Wellesley Wire Video Introduces Five Schiff Fellows and Their Projects

February 5, 2013

Each year, a select group of senior honors students are awarded Jerome A. Schiff Fellowships. The fellowships, which are made possible through a generous gift from the Jerome A. Schiff Charitable Trust, enable Wellesley College to fund the independent research projects of 10 to 15 students during the academic year.

A video by Gabrielle Linnell '13, now posted to the Wellesley Wire, invites you to meet five Schiff Fellows in "their natural habitats." The fellows profiled are: Lynn Geiger '13, astronomy and geosciences; Paula Yust '13, psychology; Lucy Liu '13, chemistry; Sara Putterman '13, art history; and Priscilla Gutierrez '13, sociology.

Linnell, herself a Schiff Fellow, is not profiled in the videos, but she did write about the inspiration for her project, and her experience, in a blog which was published by the Huffington Post College. Read: "Searching for Donne."

"It was because of Donne, and his fellow English Renaissance poets, that I had boarded a plane to England to spend two weeks running around the country, visiting libraries, speaking with scholars, and walking in some of the places where they lived," wrote Linnell, a medieval and Renaissance studies major. "I was searching for inspiration and enlightenment for my senior thesis—an extensive comparative analysis of travel, home, and space in Donne's work and in the poems of Andrew Marvell."

All of the 2013 Schiff Fellows will present their research at the 2013 Ruhlman Conference in April.

2012-13 Schiff Fellows, Their Thesis Topics and Advisors

  • Bridget Begg
    Medieval Nonsense Verse: Contributions to the Literary Genre
    (Matthew Sergi, English)
  • Lizi Chen
    Welfare Analysis of Long-term Care Insurance Market: A Sufficient Statistics Approach
    (Casey Rothschild, Economics)
  • Mariya Chokova
    The Female Perspectives on Literature Under the Regimes of Mussolini (Italy) and Salazar (Portugal): A Comparative Analysis
    (David Ward, Italian Studies)
  • Jennifer Fishbein
    Signaling Mechanisms and Physical Structure of Biofilm Growth in Synechocystis sp. Strain PCC 6803
    (Mary Allen, Biological Sciences)
  • Lynn Geiger
    Distribution Analysis and Comparison of Martian and Lunar Craters
    (Wesley Watters, Astronomy)
  • Yuting Guo
    India and China’s Responses to the U.S. Policies of the Global War on Terror
    (Paul MacDonald, Political Science)
  • Priscilla Gutierrez
    How Women Experience and Acquire Privilege in Elite Liberal Arts Colleges
    (Markella Rutherford, Sociology)
  • Gabrielle Linnell
    The World’s Contracted Thus: The Question of Travel in the Poetry of John Donne and Andrew Marvell
    (Sarah Wall-Randall, English)
  • Lucy Liu
    Molecular Matchmaking: A Computational Study of How Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Drugs and Targets Interact
    (Mala Radhakrishan, Chemistry)
  • Rebecca McClain
    Optimizing a Nanovehicle for Pancreatic Cancer
    (Nolan Flynn, Chemistry)
  • Kelly Mercer
    To Sink or Swim: Explaining U.S. Coastal State Sea-Level Rise Policy
    (Beth DeSombre, Environmental Studies)
  • Elena Mironciuc
    Forging a New Russian Hero: Post-Soviet Science Fiction and Its Moral Objectives
    (Thomas Hodge, Russian)
  • Lamiya Mowla
    Radiative Cooling of Silicon Wafer for Gravity Wave Detection
    (Robbie Berg, Physics)
  • Sara Putterman
    Italian Renaissance Textiles in the Davis Museum
    (Jacqueline Musacchio, Art)
  • Kia Salehi
    Using Optogenetics to Causally Test the Role of Neural Coherence in Attention
    (Michael Wiest, Neuroscience)
  • Paula Yust
    Predictors of Unilateral to Reciprocal Friendship Development among Preschoolers
    (Tracey Gleason, Psychology)

Honorable Mention

  • Erin Yeagle
    Binocular Stereopsis in Areas V2, V3 and V3A of the Macaque Monkey
    (Bevil Conway, Neuroscience)
  • Da In Kim
    Detection of Object Boundaries Using Stereo and Motion Cues
    (Ellen Hildreth, Computer Science)