Seventeen Senior Honors Students Have Been Awarded Schiff Fellowships

Meet this year’s Jerome A. Schiff Fellows. For 2013-2014, 17 senior honors thesis students have been awarded generous funding from the Jerome A. Schiff Charitable Trust. Congratulations to:

Emily Anderson ’14, Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences
Accent Acquisition: Jamaican Creole Speakers' Pronunciation of Standard American English

Lara Gechijian ’14, Biological Chemistry
The Effect of a Novel Cytotoxic Agent on the Kinetics of Phosphodiesterase 3A

Michaela Haffner ’14, Art History
The Intersection of Modern Art and Medicine: Édouard Vuillard's Domestic Paintings of the 1890s

Hannah Herde ’14, Physics
Modeling Atmospheres: Ultraviolet Light Absorption by Sulfur Dioxide and Diatomic Sulfur

Victoria Hills ’14, Biological Sciences
Defining Cancer: Factors Predictive of High-Risk Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Charlotte Hulme ’14, Political Science
Ethnic Conflict by Other Means: Localized Transitional Justice in Rwanda

Young-Ah (Lucy) Lee ’14, Chemistry
Janus Devices for Gastrointestinal Drug Delivery

Grace Leeson ’14, History
"Let Moms Tell You What Happened in the Good Ole Days:" Contextualizing Female Comedians and Their Activism in the United States Civil Rights Movement

Yikang Li ’14, Economics
Adverse Selection in the Great Irish Tontines of 1773, 1775 and 1777

Sara Martin ’14, Biological Chemistry
Monoclonal Antibody Targeted Delivery of Boron Loaded Gold Nanoparticles to Pancreatic Cancer Cells for Boron Neutron Capture Therapy

Catherine Matulis ’14, Physics
Building a Confocal Microscope for the Study of Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in Diamond Nanocrystals

Sophia Mo ’14, French
Intellectuals, Defenders of French Republican Ideals?: The Violence of the Algerian War and the Ambiguity of the Role of the Intellectual

Katherine Siegel ’14, Music
Berlioz's Les Nuits D'été: Masterful Orchestration as a Vehicle for Text Expression

Caroline Templeton ’14, Geosciences
Controlling Factors of Coastal Morphology in Aceh, Indonesia, since the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami

Mayrah Udvardi ’14, Environmental Studies
Bangalore: Urban Development and Sustainable Design for the Underclass

Emily Weddle ’14, Music
The Powerhouses of Parisian Society: Effects of Female Patronage on the Ballets Russes

Helen Willis ’14, Economics
Infant Mortality and Income Inequity in the United States

Each of the Fellows brings her own conviction and curiosity to her project. Grace Leeson ’14, president of Wellesley’s improvisational comedy group Dead Serious, is studying the role of female comedians in political communities during the civil rights movement. “I’m expanding our notion of what it means to be political, which is beyond the traditional images of the civil rights movement,” said Leeson. “I want to look at how people unite in political communities outside of traditional grassroots activism.”

Charlotte Hulme ’14 will be using her grant to conduct interviews in Rwanda. “I’m looking at some local level courts in Rwanda that were put into place after the genocide in 1994. It’s interesting how the state became involved in the courts, which were traditionally organized at the local level,” said Hulme. “I’m trying to figure out how the courts in practice ultimately contributed to national reconciliation or not. By speaking with Rwandans who have participated in the courts, I might get a better understanding of how well these actually work.”

Schiff Fellowships are awarded on the basis of merit. Awardees receive $2,000 to fund any part of their research, be it for travel, gaining access to data, or paying participants in studies. The Fellows’ highly specified and detailed work is greatly enriched by the funding. Hannah Herde ’14 expressed how essential these resources were to her studies. “Science is not something people can do in their basement anymore. It requires that we talk to each other and learn to communicate,” said Herde. “To take my education at Wellesley out into this global collaboration has been an amazing experience, and I’d like to thank Wellesley and the Schiff Fellowship for giving me the opportunity to do that.”

The Fellows will present their projects and findings at the 2014 Ruhlman Conference in April.

—Susan Puente Matos ‘14