Professional Master's Presentations
Valerie Averia, Applied Positive Psychology
Savoring the Shared Life: Strengthening Marriages Through Collaborative Legacy Writing
Legacy writing, in the form of stories, memoirs, and letters, is the preservation of a person’s life experiences for the purpose of being passed on to others. Involving the examination of one’s personal history, memories, and values, legacy writing can be a powerful savoring and sense-making tool as well as a guide to living one’s life at its best. Writing legacies pieces is typically approached as a solitary, individual activity. But, utilized as a collaborative activity for those in a committed dyadic relationship, particularly in marriage, legacy writing may have the potential to help it flourish. Research show that a close, supportive marriage is a key predictor of health and happiness. Through a literature review, the paper explores collaborative legacy writing as a positive intervention for enhancing the shared life of married couples. The proposed intervention takes the form of a ritual of connection, wherein married couples purposefully come together to co-author legacy pieces using a suggested three-step model. Each step features evidence-based happiness-enhancing mechanisms widely used in positive psychology including mutual savoring, positive reminiscence, anticipation, reappraisal, and meaning-making to enhance enjoyment and satisfaction in the couple’s marital journey.
Edward Johnson, International Studies, The Lauder Institute
The Battle for Africa’s Sporting Heart: Can Basketball Overtake Football’s Popularity?
Basketball is the new kid on the block that has been growing so much that it has been touted as the sport to finally unseat football (soccer) as Africa’s favourite sport. Basketball is a $1 billion business proposition across Africa, where promoters are growing the sport that is so beloved in the United States. But whether basketball can surpass football in creating fan frenzy, a sense of national pride, and lucrative deals remains to be seen. In order to understand the battle for both cultural and financial supremacy between football and basketball in modern day Africa, one must ask what makes football so popular in Africa in the first place? Why do people adopt one sport over another? Football was initially adopted by the local elites during colonialism but the game was quickly adopted by people outside the elite class as it had low barriers to entry and became a means of mass protest. Football clubs became fertile grounds for protest against colonialism as they enabled healthy men to come together over an organised idea. Just like trade unions played a pivotal role in the ability of locals to organise themselves against the colonial powers, in many cases, so did football clubs. Football therefore has a special part in the dignity and identity of many communities due to the role it played in the liberation and anti-colonial movements, such that it has grown to transcend generations and class divide. Basketball has been winning a lot of market share from a sport economics point of view and making all the right moves to increase the dignity and pride of Africans. Basketball may well be Africa’s highest value sport in the next 20 years, but the indication is that “the ‘beautiful game” of football, will always be Africa’s first and real true love as it has been a part of community identity for longer and was adopted by regular people into their culture even before it could be conceived as a business proposition.
Rebecca Liu, International Studies, The Lauder Institute
How U.S. Startups Are Working to Serve Immigrants
In the US, we often talk about immigrants achieving “the American Dream.” Immigrant success stories abound with people like Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jerry Yang, and Rihanna. These stories are incredible, but may also overshadow the challenges of being an immigrant. These challenges include learning a new language, navigating a complicated healthcare system, building up your credit from scratch, and undergoing bureaucracy and waiting games to become a citizen. While there are many immigrant success stories, we rarely talk about the startups that are working to alleviate hurdles for immigrants. Through my research, I examine 41 startups that are serving immigrants in digital health, edtech, fintech, and legal tech. This is especially important, because immigrant populations have drawn a lot of vitriol and hate in the last few years as seen in a rise in hate crime, travel bans, and actions to curtail immigration. But America needs immigrants, as immigrants drive economic growth and innovation in the US. In 2020, there were 44 million immigrants in the US – making up 14% of the US populations. In 2015, immigrants contributed $2 trillion to US GDP. Through my research, I investigate trends around funding, stages, and challenges for these startups.
Zhao Liu, Environmental Studies
From Bottled Water to Filtered Water: Save Money and Save the Earth
Last year, I bought a water filter pitcher as an alternative to bottled water. Not only has this helped me reduce the carbon footprint of my personal life, but it has also helped me save $260 a year, and more importantly, I no longer have to lug heavy bottled water to my house. Manufacturing, transporting, and even recycling bottled water requires energy which creates a significant number of carbon emissions. Research shows that the energy used in the life cycle of a plastic bottle is equivalent to filling the bottle one-quarter full of oil. A regular bottled water drinker must plant five trees to neutralize the carbon emissions of the bottled water consumed. The average consumer in the U.S. uses 166 plastic water bottles each year. Suppose each American residents reduce a bottle of water consumption every year. In that case, the reduction of carbon emissions is equivalent to the carbon absorbed by trees in 70 Central Park for one year. For some products, we do need to pay more to buy green products. But for some others, we can make small changes to reduce our personal carbon emissions significantly, while saving money.
Kerry O'Neill, Applied Positive Psychology
Striving Together: Competition Redefined
Competition can bring out our best and our worst. Taking a cooperative approach to competition and seeing oneself as competing WITH others, is often an experience filled with camaraderie, teamwork, and positive emotions. Conversely, a contentious, adversarial approach to competition, seeing oneself as competing AGAINST others, often results in jealousy, resentment, disunity and a litany of other negative emotions. The original definition of compete in Latin is competere: to come together to agree; a striving together. Those who strive together want their opponents to do well because it will bring out the best in them. They find inspiration, not resentment, in others’ success and they enjoy life-giving relationships not only with their teammates, but often with those on other teams as well. There is no sideways energy wasted on focusing on others, allowing for greater engagement and flow, paving the way for increased performance. When competition becomes a lesson in self-interest, teammates become opponents and the opponent becomes the enemy. The cost to relationships is great as is the incalculable cost to the bottom line; lack of collaboration derails success in business, academics, sports, and beyond. It’s time to start striving together and reaping the rewards.
Social Sciences Presentations
Amber Mackey, Political Science
Racial Policy and Agenda Instability: Measuring Legislative Attention to Race
With thousands of policy problems, many topics never make it to the legislative agenda, even despite pressure from constituents. In the past decade, we have seen increased mobilization of racial and ethnic minorities pushing for policy action across many domains. Despite these changes, contemporary scholars have not researched variations in legislative attention to race across time. Through a theory-informed text analysis approach, I demonstrate that with careful attention to the frequency and type of racialized words in the bill text, we can measure legislative attention to race across time. After completing an intensive content analysis, I created a racialized language tool that measures the magnitude and frequency of racialized words in a bill’s text. Using this racialized language tool, I question: How has legislative attention to racial issues changed over time? I gathered the bill text for all of the proposals between 2010-2020 in several state legislatures. My results demonstrate that legislative attention to race is increasing over time. However, this result is being driven by resolutions, which are symbolic policies that do not carry the full weight of the law. More substantive bills with the potential for greater impact are not driving this increase in legislative attention to race.
Xincheng Qiu, Economics
Vacant Jobs
We now live in a strange labor market with help-wanted signs virtually everywhere. The pandemic labor market, unlike previous recessions, is not struggling with high unemployment rates but the so-called "Great Labor Shortage." The number of job openings is skyrocketing and reaches a record high. More worrying is that it does not appear to be a short-term phenomenon, as there are no signs of improvement at all even after a whole year of labor shortage. Despite very different sets of policy tools adopted by each country during the pandemic, the aftermath of a severe labor shortage is not unique to the United States but also present in many other countries around the world. Employers are desperate to hire workers but cannot fill their vacant positions, which has become the biggest challenge to the post-pandemic recovery and receive significant attention in policy-making. Why is that? Where do these vacant jobs come from? Are they newly created jobs, or existing positions vacated by workers quitting the labor market? Does such distinction matter? If so, what are the macroeconomic implications? These are questions I seek to answer in this talk.
Justin Reamer, Anthropology
Lenape Agriculture in the Minsink
The transition to agriculture marks one of the most significant changes in the history of human society. As such, many archaeologists have focused on understanding why people transitioned from hunting and gathering lifeways to agriculture ones. But by asking why, archaeologists have overlooked the more important question, and the much more answerable question, of how agriculture was adopted. Approaching my research from a daily foodways perspective, meaning all of the different practices producing what we eat every day and the associated social meanings, I explore how the Lenape transitioned from a hunting and gathering subsistence strategy to one focused on maize-based systems of agriculture. Maize, originally domesticated in Central Mexico, is a tropical plant with no wild correlates in the Northeast and was a completely novel plant when introduced. Yet by the time of European contact, the Lenape, like many Indigenous people of Eastern North America, were growing and consuming maize every day. Employing ceramic, plant, and storage pit data, I explore how the Lenape of the Minisink region began growing, processing, storing, and cooking maize in everyday settings. I also explore what impacts this had on their local environment and how their agricultural strategies can improve agricultural sustainability today.
Elena van Stee, Sociology
Privileged Dependence, Precarious Autonomy: Parent-Young Adult Relationships Through the Lens of COVID-19
COVID impacted all of us, but socioeconomic privilege shielded some families from the most devastating effects. My research asks how undergraduates’ unequal family resources served to amplify inequalities between students in the wake of COVID-19 campus closings. My interviews with college students and their mothers during the early months of the pandemic revealed increased dependence on parents among upper-middle-class students and greater autonomy among working-class students. Upper-middle-class students typically relied on their parents for reassurance and assistance—a “privileged dependence.” In contrast, working-class students demonstrated “precarious autonomy” as they tried to figure things out on their own, even providing help to other family members along the way. Upper-middle-class parents’ greater socioeconomic resources and the shared assumption that students would continue to rely on these resources protected upper-middle-class students from a variety of financial and academic disruptions. These protections may yield longer-term payoffs, thus amplifying inequalities between students. Overall, my findings add to growing evidence that COVID-19 exacerbated class disparities in higher education. They also highlight the need to consider students’ relationships with parents in understanding inequality among college students—both within and beyond the context of the pandemic.
Natural Sciences Presentations
Drew Behrendt, Chemistry
Featurization: Unraveling Complex Correlations Using Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) is a tool that is growing in popularity in fields ranging from marketing to materials science. The strength in ML lies in finding correlations in large amounts of data that are not obvious to the human eye. The challenge for the user, however, lies in picking the relevant features of a piece of data to collect so that correlations found using ML are meaningful. In chemistry and other natural sciences, one can leverage the advances in ML combined with big data to elucidate so-called structure-function relationships, which can lead to greater understanding and control of desired emergent system properties. As a specific example, I highlight a recent project using high-throughput calculations to find new materials for CO2 binding and conversion. In this example, each data point is a different material with a corresponding binding energy to CO2, and the features fed to the ML algorithms are hand-selected unique numerical identifiers. Using ML, we are able to find the structure function relationship that makes certain materials better than others for CO2 conversion and capitalize on it for better catalyst design. Overall, this is an exemplar project for how ML can enable new advances in natural sciences and beyond.
Jarrett Dillenburger, Chemistry
Lasagna á la Nano: Recipes for Making, Breaking, and Decorating Layered Nanomaterials
I want you to think of a delicious serving of authentic lasagna! Or, what about some moussaka? Maybe you’d prefer to imagine a triple-layered chocolate cake? Now, what is the connection between these foods? Aside from making you hungry, they all have a structure of repeating layers that stack up to create a fantastic dish! In materials chemistry, layered nanomaterials are also made of stacked layers, just like lasagna, albeit much smaller! In fact, each layer, or “nanosheet”, is about one million times thinner than the diameter of a human hair! The layered structure gives these materials fascinating properties that can be changed for different applications (such as energy storage or catalysis). In lasagna, the pasta sheets are surrounded by a tasty sauce. In layered nanomaterials, the nanosheets are surrounded by a mixture of atoms and molecules. With the right recipes, we can modify the nanosheets, change the molecular “sauce”, or break the material into single nanosheets. By adding different atoms and molecules on and between the sheets, we can modify the properties of the nanomaterials to match a specific application. Our work shows that when we bake layered nanomaterials using just the right recipe, we can produce incredible nanomaterials.
Mark Giovinazzi, Physics and Astronomy
From Zero to Five Thousand: The Current Census of Exoplanets
Thirty years ago, we knew of zero exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system. Today, we know of more than 5000. Through a variety of detection methods, the uncovering of these planets is a great marker of technological advancement, and a demonstration of the human capability for space exploration. From rocky worlds to gas giants, the current population of exoplanets is diverse, and spans a wide range of physical features. Studying these planets offers insight into how our own solar system may have formed, and will provide clues to finding life beyond Earth. The search for exoplanets is ongoing, and in the coming decades we will continue to make discoveries that will push the bounds of our understanding of how they evolve, contribute to the rich diversity of planets that exist, and give us a more complete depiction of Earth’s place in the Galaxy.
Spenser Talkington, Physics and Astronomy
Magic Without a Twist: The Dark Space
When the electricity goes out, the first thing we do may be to check our phones and see whether any of our friends have electricity. This illustrates our generation's great dependency upon electronic devices for daily life to a greater extent than any previous generation. Our mastery of electrons started as a nascent understanding a century ago, leapfrogged with the development of quantum mechanics, continued with the completion of the first general-purpose computer "ENIAC" at Penn in 1945, and burst open with the mass production of transistorized devices. These developments in electronic devices depended on the "single particle" properties of electrons, but the potential for creating devices such as quantum computers and high-temperature superconductors leveraging the "many particle" properties of electrons are the frontier. Over the last decade, twisted stacks of thin materials have emerged as a promising platform to unravel and control this many particle electronic physics, culminating with great successes in the flat band of "magic angle" twisted bilayer graphene. In this talk I will describe these developments and my research that shows we can realize flat bands in the "dark space" of open quantum systems, realizing "magic" independent of the twist angle.
Jonas Toupal, Earth and Environmental Science
To a Cleaner Future: Environmental Impacts of Mining Lithium
Transitioning to a carbon-neutral future requires an increase in mining of metals used in the green infrastructure, such as lithium (Li) [1]. Lithium production has nearly doubled between 2016-2020 [2]. There is limited information on the impacts of mining of Li ores and the associated impacts on the environment near such deposits [3]. We have sampled and analyzed surface waters near hard-rock Li deposits in four countries to estimate potential pollution signatures, and one of the most important contaminants investigated was Li itself [4]. Currently, we are exposing four different types of Li ores to four environmentally common acids to estimate Li release from these ores under different conditions. This work is most pertinent to the potential negative impacts of mining hard-rock Li deposits, but also sheds light on natural removal of Li ions from surface waters via precipitation of clay minerals. [1] Choubey et al. (2016) Minerals Engineering 89. [2] USGS (2015-2021) Mineral Commodity Summaries. [3] Bradley et al. (2017) USGS Report 2010-5070-0. [4] Toupal et al. (2022) Journal of Geochemical Exploration 234.
Humanities Presentations
Juliette Bellacosa, French and Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies
Peter Greenaway’s Reanimation of the Last Supper
To this day the refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan still houses Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper on the wall where Leonardo painted it. Tourists from around the globe marvel at the monumental masterpiece in carefully controlled fifteen-minute time slots. For many the experience takes on the dimensions of a pilgrimage fueled by the myth surrounding Leonardo, whose taste for experimentation caused the fresco to quickly deteriorate. The Last Supper hosts an obsession with the work’s impending disintegration that shapes, if not distorts, the spectator's experience of the work. What would happen if by some miracle a sense of permanence or resilience were to rescue the Last Supper from the threat of imminent oblivion? The digital adaptation of Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, achieves just this. This talk aims to show how what Greenaway describes as a “combination of the still and moving image,” reconciles the tension between the endurance of the ‘myth’ surrounding Leonardo and the material fragility of the Last Supper, and restores the work to a puissance commensurate with the original artistic vision.
Marie Bellec, French and Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies
A Mythology of Ends and Origins: The American Desert in Contemporary French and Francophone Fictions
This talk examines the various mythologies attached to the American desert in contemporary Francophone fictions. Metonymy of the United States in the early days of American imperialism, the desert is characterized by its purported emptiness and immensity to fill. Film directors invest it with meanings and concepts and tirelessly reenact the myth of the American conquest. The desertic space thus conceptualized is no longer geological, but mythical. Francophone fictions of the last thirty years attempt to knock off this myth. They banter with this supposedly empty format and its endless combination of fictions to subvert the older values of western films. However, the myth, in the twenty-first century, shifts towards the dystopian and Francophone authors and filmmakers associate it with new eschatological images: they depict a deleterious America, and the arid place, specifically, reflects the anxieties of the end of the world. Notably, the main characters of my corpus, either from France or Québec, go on vacation to the desert where they find death, whether voluntarily or not. I will show that these pessimistic endings reflect on the collapse of civilization, on the one hand, and on the failure of the touristic and neocolonial adventure, on the other.
Mohamud Mohamed, History
Veneration, Destruction, and Debate: The Contested History of Graves, Tombs, and Shrines in Bilād as-Ṣūmāl
The question of the erection and veneration of tombs, graves, and mausoleums has long divided Muslim jurists and theologians. I am interested in exploring how different factions of Muslim scholars in Bilad as-Ṣumal (today known as Somalia, but historically the lands that incorporate current-day Djibouti, Eastern Ethiopia, and the NFD region in Kenya) have debated and marshaled arguments in support or in criticism of this practice that became emblematic of Islamicate societies from the earliest days to the current moment. I seek to interrogate and explore the history and transformation of these practices in this geography. The major trends that will shape and guide this talk are the historical emergence of these sites, the cult of saints tied to these loci, the scholarly debate regarding this practice, and the role of secular authorities in mediating the [often] violent conflict surrounding tombs, graves, and mausoleums. Ultimately, I seek to understand how this practice is couched in a discourse of power, authority, and the [re]construction of memory and sacred geography.
Susanna Payne-Passmore, Music
Creative Music Practices as Embodied Multimodal Research
Abstract coming soon.
Kyle West, Ancient History
Aging Virtuously: Cicero on Old Age, Disability, and Character
In Cicero’s dialogue on aging well, the de Senectute, heavy emphasis is placed on the power of self-discipline and a positive mind. Mental and physical decline affect many older people, Cicero admits; he is profoundly concerned about the vulnerability we all experience as we age. However, he insists that if we live virtuously from youth up, this will prepare us so that we hardly feel our age as older people. But this poses a serious problem: if we accept Cicero’s message of “mind over matter,” does this require us to judge those whom old age makes miserable? On its own, the De Senectute implies that if older people end up impaired, this flows from a corrupt character. However, other texts, especially Cicero’s treatment of older role models in the speech Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo, suggest that in practice Cicero’s attitude was shaped by context, such as political values and interpersonal relationships, more than by philosophical theory. This has important implications for how elderly and disabled people are considered today. We share with ancient people anxieties about the vulnerability of our bodies. But the interpretations we put on disabilities matter just as much or more than physical factors for individuals’ well-being.