2010-2011 Graduate Student Achievements

• Psychology GSAS doctoral students Michael Slepian and Priya Mitra and biology graduate students Crista Burke and Jessica Walden-Gray were awarded 2011 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. The three-year awards fund graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields within the United States and abroad. The support includes a $30,000 annual stipend, cost of education and travel allowances, and access to the TeraGrid supercomputer. The GSAS students were four of only 2,000 graduate students chosen as 2011 fellows; the NSF received over 12,000 applications for this program. "An NSF graduate fellowship recognizes the most outstanding abilities, accomplishments, and promise in doctoral scholarship in the sciences and engineering," said Lynne Pepall, dean of GSAS. "Having these new NSF graduate fellowships awarded in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is a wonderful recognition of our students and their exciting research." Read more by clicking here.
   
• Aaron Brown, a GSAS mathematics doctoral student, was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. The two-year, $130,000 fellowship will support Brown's continuing research on the classification of basic sets in 3-manifolds and his investigation of the structure of the group of measure preserving diffeomorphisms. "This is a prestigious award for Aaron and for our graduate program," said Boris Hasselblatt, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics. "It is a bit of a job to get figures, but the last one I heard was that there are twenty to thirty of these fellowships awarded each year to the very top students in the country. This award shows that our best graduate students are equal to the very best students elsewhere."Read more by clicking here.
   
• GSAS psychology student Patricia Allen was named the recipient of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools Outstanding Master's Thesis Award in March 2011. Allen received the award, which came with a $1,000 prize, for her thesis on the research she conducted on creatine and its potential to serve as a complementary or alternative treatment for depression. The first half of Allen's thesis was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology in 2010, and she is continuing her research as a psychology doctoral student at Tufts. Allen, whose doctoral studies are being funded in part by a predoctoral fellowship from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, hopes her research will "provide mechanistic insight to improve our understanding of the neurobiology of depression, to enhance current antidepressant therapies, and to better inform the design of human clinical trials." Read more by clicking here.
   
• GSAS art history student Ximena Gomez won the best paper award by a master's student at the 2011 Texas A&M University Graduate History Conference held in February 2011. Gomez won the $125 prize for her presentation titled, "Santiago in Siena: A Transatlantic Approach." Said Gomez, "My presentation confronted the question of what place a very Spanish image—that of Santiago Matamoros ("Saint James the Moor-Slayer")—had in a chapel in Siena, Italy. The city had at the time had fallen under the control of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. To uncover possible receptions that the Italians may have had to the painting, I looked to representations of Santiago Matamoros and Santiago Mataindios ("the Indian-slayer") in Spain's New World colonies. By examining the chapel image in the historical context of Charles's invasion and drawing from these New World images and interpretations, I was able to identify readings of the image other than those most likely intended by the Spanish imperial patrons." Gomez, who graduated in May 2011, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the history of art at the University of Michigan. Read more by clicking here.
   
• Timothy Lawton, a GSAS chemistry doctoral student and member of the Sykes Research Group at Tufts, was one of only twelve graduate students in the country chosen to participate in the 13^th annual JFC-Fruhjahrssymposium in Erlangen, Germany. The symposium, which took place in March 2011, brought together young chemists from the northeastern United States and across Europe. Lawton's current research is aimed at probing the interaction of molecules with metal surfaces, and while in Germany he presented a project titled, "Atomic-Scale Studies on Curved Copper Single Crystals." Lawton was chosen to participate in the symposium by the Northeastern Section Younger Chemists Committee (NSYCC) and the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society (NESACS).
   
• GSAS urban and environmental policy and planning graduate student Ryan Fattman was sworn in as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in January 2011. Fattman, a Republican, represents the 18^th Worcester District, which includes the Massachusetts communities of Bellingham, Millville, Blackstone, and parts of Sutton and Uxbridge. Fattman is also a former Sutton town selectman, and in 2008 was one of only twelve graduate students in Massachusetts chosen as a public policy fellow by the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government's Rappaport Institute. Read more by clicking here.
   
• A team consisting of GSAS urban and environmental policy and planning graduate students Kris Carter, Eric Giambrone, Eunice Kim, Michelle Moon, and Jong Wai Tommee received the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Planning Association's (APA) 2010 Outstanding Student Planning Award for Best Community-Wide Project. The team, which accepted the award during a luncheon in December 2010, worked with government departments and community groups in Watertown, Massachusetts to produce a report titled, "Watertown Community Path: Linking Watertown's Past to its Future." The report examined the feasibility of developing a multi-use path connecting East Watertown, Watertown Square, and the Charles River, and last July the Watertown Town Council voted unanimously to adopt, virtually without change, the group's detailed conceptual plan for the Community Path. The graduate students completed the project as part of the field projects class each UEP student takes during their first year in the program. Read more by clicking here.
   
• Meron Langsner, a GSAS drama doctoral student and award-winning playwright, is using YouTube to collaborate with Zillah Glory, a critically-acclaimed actress who alternates her time between California and Minnesota. Together, Glory and Langsner have been workshopping a monologue Langsner has written as well as other works in earlier stages of development. "I knew that Zillah was interested in new work and we had a very strong artistic rapport when we worked together in Boston some time ago," said Langsner. "So, I proposed that we could workshop some monologues I was writing and explore both the actor's process in learning a new work and the writer's process while working with an actor." The distance between the pair—which can be anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 miles depending on where Glory is residing at the time—has proven to be a nonissue with the help of YouTube. By posting videos on the site, Langsner and Glory have been able to both explore their own work and document how technology can be used in the dramatic arts. The videos can be viewed by clicking here.
   
• GSAS studio art students Sofia Botero, Robert Gross-Kennedy, John Guy Petruzzi, Emily Somma, and Angela Lauren Speece presented their work at the Tufts Art Gallery as part of the December 2010 MFA Thesis Exhibition. The exhibit, which was held in the Tufts University Art Gallery from December 2, 2010 to December 19, 2010, included works such as a mixed media installation piece designed to help the viewer meditate upon the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to a series of mural-scale watercolors of life-sized animals which raise questions of life, loss, change, and intervention. Read more about the exhibit by clicking here.
   
• Four Graduate School of Arts and Sciences students presented their research during a December 10, 2010 symposium titled, "Lady Gaga's Bad Romance with Feminism." The event was sponsored by the Women's Center and the Graduate Student Council, and included presentations by music graduate students Stephanie Gunst ("Wanting Love and Revenge: Critiquing the Canon in Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance'") and Rebekah Lobosco ("When Gaga Meets 'Glee': Interpretations of 'Poker Face'") and English doctoral students Anne Moore ("Don't Ask Don't T-t-t-telephone Me: Soldiers, Paranoia, and Reparation") and James Mulder ("Dysfunctional Sex in 'Alejandro'"). Read more by clicking here.
   
• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences urban and environmental policy and planning graduate student Alejandra St. Guillen was chosen as the new executive director of ¿Oíste?, a Boston-based nonprofit organization working to advance the political, social, and economic standing of Latinos and Latinas in Massachusetts. In her new role, St. Guillen will direct the organization's fundraising initiatives, provide day-to-day management of its finances and administrative operations, and develop new partnerships statewide and nationally to advance ¿Oíste?'s funding and programmatic work. Read more by clicking here.
   
• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences occupational therapy graduate student Jacqueline Bresnahan published an article titled, "Tri-Leadership Learning as a Group Within a Group," in OT Practice magazine. The article, which appeared in the November 8, 2010 edition, focused on how Bresnahan and fellow occupational therapy students Nataly Gutflais and Shawna Hollebone used the Nintendo Wii system with clients suffering from memory loss-related issues. Read more by clicking here.
   
• The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) and the School of Engineering have awarded research grants-in-aid to sixteen graduate students for the fall 2010 semester. The awardees, who come from eight different graduate departments, are pursuing projects with titles such as "You Look Mixed, What Are You? Perceptions of Mixed Race Individuals"; "The Contribution of Histones to Maintaining DNA Triplet Repeat Stability"; "Looking for Nothing: The Search for Abstraction in Matisse"; and "Viral Templated Pt Nanocatalysts for PEM Fuel Cell Application" Read more by clicking here.
   
• Graduate School of Arts and Sciences chemistry doctoral student Heather Tierney won the Morton M. Traum Award in October 2010. The award, which comes with $1,200 and a certificate, recognizes the best surface science presentation by a graduate student during the International American Vacuum Society’s (AVS) annual meeting. Tierney’s winning presentation was titled, “Understanding and Controlling Rotation at the Single-Molecule Level.” During the AVS meeting, Tierney also received the Dorothy M. and Earl S. Hoffman Scholarship. The scholarship, as explained on the AVS website, “recognizes and encourages excellence in continuing graduate studies in the sciences and technologies of interest to AVS.” Heather Tierney was one of only two graduate student attendees to receive the scholarship, which comes with a $1,250 prize and reimbursement for travel expenses to attend the AVS meeting, which was held in New Mexico.
   
• GSAS child development doctoral student Jessica Dym Bartlett was chosen to be a fellow by the National Quality Improvement Center on Early Childhood in October 2010. The fellowship supports up to two years of dissertation research, with each recipient receiving $25,000 for each twelve-month period. Bartlett, who was one of only two graduate students in the country chosen to be a fellow, will serve as a fellow from 2010-2012. Her dissertation will focus on how adolescent mothers with a history of childhood maltreatment manage to break the cycle of abuse and neglect and parent their own children successfully. Read more by clicking here.
   
• GSAS urban and environmental policy and planning graduate student Julio Roman was part of a team that produced a film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart." The film, which was featured on the Tufts website in October 2010, was made by Roman and undergraduates Ned Berger, Josh Hale, and Erika Volchan O’Conor as part of the Experimental College’s "Making Movies" class. View the film by clicking here.
   
• Livia Lin, a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) music student, performed her original composition “Childhood Sketches” at the Asian Music Festival earlier in October 2010. The festival, which took place in Tokyo, Japan, included graduate student and professional composers and performers from Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Israel, and Australia. Lin, who is originally from Hong Kong, was also a finalist (advanced level) for the 2009 National Academy of Music’s International Music Prize for Excellence in Composition.
   
• GSAS child development doctoral student Miriam Arbeit has been appointed to the Massachusetts AIDS Advisory Panel. As a panel member, Arbeit will be responsible for reviewing all new sexuality education materials that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education distributes to educators in public schools; she will also play an active role in assessing the needs of youth when it comes to sexuality education and she will help youth leaders draft and present policy proposals to key decision makers in government, education, and other sectors. Arbeit is a graduate of Columbia University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and human rights in 2007, and her primary research interests involve using the PYD approach to study adolescent sexual development, focusing on how school-based curricula and out-of-school-time programs can proactively support adolescents in developing sexual agency, sexual ethics, and the social, emotional, and cognitive skills necessary to make healthy decisions and engage in fulfilling relationships. Read more about Miriam Arbeit.