Celebrating Scholarship

Amitava Kumar, Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair, is author of My Beloved Life, a new novel published by Penguin Random House, that traces a fictional life through 20th-century India.

Joshua de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, has received grant funding from the NIH in collaboration with his colleague from MIT for the project “Psych-DS: A FAIR data standard for behavioral datasets.” This three-year project is an important step forward for scientific efforts that rely on behavioral data; the standardized representation of behavioral data into machine-readable formats is a critical first step for the development of new scientific tools that can accelerate the pace of neuroscience and biomedical research.

Catherine Tan, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is author of Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge, newly published by Columbia University Press (January 2024). Spaces on the Spectrum takes on the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which approach autism either as a difference to be accepted or as a medical condition to be treated.

Allison Puglisi, Assistant Professor of History, received a fellowship from the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College for academic year 2024–2025 for her project entitled “Redefining Residency: Black Environmental Thought in New Orleans,” which will focus on how housing activists, particularly Black women, laid the groundwork for modern Black environmental organizing.

Colette Salyk, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Chair of Physics and Astronomy on the Maria Mitchell Chair, has secured a Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) grant award in collaboration with her colleague from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in support of a research program titled "Building on ALMA: a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) legacy survey of the chemical evolution of planet-forming disks."

Mita Choudhury, Professor and Chair of History on the Evalyn Clark Chair, has been awarded a Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) fellowship to support her book-length project The Silent Chain: History and Reckoning in the Catholic Church.

Candice Lowe Swift, Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Erendira Rueda, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Latin American and Latinx Studies, published Academic Belonging in Higher Education.

Leah Isseroff Bendavid and her collaborators are investigating the potential application of boronic acids as anchoring groups in dye-sensitized solar cells with a computational study the scope of which is only possible through ACCESS—an advanced computing and data resource supported by the National Science Foundation. The results of this study will inform ways in which dye-sensitized solar cells can be optimized to improve their stability and efficiency.

Amitava Kumar, Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair, is author of The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary, “an arresting document of our times, an irresistible peek into a writer and artist’s heart, and a clarion call for hope.”—Udayan Mitra, Executive Publisher, HarperCollins India.