SAS Graduate Students Honored as 2025 Dean's Scholars
Penn Arts & Sciences has named 20 students from the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Liberal & Professional Studies, and the Graduate Division as 2025 Dean’s Scholars. This honor is presented annually to students who exhibit exceptional academic performance and intellectual promise. Congratulations to our SAS doctoral scholars!
Vivian Bi (Anthropology)
Vivian Bi is a third-year PhD Candidate in Anthropology who investigates the relationships between governance, migration and ecology. Vivian’s dissertation explores the ways that utopian communities have attempted to reverse Chinese migration trends and attract residents to rural villages that advance alternate forms of governance and environmentally sustainable living practices. At Penn, Vivian has served as a coordinator for EnviroLab, organizing a campus working group and a two-day graduate conference in Environmental Anthropology. In Fall 2024, she co-founded Upstream, a publishing collective focused on “noticing, questioning and mapping the dynamic ecologies between people, the built environment, and our nonhuman relatives.”
Sophia Cocozza (Music)
Sophia Cocozza is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Music Studies. Sophia’s current research explores sound art, with a dissertation project that focuses on avant-garde installation art practices, particularly in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, and Milan. Her work stands out for its emphasis on sound as a central element in installation art. Sophia’s research sits at the cross-disciplinary intersections of sound, performance, and materiality, with particular attention to issues of gender and disability. It also intersects valuably with museum studies and builds on her experience working in galleries and public art spheres. Her concentration in museum work has developed in tandem with training in early music as well as extensive archival work. Sophia considers how notation, gesture, touch, and community voicing inform interpretations of sound by artists of various backgrounds. Sophia regularly translates her scholarly interests to activities on campus, playing a crucial role in exhibitions presented in conjunction with the “Music in the Pavilion” concert series in the Kislak Center and serving as a guide at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA).
Alyssa M. Hernandez (Psychology)
Alyssa is a third-year graduate student in clinical psychology, focusing on access to and quality of behavioral and mental health services for neurodiverse children from underserved communities. Her research explores how families cope with neurodiverse children’s needs, building partnerships with frontline workers and agency leaders. She is also interested in applying development economics to improve support services, such as non-contingent cash transfers. Alyssa has published a paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry on the impact of family demographics on early intervention practices. At Penn, she founded a DEI group for clinical psychology, addressing curricular issues and offering peer consultation.
Joyce Jaeyun Kim (Sociology)
Joyce Kim is a third-year Ph.D. student pursuing a joint degree in Sociology and Higher Education. Her research examines race, class, and gender inequalities in the college-to-career transition. In her dissertation, Joyce compares how students from different racial and class backgrounds navigate preprofessional activities and how institutional cultures shape career plans. She published an article in Social Problems that analyzes how the intersection of race and class shaped the way college students thought about the moral dimension of their career choices. Joyce’s work has been awarded outstanding graduate paper awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Sociology of Education Association. She serves as a Netter Center Provost’s Graduate Academic Engagement Fellow and was recognized for her dedication to undergraduate teaching and mentorship as a 2024 recipient of the Penn Prize in Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students.
Matthew Ray Mena (Chemistry)
Matthew R. Mena is a fourth-year doctoral student and research assistant in the Mindiola research group. His project involves the synthesis of complex systems of multiple titanium metal ions meant to mimic the metal centers in enzymes that perform some of Nature’s most challenging chemistry, like splitting nitrogen gas to generate ammonia. Matthew has established synthetic routes for the isolation of the heavier terminal pnictides of titanium and zirconium and has probed their reactivity toward inert molecules and strong bonds. His collaborative research efforts have resulted in publications in outstanding journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Inorganic Chemistry. Matthew has also devoted his time to training undergraduates, served as a summer mentor for two high-school students, and volunteered for Big Brothers Big Sisters in Philadelphia.
James Paul Mesiti (Spanish and Portuguese)
James Mesiti is a third-year PhD student in Spanish and Portuguese whose research explores how poetic thought can be expressed across different mediums and art forms. His research focuses on the evolution of Surrealism in Spain, examining its transformation from an avant-garde movement in the 1920s and 1930s into an enduring artistic and literary tradition in Spain. In his dissertation, James engages deeply with transdisciplinary methodologies, demonstrating how poetic thought traverses diverse mediums and art forms. James is an accomplished poet whose second poetry collection, petal/transport was recently published (Arteidolia Press, 2024), following the success of his first book, Algo de nadie (Valparaíso Ediciones, 2021). James combines creative output with academic engagement, contributing a forthcoming book review to the Journal of Modern Literature and organizing a graduate conference on “Motion, Medium, Message.” He is a recipient of an annual graduate student teaching prize awarded in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
David Mulder (History of Art)
David is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the History of Art with a concentration in the art of ancient Western Asia. His dissertation focuses on the motif of human-animal combat on cylinder seals of the Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia (ca. 2900-2350 BCE, exploring how these images frame human-animal relationships and their significance in early Sumerian city-states. He has participated in archaeological fieldwork at the site of Tell al-Hiba (ancient Lagash) in Iraq and has been involved in research and text writing for the renovated Eastern Mediterranean gallery at the Penn Museum. He has also published two articles in Expedition, the museum magazine. David has shared his scholarship in a variety of academic venues, presenting his work at numerous conferences and symposia, including a workshop on seal use at the Musée du Louvre, the Barnes Foundation Graduate Student Symposium, and the 13th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East in Copenhagen.
Jacqueline Wallis (Philosophy)
Jacqueline (Jacqui) Wallis is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Philosophy, focusing on addressing the “translatability crisis” in biomedical research—where treatments successful in animals fail in human trials. Using philosophy of science and her lab technician experience, she develops interventions to improve how experimental systems model human health and disease. Her work skillfully combines philosophy of science with biomedical concerns. In addition to publishing scholarly articles, Jacqui has earned the SAS Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She has also coached high school Ethics Bowl teams, worked with elementary students on philosophy through comics, and served as the Philosopher in Residence at a local high school.
Caroline Wechsler (History and Sociology of Science)
Caroline Wechsler is a 3rd-year PhD student in the Department of History and Sociology of Science and a fifth-year combined MD/PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. Caroline’s research examines the changing role and status of medical genetics in the 20th century. Using archival sources, oral histories and ethnographic interviews, she interrogates how and when diseases become “genetic” and the stakes of that transformation. Caroline is a committed and enthusiastic teacher, receiving the Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by Graduate Students in 2024. She was awarded the Perelman School of Medicine History of Medicine Prize (2023) and the Stallybrass Prize in the History of Material Texts (2024). Caroline aims to bring together scholarship from history of medicine and science, disability studies, and medical anthropology, and seeks to gather insights from clinical practice and deep historical work to improve patient care.