Student Research Profiles

Commencement 2021 Meet the Class Marshal: Lucy Armentano
May 21, 2021By Cody Musselman Lucy Armentano is graduating with a PhD in psychology and is a GSAS 2021 class marshal. While at Yale, Armentano held many leadership and advocacy roles within the broader university community. She served as Chair of the Graduate... read more

Commencement 2021 Meet the Class Marshal: Stephen Gaughran
May 21, 2021By Cody Musselman Stephen Gaughran is graduating with a PhD from the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and is a GSAS 2021 class marshal. While at Yale, Gaughran was involved with several research and student advocacy communities,... read more

Graduate Mentor Awards to Sivaramakrishnan, Blight, and Briggs
May 17, 2017Three outstanding faculty advisers, one from each academic division, will be honored on Sunday, May 21, at the Graduate School's Convocation. They are: Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan (Social Sciences), David Blight (Humanities), and Derek Briggs... read more

Digging into Ancient History
May 15, 2017In northern Israel, scholars from many disciplines and countries work side by side to survey, excavate, and attempt to understand how people have lived ever since the Stone Age. One of those researchers is fourth-year graduate student Nicholas... read more

Do Monkeys and Gorillas Have a Sweet Tooth?
May 10, 2017Elaine Guevara (Anthropology) studies the evolution and behavior of non-human primates, not only by observing them in the wild. She also explores the genetic basis of their traits. One recent project looked at whether Old World monkeys and apes... read more

Practical Ways to Improve Kids’ Lives
April 1, 2016Karl Minges (Nursing) studies how simple changes can improve children’s health and lead to better academic and behavioral outcomes. Since coming to Yale, Minges has published 19 papers in peer-reviewed journals and was first author on 14 of them.... read more

Topic Modeling All 75 Years of Slavic Review
February 22, 2016Slavic Languages and Literatures students Jacob Lassin and Carlotta Chenoweth are working with Assistant Professor Marijeta Bozovic and Trip Kirkpatrick, senior instructional technologist at the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning, on a project... read more

Protecting Endangered Predators
January 25, 2016“There are fewer tigers in the wild than there are Yale undergraduates,” says Jennie Miller (FES PhD ’15), an ecologist and conservation scientist. Miller studied tigers and leopards in India for her dissertation and now, as a postdoctoral... read more

Studying a 'Complicated Process': Research on Advertising through the Lens of Sociology
September 29, 2015Andrew Cohen (Sociology) has been interested in advertisements for a long time. “You get bombarded with ads every day, but did you ever wonder why it was that particular ad, with that particular model, and that particular tag line?” Cohen asks. “... read more

Engineering 'Off-the-Shelf' Blood Vessels
September 28, 2015Nina Kristofik (Engineering and Applied Science) has won an American Heart Association graduate fellowship to pursue her research on tissue engineering. Kristofik is working to create better small-diameter (less than 6mm) arterial grafts. Vessels... read more

Land, Libel, Litigation, and ‘Unwomanly’ Behavior in the Early Republic
September 28, 2015Michael Blaakman (History) is writing a dissertation on “land mania” during and after the American Revolution. “Speculation Nation: Land and Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic, 1776-1803” explores the corruption that lay at the... read more

Fracture Toughness, or If You Drop a Smartphone....
June 11, 2015If you drop a smart phone, the glass screen has a nasty way of cracking when it hits the floor. The glass itself might be strong enough to withstand the impact, but invisible structural flaws weaken its resistance to fracture. Wen Chen (Engineering... read more

Inside Islam: Research on Two Mosque Communities
June 11, 2015Elisabeth Becker (Sociology) is studying Muslim communities in London and Berlin, where she is currently doing research. Her dissertation will be an in-depth ethnographic study, and, to accomplish it, she has immersed herself in the life of the... read more

Literature that Flourished Despite Dictatorship
June 11, 2015Nathalie Batraville (French) is studying Haitian literature during the regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which extended from 1957 to 1971. Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”, who took over on his father’s death, were dictators who... read more

Gendered Racial Boundaries in WWII Alaska
April 13, 2015Growing up in Anchorage, Holly Miowak Guise (History) heard stories about discrimination that her Iñupiaq family had endured when they left Unalakleet, their tiny (pop. 700), remote village in the Alaskan bush. At Stanford, where she majored in... read more