improve our understanding of microbial HMO metabolism in human infants in the United States and determine whether a specific pattern of HMO metabolizing genes protects infants from atopic dermatitis and eczema.
I will work on research examining racial sympathy, defined as White distress over Black suffering, and its role in American politics. I will explore whether and how the Trump presidency and recent racial unrest have impacted racial sympathy and how racial sympathy might be channeled into political action.
Research on social inequality is naturally discipline-based: inequality researchers tend to focus on the inequality types of most interest to their discipline (e.g., income inequality to economics, life span inequality to demography). This has the unfortunate effect of keeping the advances in our understanding of inequality and its dynamics largely siloed and unknown to researchers in other disciplines. But because inequality research is ultimately grounded in mathematics -- the measurement of inequality is an inherently mathematical problem -- one can therefore use mathematics as a common language that inequality researchers across disciplines can draw on to jump-start conversations about advances in inequality research. This project seeks to do just that. Its chief aim is to investigate inequality metrics in economics, public health, and the broader social sciences using a transdisciplinary and synergistic approach, and then port over one discipline's known results, insights, and methodologies for each metric to the other two disciplines and disseminate the findings widely through publications in open access scholarly journals. This approach will yield new strategies for reducing inequality unknown to researchers in one discipline yet well-known to researchers in other disciplines and thus has the potential to accelerate the pace of inequality research.
The overarching goal of my research is to provide insight into whether electrons or photons or both created life. My apparatus at Wellesley College, designed and built with help from Wellesley College undergraduate collaborators, is one of three in the World that can directly compare electron- and photon-induced reactions in condensed matter. Such experiments are important because the energetic processing of interstellar ice mantles and planetary atmospheres via radiation chemistry and photochemistry is a critical mechanism in the extraterrestrial synthesis of prebiotic molecules whose delivery via comets may have kickstarted "Lyfe" on Earth. This summer, we will make operational a custom-designed helium cryostat that will allow us to attain temperatures as low as 10 K to simulate interstellar ices better. Our multipronged experimental approach will provide a more detailed understanding of how prebiotic molecules are synthesized in cosmic ices surrounding interstellar dust grains found near star-forming regions of the universe. Such studies may help us better understand the initial stages of the genesis of life.
"Sounding Gurbāni" examines the idea of unstruck sound (anhad nād) in Sikh scripture, Sri Guru Granth Sahib (SGGS), with the goal of exploring how anhad nād manifests in music-led worship today. Focusing on the activities of Amritvela Trust (based in Ulhasnagar, India), I consider how multimedia performances engineer a feeling of communal, digital bliss for congregants who participate in kīrtan (Sikh devotional music) in India and around the world.
Out-of-school time (OST) programming for children and youth in the U.S. exists within a complex social and political terrain. Structural forces and systems of domination (e.g. racism, capitalism, anti-blackness, settler colonialism, heteronormativity) create layers of inequities in society. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated and exacerbated existing inequities across lines of race, class, gender, immigration status, and ability. These intersecting social forces inform how and where community opportunities for educational enrichment, identity development, and civic engagement are created, accessed, experienced, and needed by young people.
With these issues in mind, this national study examines the current opportunities and challenges that the out-of-school time (OST) sector faces in engaging racially minoritized and historically marginalized youth populations. Through critical qualitative and participatory methods – conducting a literature review, key stakeholder interviews, focus groups with expert informants, and a youth participatory action research project – this research aims to both (1) interrogate the sociopolitical context that is contributing to issues of equity in the field and (2) lift up the innovative work of community-based educators and young people to combat inequities and improve youth experiences in programs.
The diversity of the world’s languages led many thinkers to speculate that linguistic diversity could also lead to cognitive diversity across speakers of different languages. The goal of the current project is to pinpoint the exact nature of the relationship between language and cognition by combining laboratory research and fieldwork to investigate (a) aspects of human cognition that depend on having a language – any language, (b) effects of language modality, spoken or signed, on cognition, and (c) effects of cognition on the acquisition and emergence of language in the visual-spatial modality. Because experimental deprivation of language to children is unethical, I work with populations where we observe naturally occurring manipulations of language exposure: deaf children with delayed first-language exposure, learners of an emerging sign language in Nicaragua, and children and adults who acquired a sign language from birth. Each allows us to ethically isolate differential effects of language on cognition and of cognition on language. Within each of the three directions, I examine the same three areas: theory-of-mind, spatial cognition, and analogical reasoning. Theory-of-mind broadly refers to the understanding of internal states—intentions, desires, emotions, and beliefs—and that others’ internal states can be different from one’s own. In the domain of spatial cognition, my work investigates the ability to integrate multiple cues for navigation, engage in visual perspective-taking, and categorize the way in which objects are spatially located. With respect to analogical reasoning, I focus on the ability to detect and generate analogical mappings between a meaning (e.g., a location) and either a linguistic (e.g., a word) or non-linguistic (e.g., a map) representation. By identifying the domains of human cognition that depend on language and vice versa, we gain deep insight into how language and cognition leveraged elements from each other over the course of evolution to engender modern human cognition. But just as importantly, we can identify points of intervention to foster success for language-delayed children, and we can develop expectations for the trajectory of language acquisition appropriate for the learners’ language modality.
The overall goal of the current work in the lab is to explore how the brain integrates internal and external environments to modify the perception of visual cues to promote survival in different habitats. Work across organisms has investigated how internal state modulates perception of odor, pheromone, temperature, and water, however, little work has examined how internal state differentially modulates the perception of visual stimuli of organisms from environments with distinct visual ecologies (such as the forest and desert) that may have imposed very different evolutionary pressures. We are examining the contributions of anatomical and neural circuit changes in guiding visually evoked behaviors in Drosophila (fruit fly) species living in distinct ecological habitats. These experiments will elucidate the impact of ecological habitats on the generation of state-dependent behavior and neuromodulatory circuits in order to understand how behavioral responses and the neural circuits involved may have been altered by differential evolutionary pressures. We utilize a multifaceted approach: (1) genetic manipulation to allow control over specific neural pathways, (2) visual and olfactory ‘virtual-reality’ flight simulators to measure sensory motor integration that drives adaptive behavior, and (3) in-vivo two photon calcium imaging as an indicator of neural activity. (Research summary adapted from NSF Public Award Abstract.)
Phenotypic plasticity refers to the ability of an organism to generate distinct morphological, behavioral or metabolic changes in response to environmental changes. Laboratory and theoretical research has shown that phenotypic plasticity may play an important role in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of species, although the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. Research in our lab investigates the molecular and physiological basis of phenotypic plasticity in artificially selected insects that exhibit distinct amounts of plasticity and aims to identify key regulators of hormonal systems. Much of the work is carried out by students at Wellesley College. Determining the molecular mechanism by which phenotypic plasticity evolves has implications for our understanding of evolution and may also help identify novel regulators that may serve as potential targets for pest management.
New England and adjacent areas have experienced damaging earthquakes in the historic past, yet the recurrence intervals of these events remain largely unknown. Instrumental and historic data are not long enough to adequately assess the seismic hazard; thus, geologic records have to be investigated to understand source areas and occurrence of strong earthquakes. One of the most suitable geologic archives are lakes, which can provide continuous, undisturbed, and easily datable sediment records that often span multiple millennia. In this project we will study the sediments of two lakes in eastern Massachusetts, Sluice Pond in Lynn, MA, and Walden Pond in Concord, MA, to identify sedimentary deformation features associated with known historic earthquakes as well as prehistoric events. This is collaborative research with Wellesley College, Salem State University and Boston College.
The majority of deaf children are at risk for impoverished and/or delayed exposure to language, spoken or signed, because they have limited access to speech sounds and have parents who are not native users of a sign language. Work on the critical period has shown that delayed exposure to a first language has lasting effects on many aspects of development. The goal of this project is to understand how exposure to primarily non-native language input during the critical period affects vocabulary acquisition. We focus on early vocabulary development in deaf children learning American Sign Language (ASL) and we investigate the strategies used by deaf children with native exposure to ASL and by deaf children who are learning ASL from their non-native, signing hearing parents. Here we ask how variations in quality and quantity of language input during the critical period shapes early language learning strategies. This project will provide a detailed view of early ASL vocabulary acquisition, and can help practitioners and researchers develop interventions to mitigate the risks and effects of impoverished language exposure during the critical period.
La Princesse de Clèves is an essential work for understanding the history of the novel as a dominant genre, for charting the rise of complex psychological characters in western literature, and for studying female authorship in the early modern period. The digital format of our edition will allow my collaborators and me to present the text to scholars, students, and the general public in a variety of new ways. Our edition will provide the original French text and our English translation, with options to read the book either in a single language or in dual-language mode (with facing-page translation and a bilingual audio recording option), allowing students and teachers to discuss the nuances of seventeenth-century, classical French as well as Madame de Lafayette’s particular style of writing. The digital format will enable us to incorporate dynamic links, embedded within the text, for images, maps, dictionaries, sound and video files that will help readers understand multiple contexts of the work. The edition will include dossiers devoted to different topics of discussion, such as a network analysis of the novel, a history of feminist readings of Lafayette's texts, and an analysis of the polemic around French president Sarkozy's critique of the novel. Finally, the digital affordances will allow my team to provide a twenty-first century version of La Princesse de Clèves, which we hope will appeal to a wide audience, thereby opening the novel and French culture to new readers. I am strongly invested in promoting seemingly distant eras and their works to today’s students in an effort to move away from a culture of presentism that too often depicts the past as having little cultural relevance to us today.
My Fulbright semester at Tampere University, Finland is inscribed in an ongoing collaboration with the Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI), which pushes forward the intersections between feminism and Peace Research. I will work primarily on finalizing the manuscript of the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research. The Handbook is premised on the argument that feminist thinking is necessary to analyze the core issues in Peace Research, in order to find solutions to global problems and to promote the peaceful transformation of violent conflict. We bring forward feminist perspectives on traditional Peace Research topics such as militarism, peacekeeping, arms trade, and the articulation of different forms of violence. We also advance critical and alternative topics that mainstream Peace Research has sidelined. These include, for example, the role of masculinities and femininities in war and peace; the political economy of gender and militarism; intersectionality as a methodology to understand war and peace; postcolonial and decolonial feminist perspectives; the queering of war and peace; and many others. In sum, the Handbook of Feminist Peace Research contributes to the visibility of these feminist critical approaches to Peace Research, and makes them accessible to scholars and students interested in the subject. It is co-edited with researchers at TAPRI, Bristol University, University of Ghana, and Gothenborg University. With another scholar from Tampere University, I will also turn an existing co-authored conference paper into a peer-reviewed article outlining the theoretical case for a sustained and much-needed engagement between Peace Research and Global Health. These projects will be complemented by teaching at TAPRI and public and in-class lecturing for Global Health and Development.
The general aim of my research project is to write a critical and annotated edition of Giorgio Bassani's novel "The Garden of the Finzi-Contini's" based on the recently rediscovered manuscript and typescript, as well as on various other documents preserved at the 'Giorgio Bassani Foundation' in Ferrara and at the 'Luigi Einaudi's Archives' in Turin.
Estrogens provide protective effects to females against metabolic insults. Postmenopausal women, due to a reduction in estrogens, have increased weight gain, which predisposes them to cardiovascular, metabolic and inflammatory disorders, and cancer. Estradiol (a type of estrogen) treatment protects postmenopausal women and female rodents lacking estrogens from high-fat diet (HFD)-induced weight gain. While the effects of estrogens on energy metabolism are well known, the mechanisms involved are not entirely understood. The microorganisms that inhabit our lower digestive tract, collectively called gut microbiota, have profound effects on host energy status. Thus, alteration of gut microbiota through prebiotics, probiotics, or direct transplantation of microbiota, modulates metabolic homeostasis. For example, altering the gut microbiota in lean animals to match those of obese individuals also alters metabolic status of the lean animals. Gut microbiota are rapidly altered by environmental perturbations including hormones, stress, and diet. While changes in estradiol levels in females are associated with alterations in gut microbiota, it is not known if these microbiota function in estradiol-mediated effects on energy homeostasis. Through this grant from the Mouse Metabolic Phenotype Center (MMPC), I am investigating whether gut microbiota transplanted from estradiol-treated lean female mice will protect the estradiol-deficient recipients from metabolic insults. This project involves a team consisting of myself, my mentor Dr. Marc Tetel, and our collaborators Dr. Jason Kim (Director, MMPC, University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS)) and Dr. Beth McCormick (Founder, Center for Microbiome Research, MMPC, UMMS). We hope that findings from this project can be applied for the development of better therapeutic strategies for metabolic disorders in postmenopausal women, a critical aspect of women’s health.
My research project examines the cultural history of money by charting its development and use across time and place. Beginning with the giant stone currency (rai) found on the Micronesian island of Yap, and moving through increasingly portable and eventually intangible examples (coins, paper currency, credit/debit cards, Venmo), the project seeks its logical endpoint in a discussion and cross-cultural comparison of newly emergent cryptocurrencies and the myriad forms that have preceded them. Here, I argue that humankind's social and cultural constructions can be directly linked (and mirrored in) to our relationship with currency, a claim I will address and unpack through a careful examination of our transition from the tactile to the digital, from an oral to an electronic world of communication and exchange. The first phase of this project involves a preliminary and concentrated research trip to Yap to see the stones, meet with their owners, and talk with community members about their relationships to this unique form of currency.
My research seeks to introduce the phenomenon of racial sympathy, defined as white distress over black suffering, to political science and demonstrate its relevance to American public opinion. By combining several methods including survey research and statistical analysis, experiments, participant observation and long-form interviews, I find that racial sympathy is a distinct and powerful racial attitude that shapes public opinion among a surprisingly large share of white Americans.
This project examines how multiple environmental factors collectively affect populations of an aggressive invasive plant species, Alliaria petiolata (garlic mustard), across a range of conditions. A key focus is on constructing empirically-parameterized population models in order to quantitatively link processes at different ecological scales. As species do not exist in isolation, the project will also investigate the intersection of competition between plant species and their surrounding habitat; specifically, how does the environment influence the outcome of species competition, and what are the implications for coexistence or exclusion? Overall, this work aims to explicitly test and advance invasion biology theory, improve ecological forecasting, and inform the management of invasive species.
The ovarian hormones, estradiol and progesterone, bind to their receptors in the brain and throughout the body to influence behavior and physiology. Our work focuses on how receptors for these hormones function in specific brain regions to influence behavior. We have taken a proteomics-based approach to identify proteins from the brain that interact with estrogen and progestin receptors. More recently we have begun to study how estrogens regulate energy homeostasis. Estrogens elicit profound effects on metabolism by acting to decrease weight gain in women. For example, post-menopausal women tend to gain weight, which increases their risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Estrogens have similar anorectic effects in female rodents. Recent work from our lab and others reveals that estradiol protects against high fat diet-induced obesity in female mice. We are currently exploring different mechanisms by which estrogens elicit these effects in female mice. Much of our work involves collaborations with colleagues at Wellesley and others in the United States and abroad. By enhancing our knowledge of basic hormone mechanisms, we may better understand how hormones impact women’s health and disease, including breast cancer, diabetes and obesity.
Developmental plasticity has dramatic effects on the survival and reproductive fitness of organisms. In many organisms, including humans, changes in developmental physiology initiate dramatic alterations in growth and morphology. Attainment of particular body size thresholds triggers these changes in developmental physiology; however, we do not yet know how an organism senses its body size. Research in the Suzuki lab aims to answer this issue by studying the transcriptional regulation of developmental hormones in arthropods (insects and crustaceans) and experimentally manipulating conditions that alter the body size thresholds. Our current work focuses on genes that regulate the production of ecdysteroids and juvenile hormone. In particular, we focus on the endocrine roles of the POU transcription factor, ventral veins lacking, which has been demonstrated to play a key role in regulating hormone biosynthesis. Given the current trend towards precocious puberty onset among youth, understanding the regulation of developmental transitions will have important medical and public health implications.
Decision-making requires the brain to integrate multiple stimuli and elicit an appropriate behavioral response. However, a singular input does not always produce the same output. An animal’s external environment, internal physiological state, and behavior will determine how it assigns the appropriate valence or value to a stimulus. Stress has been shown to directly effect multisensory processing, but the mechanisms of this remain largely unknown. We use behavioral and physiological assays, in which Drosophila melanogaster (the fruit fly) are able to control their sensory experiences in real time. We combine these ‘virtual reality’ flight simulators with molecular, genetic, optogenetic and opto-physiological techniques to investigate the neuronal circuitry that is able to process a variety of states and produce an adapted behavioral response. Currently we are investigating the neuromodulatory mechanisms by which internal state alters visual and olfactory behaviors.
Glutamate is the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain and its synaptic levels are tightly regulated by glutamate transporters, located primarily on glia. In the nematode, C. Elegans, the major excitatory neurotransmitter is acetylcholine, but glutamate neurotransmission remains critical for a number of functions. Glutamate synapses in C. Elegans are not surrounded by glia and of the six glutamate transporters expressed, only one is found in neurons. So, what is the role of glutamate transport in C. Elegans? Research in the Bauer lab centers around studying mutant worms in which the genes for one or more transporters have been knocked-out. We are interested in how glutamate transporters regulate behavior – particularly learning and memory – and how the transporters are involved in metabolism and lifespan. We hope that these studies will teach us something about how the process of neurotransmission has evolved.
My current research project addresses the anatomical transformation of the shoulder girdle that occurred during the evolutionary transition from synapsid reptiles to mammals. The sternum integrates the head, neck, chest, and limbs, and plays a key role in establishing patterning along the anterior-posterior axis of the body. Specifically, my students and I ask whether the sternum of living mammals is a single element, or the fusion product of multiple ancestral elements, each with a unique developmental history and peripheral articulation. We use CT scans of fetal whales to document sternal structure along the timeline of an individual’s development, and fossil ground sloths and armadillos to document changes over evolutionary history.
What does fraud—as a political, legal, and moral category—reveal about the conditions of social, political, and economic life in the early 21st century? This project pivots around the moral economies and governance politics of estafa (fraud) in the conjoined cities of El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia. Fraud accusations sit at the intersection of donor-backed development projects and dubious pyramid schemes, transnational judicial reform efforts, and everyday livelihood strategies in places like Bolivia, as foreign donors and national governments emphasize entrepreneurship as the means to alleviate poverty and seek to promote the rule of law. This project will illuminate the shifting relationship between desire, entrepreneurship, virtuous citizenship, and the criminalization of insolvent subjects—with implications for understanding fraud's significance beyond the Bolivian context. This project involves sustained ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with aggrieved pyramid scheme participants, shopkeepers, and salespeople in Bolivia's many multilevel marketing companies, as well as with state regulators, foreign donors, and members of the criminal justice system.
‘Mirrors for princes’ – writings that offer advice to rulers on their governance and comportment – are attested for virtually all pre-modern agrarian societies. Pre-modern Muslim societies produced numerous examples of the genre, written first in Arabic, and later in Persian, Turkish and Urdu, across a terrain that stretched from Spain to South and Central Asia. Written by secretaries and administrators, historians, men of letters, religious scholars, jurists and judges, mirrors shed considerable light on the political and intellectual cultures in which they were produced and to which their authors responded. They complement and sometimes subvert other modes of political discourse, such as legal writings, philosophical treatises, historiography and panegyric poetry, with which they also intersect. This project will prepare an anthology that will present, in English translation, important texts drawn from the medieval Arabic and Persian ‘mirrors for princes’. The anthology will also provide a substantial introduction to the genre, in which I situate the selected textual examples in their historical as well as literary contexts.
During my semester at the University of Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a Fulbright Scholar, I worked on several projects in algebraic topology, including developing a new brand of functor calculus with my Ph.D. student there. I also started a new collaboration that will attempt to apply the cutting-edge field of topological data analysis to large data sets describing various socio-economic conditions in Bosnia-Herzegovina such as poverty, child care, and the status of women. I spent a lot of time talking about mathematics, and science in general, with students and faculty in various cities across Bosnia-Herzegovina. This provided a new perspective of what it means to be a scholar in a developing country without many resources for education. I also delivered a number of lectures to a variety of audiences ranging from high schoolers to university professors in an attempt to depict mathematics as a relevant and vibrant field and indicate its many uses and applications.
Argentine women filmmakers have made significant contributions to the film industry since the mid-1990s. Despite the fortified and professionalized bond between women and cinema in Argentina, academic research still continues to be patchy. This project fills in parts of such lacunae, as it draws more nuanced attention to the place of affect in the films of Argentina’s most prominent, prolific, and internationally reputable women directors—that is, Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel, and Lucía Puenzo. Several questions drive my analyses forward regarding the distinct explorations of affective manifestations in these directors’ films: How does affect shape the meaning of these particular films or endow certain moments in them with socio-cultural significance? What kind of aesthetic newness do these filmmakers generate at the core of and beyond the New Argentine Cinema by distinctly privileging affect over basic emotions? What can concentrated manifestations of affect reveal aesthetically about these films’ sociopolitical commitments? Upon answering these (and other) questions, my project ultimately centers on the subtle tensions between affect and emotions as terrains of sociopolitical significance in these directors’ feature-length films. Such tensions significantly relate to their films’ core arguments, signaling the directors’ novel insights into complex manifestations of memory (individual, social, and historical), desire (incestuous, homoerotic, and inter-generational), and violence (political, emotional, and sexual).
In this book, I clarify how Ivan Turgenev, famous for the stories and novels he wrote from the 1840s to the 1870s, managed to create some of Russian literature's most celebrated descriptions of nature. I propose that Turgenev's lifelong devotion to hunting instilled in him a particular attitude toward the natural world that meshed with his philosophical tendencies and found striking outlets in every one of the many genres he attempted. I comment extensively on Turgenev's underappreciated relationship with Sergei Aksakov, his friend and the elder statesman of Russian sporting literature, which flowered at mid-century. In making my argument, I begin by developing new terminology for analyzing, on the one hand, nature writing that imposes human meanings on flora, fauna and landscape versus, on the other hand, writing (of the kind pioneered by Aksakov) that tends to respect the autonomy of biota and natural settings. I trace Turgenev's actual hunting practices and their ideological and aesthetic implications before embarking on a detailed analysis of how his hunting-based conception of nature shapes the extraordinary artistry of, among other works, his "Notes of a Hunter" (a cycle of short stories) and the novels "Rudin," "A Gentry Nest," "On the Eve," and "Fathers and Children." These are all mainstays of the Russian canon that open themselves up to fresh, culturally sensitive readings when they are approached from an ecocritical vantage point.
Filomina Steady
This study uses the controlled comparison method to investigate the role of women and gender dynamics in the creation of communities of freedom that constitute the Returned African Diasporas in West Africa. Field and archival studies are conducted in Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana, the Gambia and Sierra Leone using anthropological methods. The establishment of Returned Diasporas in Africa was a result of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and its abolition. These Diasporas restructured and reversed concepts of 'social death' to one of ‘social rebirth’ in the rebuilding of new communities in the Motherland. The study shows the central role of women in social organization, cultural reproduction, identity reformulation, community building and the promotion of values of freedom, social justice and equality. It uses African feminism to illustrate some of the tensions and gender dynamics, while centralizing the major contributions of women in the construction and development of these communities of freedom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt7EkRgHLcw
In the late nineteenth century regular and affordable steamships and railways brought Americans to and around Europe in growing numbers. Many of these travelers were aspiring women artists seeking the training and contact with original works of art that they could not receive at home. They naturally gravitated to Rome, where Henry James evocatively but dismissively characterized some of them as a “strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock.”
The poet and sculptor Anne Whitney (1821-1915) was part of this group. She and her companion, the painter Addy Manning (1836-1906), lived abroad from 1867-71 and 1875-76, primarily in Rome but also in Florence and for several months each summer in more temperate locales. Their lives abroad, as revealed in the art and other objects they created, admired, and acquired, and in the more than three hundred letters they wrote to and received from family and friends, form the framework for my study. But my research also examines contemporary newspapers as well as the letters and diaries of other sculptors, painters, authors, patrons, and travelers, both female and male, held in archives and institutions here and abroad. These primary sources demonstrate that Whitney’s experience abroad was not unique, though her detailed documentation of it was extremely unusual, and they provide me with a way to construct a vivid narrative of American experience in Italy. I look at what these women made, saw, wrote, bought, sold, and lived with while abroad and on their return to the United States. As the first American women to live in Italy and learn from its art and history, their lives abroad gave them a perspective they would not have had otherwise, and their experiences make them much more interesting than the anonymous flock described by Henry James.
A distinctive feature of pancreatic cancer cells is their tolerance to nutrient- and oxygen-deprivation. Pancreatic cancer cells, including PANC-1, can survive for 48 hours in the absence of essential amino acids, glucose, and serum, whereas normal cells die within 24 hours under identical conditions. Since normal tissues seldom encounter nutrient deprivation, targeting the resilience of pancreatic cancer cells under nutrient-deprivation is a compelling new therapeutic approach. Research in the Carrico-Moniz Lab uses organic synthesis to develop novel compounds of medicinal importance. Our studies in this area have culminated in the discovery of a patented family of coumarins possessing anti-proliferative activity against PANC-1 exclusively under nutrient-deprived conditions.
My project focuses on the films made in Austria between 1933 and 1937 by a few independent studios who produced films by and with the largely Jewish exiles from Hitler’s Germany. I trace the ways in which many of these attempt to come to terms with the trauma of exile, considering how the common language and close ties between Germany and Austria allowed filmmakers some level of continuity with their previous work, while pressures from Germany simultaneously meant that even these independent studios had to tightly control the content of these productions. These Austrian exile films represent an especially interesting body of work, both because they are tied most clearly to filmmakers’, actors’, and crews’ previous work and because they manage to subtly reflect on the experience of exile and the transitional period immediately after Hitler’s rise to power.
My project, Losing Laroche: The Story of the Titanic’s Only Black Passenger, is the first in-depth study of the only black family on-board the RMS Titanic. The story of the Haitian Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche, his French wife Juliette Lafargue, and their descendants is largely unknown and troubles the assumption of an all-white Titanic narrative held in the United States. I recount Laroche’s life story in order to probe the ways in which African-Americans make sense of their lived existence during what historian Rayford Logan called “the Nadir” of U.S. race relations. For many African Americans, the Titanic represented the ultimate symbol of white hubris. Indeed, in black memory and literature, the Titanic became a vehicle of jokes, roasts, and legends surrounding a possible black passenger. In Losing Laroche, I demonstrate how Laroche allows us to better understand the possibilities of black advancement in the Titanic moment and throughout the Diaspora. Simultaneously, Laroche also demonstrates the limitations of black advancement in an anti-black world. Losing Laroche is a compelling story that largely explains why many black people are always in a constant state of leaving home, in search of home.
Through interviews and ethnographic work in the India and the United States, this project investigates how global finance continues to expand its reach to new populations through small, uncollateralized loans that target women. I argue that microfinance—neither development intervention nor scam—constitutes a crucial element of what I call “frontier finance.” This aggressive outer edge of the financial system, comprised of diverse sub-prime financial products, leverages everyday relationships between loan officers and clients to turn women previously constructed as uncreditworthy into creditworthy borrowers.
While most research on microfinance is concerned with whether or not microfinance has had a sufficient “impact” on women borrowers, whether in terms of poverty alleviation or empowerment, I show instead that it is the working class loan officers, mostly men, who benefit most from this burgeoning financial industry in India. Women clients, on the other hand, engage with microfinance in diverse ways: they organize other neighborhood women into risk pools required by the microfinance companies, they use loans to pay school fees or medical expenses, and sometimes, they might invest their loans in a micro-entrepreneurial venture. But these working class women usually politely refuse offers of empowerment from the well-meaning microfinance providers, thus troubling taken-for-granted notions of who constitutes a poor woman in India and how loans or training can help them. A book manuscript based on this work, When Women Pay Up: Power, Profit, and Personhood in Global Microfinance is currently in production.
“Precision” has become a mainstay of global military doctrine. The need to adopt technologically-precise weaponry, technology capable of hitting targets with extraordinary accuracy, is extolled as both a military and humanitarian necessity of contemporary war. How is it that certain weapons have come to be defined as “precise”? This question may seem obvious on the face of it. But in reality, weapons with massive collateral damage, including strategic bombers and nuclear weapons, have been touted as precise. And why has “precise” warfare become equated with “legitimate warfare”?
Bacteria that have developed antibiotic resistance pose an increasing health risk. Antimicrobial peptides are small proteins produced by a wide variety of organisms that represent a potential alternative to conventional antibiotics in the fight against resistant bacteria. One intriguing family of these peptides are the histone-derived antimicrobial peptides (HDAPs), which are derived from the histone proteins that bind nucleic acids in cell nuclei. Research in the Elmore Lab uses a wide variety of experimental and computational methods, including bacterial assays, confocal microscopy, spectroscopic measurements, and molecular dynamics simulations, to characterize the activity and mechanism of HDAPs. We then apply the improved understanding of HDAP structure-function relationships from these studies to design novel peptides for antibacterial and drug delivery applications. These interdisciplinary studies involve significant collaboration with Wellesley undergraduates and faculty colleagues, such as Louise Darling (Biological Sciences/Biochemistry) and Mala Radhakrishnan.
The coastal waters off New England support many ecosystem services such as fisheries, recreation, conservation and shipping. Stanley is part of a newly founded Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site designed to understand how physical and chemical changes in the coastal waters stretching from Maine to North Carolina are affecting ecosystems, food webs, and productivity. The team of researchers, based at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Rhode Island, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Wellesley College, are using observations and modeling to examine processes, mechanisms and feedbacks occurring in these societally important waters. Stanley's role is to use dissolved gases, such as oxygen, oxygen isotopes, and argon to quantify biological productivity at the base of the ecosystem. To that end, she and her students bring a portable mass spectrometer on to two to four research cruises per year to measure the oxygen and argon everywhere the ship goes. Additionally, she collects water from the CTD rosette (see image) on which to measure oxygen isotopes.
This research is about unprecedented families … networks of strangers linked by genes, medical technology and the human desire for affinity and identity. It chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single moms make – from how to conceive, how to place donors in their family tree and what to do when it suddenly becomes clear that there are kids out there that share half their child’s DNA. Do shared genes make you family? Do kids find anything in common? What becomes of the chance networks that arise once parents and donor siblings find one another?
In Rhythms of Grease, Grime, Glass, and Glitter: The Body in Contemporary Black Art, I present a new interpretation of the work of Renée Stout, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Radcliffe Bailey, and David Hammons, using key examples of painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation by these prominent artists of African descent as case studies in a re-examination of the conventions and stereotypes employed in the making of works of art and in the representations of black bodies and black identity in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through the working (and re-working) of bodies and body parts that are identified as black through signs – kinky hair imprinted onto paper, a woman’s body molded and adorned with roots, a performance in a museum and as a museum, room installations of disengaged piano keys – the work of these four artists offers new ways of looking at and conceiving of black identity: by undermining familiar imagery, and shaking the viewer into a realization of the presence of the black body, their works break new ground not only in American art, but in contemporary art and American culture broadly construed.
Forest insects and pathogens are global agents of ecosystem disturbance. In the United States, tree stress and mortality from insects and pathogens creates billions of dollars in costs for U.S. municipalities and individual property owners. The interactions between insects and pathogens and other disturbances, such as climate change, are highly uncertain, but in many cases climate change is expected to increase insect and pathogen activity. This project will develop a framework to simulate and forecast the impacts of forest insects and pathogens through a generalized method that accurately captures the large diversity of their impacts. This framework will be used to simulate the potential impacts of insect and pathogen outbreaks in forests across the continental U.S. and to investigate the specific impacts of three invasive insects –Lymantria dispar, Agrilus planipennis, and Adelges tsugae – in the northeastern U.S. A key benefit of this research is that it will improve the ability to simulate future impacts of insects and pathogens on forests in combination with other disturbances like drought, heat waves, and extreme rainfall events. This research will also increase the diversity of the U.S. STEM workforce by training undergraduate women in cutting-edge quantitative methods.
The trillions of microbes inhabiting our bodies are essential for extracting nutrients from our food to maintaining the health of our immune systems. There is a growing recognition that the microbiome is directly linked to the health and development of infants and children. Research in our lab and in collaboration with several universities and research centers across the country brings together the gut microbiome, human genetics, nutrition, and cognitive development to improve our understanding of environmental influences on health outcomes in children. The longitudinal study follows over 1000 children between the ages of 0 to 12 years. As such, the study provides an ideal system for investigating the relationships among microbes, their resilience and stability, and their interactions with the human body.
Mainstream accounts narrate globalization since the 1970s as markets set free. Yet the story is more one of encasement than liberation as proliferating trade treaties, investment agreements, justice reform projects, Rule of Law indicators, balanced budget amendments and forums for non-state arbitration have shifted the world economy from the purview of government to that of law. It shows that the field of international economic law developed since the 1970s from the belief that decolonization and democracy were threats to the global economy. This project offers the first intellectual history of this transformation. Experts proposed that global capitalism and democracy could only co-exist by legally limiting state sovereignty or “tying Ulysses to the mast.”
Collective writing has been a part of the Italian literary scene for the last 15 years or so. Some writing collectives have enjoyed a degree of commercial success. My project surveys these groups, assesses their similarities and differences and asks what repercussions collective writing has on the concepts of author, authorship, property and ownership of the text.
Through a series of case studies, my book-in-progress examines the ways in which "unconventional" clients – men and women who stood apart from social norms by virtue of their sexuality or alternative ways of living – and their architects used hybrid designs and unusual planning strategies to create public facades (both literal and figurative) that shielded private enclaves behind blank Modern walls or deceptively traditional exteriors.
As a part of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (hubbardbrook.org), I am investigating how climate, weather and the abundance of insects and nest predators affect the distribution, demography and population dynamics of songbirds in a northern hardwood forest, Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, New Hampshire.
This project concerns a set of related questions about access to, control over, and preservation of cultural heritage, especially as it is manifested in art and the environment. Where does art belong? Who should own or control art? Does art have universal value that dictates everyone should be able to access it? What role do histories of colonial acquisition play in addressing these questions? What does it mean to claim a place as part of one's heritage? How should we account for heritage values in pursuing environmental preservation? I attempt to shed light on these questions through interdisciplinary investigation of cultural property, appropriation, repatriation, and preservation.
Psychiatric disorders are impairing and distressing to a large percentage of the population. Unfortunately, the field has a limited understanding of which factors contribute to the development and maintenance of psychiatric symptoms. My lab uses a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques to examine the factors that contribute to irritability, a proneness towards anger that exceeds one's peers. Recent projects have explored whether irritability in young adults is associated with the same types of behavioral and neural abnormalities that have been observed among pediatric populations.
The overarching research theme of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES) is the response of ecosystem structure, composition and function to disturbance. Disturbances, both natural and anthropogenic, are the most important factors driving change at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and throughout the Northern Forest region. Predicting the future of these forested landscapes requires a comprehensive understanding of multiple disturbances and their interactions. Some of these disturbances are chronic and long-term, such as gradual changes in average temperature and precipitation or the steady progression of beech bark disease. Others are intense and episodic, such as ice storms, wind storms, and insect outbreaks. Moreover, these disturbances may leave legacies that affect the forest, and its response to future disturbances, for decades or centuries. In this project, Matthes and her students work to understand the long-term feedbacks between soil processes, plant physiology, and tree community composition, structure, and function.
The fact that online social networks play a significant role in our perception of reality is relatively new and well documented. Along with Search Engines, they are our principal source of information on a daily basis. In the last decade, we have been researching many aspects related to the propagation of information and misinformation, the prediction of political events, and have developed tools that help users evaluate the trustworthiness of information. In particular, research in my lab has documented the shifting ways that students rely on the Web for information; the efforts of individuals, groups, and companies manipulate the ranking of search query results; the first Twitter Bomb, Google bombs; the evolution of the “fake news” phenomenon; and other examples of online propaganda using algorithmic techniques. We have also analyzed the reasons behind the unpredictability of electoral results based solely on data from online social networks.
Why are Islamic charities in Pakistan building a parallel state?
Our Solar System is not alone in the Galaxy. My group uses our on-campus research telescope to help discover exoplanets -- planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. We search stars for signs that an orbiting planet is passing between us and periodically blocking a small fraction ( < 1%) of the star's light in an event known as a transit. We work as part of two international collaborations. With the ground-based KELT (Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope) project, we have already helped to discover several giant planets that have been puffed up as a result of their close proximity to the very hot stars they orbit. We are also part of the follow-up team for NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission, due to launch in Spring 2018.
Quantum mechanics and General Relativity are immensely successful frameworks that agree with experiment with unprecedented precision. But they are incompatible with each other. New ideas in physics that unite quantum mechanics and general relativity predict tiny but detectable deviations from General Relativity. Using a technique called Lunar Laser Ranging, we can measure the Earth-Moon distance with a precision of one millimeter (that's a part in a trillion of the distance). We pulse green laser light from a telescope on Earth to retro-reflectors placed on the Moon by Apollo astronauts and Russian rovers. By monitoring the shape of the lunar orbit over time, we achieve leading constraints on relativistic gravity. Although our observations thus far are consistent with General Relativity, ongoing enhancements to our experimental sensitivity could reveal the first cracks in Einstein's gravitational edifice, and would provide a vital clue toward a grand, unified theory.
Astrophysical observations reveal that more than 80% of the matter in the Universe is dark. Identifying the new physics of dark matter is a primary scientific target for the 21st century. My group develops detectors to sense dark matter particles as they stream through the laboratory. These particles should strike an atom in the detector, causing it to recoil. By measuring the direction of the resulting recoil, we can build a skymap, as shown above, to learn not only about the physics of dark matter, but also about the structure of the Milky Way galaxy.
The ocean takes up about 25% of the carbon dioxide that is emitted by fossil fuel burning - so without the ocean, the atmosphere would be heating up even more quickly. The first step in this oceanic uptake process is air-sea gas exchange -- the crossing of the molecules of carbon dioxide (or other gases) from the atmosphere into the ocean. One of the aims of my research is to improve our understanding of and ability to model air-sea gas exchange. To that end, I am conducting research in the nation's largest wind-wave tank at the Rosenstiel School of Marine Science at the University of Miami. During the summer, my students and I set up two mass spectrometers on top of the tank and measure noble gases, oxygen, and carbon dioxide within the tank water at a range of wave conditions at wind speeds ranging from 20 to 80 miles per hour. We are using these gases to understand how bubbles and high wind speeds affect air sea gas exchange.
In this world on the move, how are people protected and provided for outside the framework of the nation-state. What kinds of new, transnational institutional arrangements are emerging to serve people whose lives traverse more than one nation-state?
Technology pervades so many personal and public aspects of our lives, making understanding its security and privacy properties critical to supporting the well being of all members of our free society. In this project, we aim to understand the security and privacy challenges faced marginalized groups, and how it may be possible to make technology better serve their needs.
The plant vascular system is of critical importance for normal plant growth, development and function, yet the mechanisms that govern development of the intricate and beautiful vascular patterns we observe in nature, are largely unknown. The vascular patterns of leaves and cotyledons provide a convenient system for addressing this complex problem. The process begins when narrow files of cells are recruited in a pattern that predicts the final venation pattern. These cells subsequently become committed to a vascular fate and differentiate into the procambium, a stem cell population that will ultimately produce the conducting tissues of the veins – xylem and phloem. Research in the Peterman lab is exploring the cellular and molecular mechanisms required for establishment of this critical stem cell population in the flowering plant model organism, Arabidopsis thaliana. Specifically, this project aims to define the role of the Sec14-related proteins, PATELLIN-1 and -2, in membrane trafficking events critical to the formation of the procambium. The enhanced understanding of how the plant vascular systems develops that will result from this project may prove useful in designing genetic modifications of plants of agronomic importance. This is particularly relevant for plants used for biofuels since xylem, makes up the bulk of plant biomass, an increasingly valuable source of renewable energy.
The objective of this ethnographic research is to investigate how Tibetan Buddhists in three diaspora communities in New York City, India, and Nepal, conceive of, and prepare for death. To address this research objective, the project asks: 1) Do Tibetan Buddhists in transnational contexts who are exposed to new end-of-life practices, perspectives, or technologies reimagine what it means to die a “good death”?; and 2) Does globalized discourse on gender reconfigure women’s aspirations for death and rebirth? Using death as a site of inquiry, this project considers an apparent paradox: how a temporal focus on life beyond death may enhance agency and empowerment in the present.
Graph Theory is a field of mathematics that encompasses tools and techniques for modeling and solving real world problems. A graph consists of a set of vertices, some of which are joined by edges. As an example, we can form a graph in which the vertices represent a set of people and the edges depict friendships.
In my research, I study families of graphs with inherent structure. I am particularly interested in interval graphs and their variants, which can be used to model scheduling problems. Given a set of meetings, each occurring in a fixed time block (an interval), we can form a graph by assigning a vertex to each meeting and joining two vertices by an edge precisely when the corresponding meetings conflict. Interval graphs can be used to analyze scheduling conflicts and determine the number of rooms needed to accommodate a set of meetings.
As a researcher, I seek results that characterize which graphs belong to a given structured family and develop algorithms to efficiently determine membership. Many of the families of graphs I study can also be viewed as partially ordered sets (posets) and I take advantage of this dual perspective in my work.
My research is in topology, and in particular in the Goodwillie-Weiss manifold calculus of functors and its applications to embedding spaces and to knot and link spaces in particular. I have studied some ways in which this theory connects to the theory of finite type invariants of classical knots and Milnor invariants of homotopy links. I have used both embedding and orthogonal calculus of functors to study the rational homotopy type of spaces of knots in any dimension, and more generally spaces of embeddings of any manifold in a Euclidean space. I have also studied configuration space integrals and their interaction with functor calculus. In addition, I have been trying to understand how these integrals might give insight into the topology of links, homotopy links, and braids, as well as how they can be used to define asymptotic invariants of vector fields. I have also recently started studying r-immersions (immersions without r-fold self-intersections) using functor calculus techniques in hope to apply them to some problems in combinatorial topology.
New data from a Russian game show reveal that female players of equal ability are significantly less likely to be picked by male team captains to answer a given question as compared to their male counterparts. We design a controlled laboratory experiment that sheds light on why the ideas contributed by men may be evaluated differently as compared to ideas contributed by women of the same baseline ability. We use a simulated group discussion with a novel task to explore this question. Subjects propose answers to a question, and then have the opportunity to select another individual to answer on behalf of the group. By randomly assigning subjects to treatments where gender is or is not observable and by varying the extent to which players can communicate and express confidence in their ability to answer, we separate the mechanisms behind any gender gap in the probability of being chosen to answer. In particular, we consider two possible explanations. Discrimination may be taste-based (pure bias against women), in which case we would expect to see the gender gap only in any treatment where gender is revealed. However, the ways in which women express confidence could also influence outcomes. In this case we would expect to see that women are chosen equally in treatments at some levels of communication, but are less likely to be chosen at other levels of communication, regardless of whether or not gender is revealed.
Barbara Strozzi (1619-77), a Venetian virtuosa singer-composer, wrote three laments in the 1650s in response to a contest debated by the Academy of the Unisoni: what is more powerful to inspire emotion, witnessing tears or song? At the time of the debate in the late 1630s, Strozzi recited the arguments of the contestants on both sides of the question, having a profound effect on the gathered academicians. She answered the question when she performed with a weeping-singing technique that was new to the genre of the lament, which had been established by Claudio Monteverdi and Francesco Cavalli and was all the rage at the time.
The main purpose of this project is to understand the incentives of crowds in mobile crowd sensing (MCS) platforms, and attempt to coordinate their mobility to optimize for system objectives. This is performed through the development of a crowd sensing mobile application, which will provide incentives for agents to share their mobility information, which will be used to recommend for them the tasks that they should complete along their routes.
A century-long trend towards earlier retirement for men in the U.S. and other developed countries came to a sudden halt in the mid-1990s. Over the past twenty years, both men and women in these countries have been working longer. During the same period, many countries enacted reforms to their social security programs, such as raising the eligibility age and cutting benefits. How much of the increase in work at older ages is due to these reforms?
Through my work as Co-Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s International Social Security (ISS) working group, I hope to help answer this question. The ISS team is a group of researchers in a dozen countries that has been working together for two decades to explore the economics of an aging workforce. For each question that we tackle, country teams conduct their own studies following a common approach and the results are combined to draw cross-country comparisons. Differences across countries in social security provisions serve as a “natural experiment” we can use to learn the program’s effects on behavior. In our current work, we document how the financial incentive to retire has changed over time due to social security reforms and explore how this relates to changes in retirement behavior.
This project examines the paradigm shift from inequality to solidarity currently underway in the U.S.; the ways in which economics as a discipline has to evolve in order to study and facilitate this shift; the various ways in which social movements - feminist, anti-racist, workers, and ecology -- are bringing this transformation; and the emergent "solidarity economy."
There is a fundamental gap in understanding how plasticity in the nervous system supports the development of communication skills. The acquisition of a songbird’s song parallels human speech learning at the behavioral as well as the neuronal level and thus provides unique opportunities to investigate the neural mechanisms of learning and memory. In this project, we aim to determine how early auditory experience modifies neuronal systems underlying memory for vocalizations. We use manipulations of the early auditory environment, quantification of stimulus-dependent neuronal activation, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and pharmacological inhibition of neuronal activity. Understanding the normal development of auditory perception will allow us to further investigate auditory-vocal learning at the cellular and molecular level and, ultimately, to identify candidate mechanisms for disorders of auditory perception and language acquisition.
My research does not involve medical surgery but the study of spaces of dimension 5 or larger. Surgery is a mathematical tool that rips spaces apart and glues them back together in a different way than before. With this machinery, topologists are able to understand topological objects and even identify the existence of spaces that we do not even know how to construct explicitly. Surgery theory arises as the combined effort of hundreds of mathematicians over six or seven decades. Recently I co-authored a research monograph on surgery theory which will be published by Princeton University Press.
Locomotion and feeding are essential behaviors for the survival and reproductive fitness of most animals. However, little is understood about why some individuals within a population outperform others and are better suited to their habitat. Populations of bluegill sunfish often diverge into two different body forms based on their habitat: a deeper-bodied shallow water form or a streamlined deep water form. This variation creates an ideal system for investigating the relationships between form, function and adaptation to habitat.
This project analyzes the role of securities underwriters in American financial development. During the nineteenth century, investment bankers developed the capacity to raise huge amounts of capital for railroads and other large firms, and typically played an important role in their governance. Yet their growing influence over economic life became politically controversial. In this project, which is joint work with Prof. Carola Frydman at Northwestern University, I study the rise and decline of financiers in the American economy, and I use legislative changes intended to restrain the influence of financiers to estimate the benefits or costs associated with their roles.
New nerve cells are generated in the brains of many adult organisms, including humans, and their production is regulated by a variety of factors such as environment, diet, the day-night cycle and hormones. These adult-born neurons appear to play a role in learning and memory, and a dysregulation in adult neurogenesis has been linked to several neurological diseases. The Beltz lab has been using a relatively simple model system, the crustacean brain, to explore fundamental questions about mechanisms producing the adult-born neurons. Among these are issues related to the stem cells that are the 1st-generation neural precursors. In the crustacean brain, these "stem cells" are not self-renewing and must be replenished from a non-neuronal source. Our studies show that hemocytes (blood cells) coming from the innate immune system are a likely source of these neuronal precursors. Goals of current research in the Beltz lab are to: (1) localize the specific immune tissue source of the neuronal precursors; (2) define agents that may be important in attracting hemocytes to the neurogenic niche; (3) develop in vitro and transgenic approaches that will allow us to examine these issues in new ways.
