Student Research Profiles

How to Earn a PhD: Perform Puppet Shows
April 13, 2015Do babies see the difference between kind and unkind behavior? Do they prefer nice people over mean ones? Do they make ethical judgments? And how can anyone know what babies are thinking, when they are too young to talk? Arber Tasimi (Psychology)... read more

More Coffee, Less Melanoma
April 13, 2015It turns out that coffee may be good for you, according to a study that was published recently in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Lead author was Erikka Loftfield (Public Health), who defended her dissertation in February. She and... read more

Black Lives Matter in 18th Century British Art, Too
January 23, 2015History of Art students Meredith Gamer and Esther Chadwick (with Cyra Levenson, associate curator of education at the Yale Center for British Art) co-curated “Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain,” a... read more

How Refugees Organize – and Don’t – to Help Themselves
January 23, 2015According to conservative estimates, close to 9 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 3 million people have escaped to... read more

Years of Life Gained from Admission Therapies after a Heart Attack
January 23, 2015Emily Bucholz (School of Public Health), an MD/PhD student studying chronic disease epidemiology, won the American Heart Association’s Samuel A. Levine Young Clinical Investigator Award for research she presented at the association’s annual meeting... read more

Andrew S. Brown: Curating a Treasure Trove of Historical Documents
December 2, 2014Andrew S. Brown (English) was in very distinguished company when he spoke at a symposium celebrating Yale’s acquisition of a major scholarly treasure: the Anthony Taussig Collection of English Legal Manuscripts and Printed Books. In fact, he was... read more

Jason Zentz: Questioning Questions for Linguistic Insights
December 2, 2014Jason Zentz (Linguistics) studies syntax (sentence structure) and morphology (word structure) in the Bantu language family, which includes some 300-500 languages spoken throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, Jason studies the... read more

Tracing the History of the Universe
December 2, 2014Distant galaxies show astronomers how the universe and our own galaxy evolved. Astronomy students Erica Nelson and Joel Leja are members of a team that is teasing out the early history of the universe by looking at distant galaxies... read more

Flying Dinosaurs and Flightless Birds: Using Allometry to Decode Evolution
September 16, 2014Daniel Field (Geology and Geophysics) is “passionate about the evolution of vertebrate animals” and spends much of his time photographing wildlife and collecting fossils. These activities provide “an endless source of research questions that... read more

Correcting the Record on the Civil Rights Movement in Canada
September 15, 2014As a member of the inaugural cohort of Diplomacy and Diversity Fellows, Wendell Adjetey (History) spent a month in Washington and Paris this past spring, studying issues and discussing solutions to some of the world’s most intransigent... read more

Why Do Men Nurture Children, and How Does That Change Them?
September 15, 2014Erin Burke (Anthropology) wants to find out how and why human males nurture their young. In order to fully understand why studying paternal care would warrant such attention, it is important to first realize how unusual it is, she says.... read more

Politics, Performance, and Protests in Putin’s Russia
June 5, 2014Fabrizio Fenghi (Slavic Languages & Literatures) was drawn to Russian literature in college because he loved the novels of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. He spent a lot of time in Russia and became increasingly interested in Soviet... read more

What Can Dogs Teach Us about Teaching?
June 5, 2014Angie Johnston (Psychology) has been interested in how the mind works since she was a little girl doing studies with her chocolate Labrador, Ginger. “I would try saying words she knew, like ‘treat,’ ‘sit,’ and ‘outside,’ in different... read more

Studying Microvasculature and the Effect of Chronic Inflammatory Disease
June 4, 2014Holly Lauridsen (Biomedical Engineering) studies microvasculature, the smallest blood vessels in a body, and what chronic inflammatory diseases do to those tiny vessels. Her work, in Anjelica Gonzalez’s lab, brings together interests that... read more

Don’t Judge a Book by Its (Lack of a) Cover
April 7, 2014The physical makeup of an old book tells an important story. When stage plays were published in Shakespeare’s day, they were usually printed as small, quarto-size playbooks, in a “stab-stitched” form without traditional bindings. Scholars... read more