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2024-2025 Dissertation Fellowship Awardees
The Graduate and Professional School offered 17 fellowships for the fall and spring semester. Awardees are listed below:
Round One
Valentina Aduen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication & Journalism in the College of Liberal Arts. She studies communication processes that enable social change and capacity building for populations disproportionately affected by land-loss and displacement. Her dissertation will focus on a case-study of a Black owned farm and heirs’ property in East Texas where she is documenting the environmental, legal and oral history of the estate. Valentina is also working on the documentary film that will tell this story. At large, her work theorizes interpretations of the law and community practices of resistance to coloniality at the intersections of media, culture, identity and rhetoric.
Ashley Barros is a PhD candidate in the Department of English within the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research explores the phenomenon of storytelling in medieval literature, giving interdisciplinary attention to the science behind reading in a way that looks back into the roots of a reading public and considers how authors structure written stories across time. Her dissertation analyzes narrator/narratee relationships within framed tale collections from approximately the 12th to 14th centuries. This research includes a socio-behavioral study with both quantitative and qualitative results showing how readers respond to stories framed by a participating audience. It enhances traditional literary criticism using an analytical approach which considers how narrative works in the mind in light of recent studies in 4E Cognition and affective science. Her research promotes an embodied narratology, multidisciplinary research of premodern texts, and the enjoyment of reading.
Elizabeth Carlino is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research examines how climate adaptation policies are reshaping and leading to reinterpretations of the human right to water. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, her work analyzes policies, laws, and perceptions about how rights are being renegotiated in the context of climate change and what this can mean for future generations’ rights to resources like water. Her dissertation work focuses on water governance and rights in South Africa, where the historical impacts of Apartheid still play a role in determining where people live and how they access water. While focused on the South African context, this work has broader applications for other places also faced with the problem of dealing with the impacts of climate change while also protecting and supporting the right to water.
Hai In Jo is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research examines literary representations of Blackness in the context of slavery and explores how Black lives, beyond representation, can be reimagined in the digital sphere. Her dissertation analyzes how African American literature resists and redefines dehumanizing portrayals of Black lives as mere data points since slavery, providing nuanced perspectives on Black lives reduced to commodities, numbers, and absences. Hai In argues that this literature helps navigate the ethical challenges posed by today’s big data environment, where similar tools of capitalism and racism are used by the state and corporations to dehumanize individuals across races. Her research reaffirms the importance of Black studies and literary imagination in shaping ethical practices of data beyond data capitalism and algorithmic racism.
Matthew Kulpa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Veterinary Pathobiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (VMBS). His research largely focuses on filarial nematodes, vector-borne parasites transmitted by blood-feeding arthropods, and developing novel molecular diagnostics to improve detection and surveillance. These parasites have broad impacts on the health of humans, domestic animals, and wildlife. Thus, Matthew’s research helps fill these knowledge gaps by shedding light on filarial nematode biodiversity, elucidating their phylogenetic relationships, and revealing their geographic- and host-associations across North America. His overall goals are to lay the groundwork of future research on filarial nematodes in North America, while simultaneously developing a high throughput sequencing technique that gathers more comprehensive epidemiological information that serves to benefit his own research and global efforts to control and eliminate neglected tropical diseases caused by filarial nematodes.
Jangjae Lee, a doctoral candidate in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the College of Engineering, is dedicated to improving the electric grid resilience in Texas. Witnessing the devastation caused by winter storms like Uri (2021), his research explores potential solutions to strengthen the power grid conditions against extreme climate events. This includes investigating the development of predictive models that utilize advanced data analysis and machine learning techniques. These models aim to forecast and prevent power outages caused by various extreme weather events, ultimately strengthening the electricity grid's resilience. This research holds immense potential to safeguard communities from extreme weather disruptions. By empowering policymakers with data-driven tools, it could significantly reduce the frequency and severity of power outages, ensuring public safety during critical events.
Jorge Medina-Durán is a doctoral candidate in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Interdisciplinary Program, affiliated with the Entomology Department within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. His research aims to identify patterns of host and parasite diversity in a phylogenetic framework in order to elucidate the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of their interaction. In specific, Jorge investigates how the morphological, ecological, genetic, and genomic diversity of unicellular eukaryotic protist parasites known as gregarines varies along with the diversity of their orthopteran insect host (grasshoppers, cricket, katydids, and allies). Because gregarines are closely related to pathogens such as the agent of malaria disease, Jorge’s findings on the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of host and parasite associations contribute to understanding how host-parasite dynamics and disease risk occur in humans and other species of importance.
Mastura Safayet is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding the linkages between climate hazards, vulnerability to food insecurity, and food access. Mastura’s research aims to characterize and improve the spatial distribution of food access for socially vulnerable and food-insecure populations, particularly due to road network disruptions after extreme hazard events. Her research involves measuring food-insecure households’ access to food assistance in pre-flood and flood scenarios to identify the areas at risk of food insecurity in Southeast Texas. By employing spatial analytical approaches, Mastura’s work provides detailed insights into the impacts of Hurricane Harvey and how road closures impacted the capacities of food pantries to operate. Mastura’s research will support policymakers, planners, and food assistance services in combating food insecurity, particularly the food access dimension of food security, following any extreme hazard event.
Michelle Stanley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning in the College of Architecture. Her research focuses on evaluating federal disaster recovery efforts with an emphasis on socio-economic inequities. Michelle’s dissertation examines the distribution of disaster recovery aid through FEMA’s Individual Assistance program following Hurricane Ike, providing analyses of various components of the process including inspection, eligibility, funding, timing, and the movement of affected households. This research will contribute to a deeper understanding of institutional processes in disaster recovery and inform policy adjustments aimed at fostering equity in aid distribution, thereby supporting the resilience of communities against future disaster events.
Xukai Zhang is a doctoral candidate in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the College of Engineering. His work primarily explores the uncertainty and risks affecting critical coastal civil and energy infrastructures in the face of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and sea-level rise. By integrating physics-based and data-driven methodologies with advanced statistical techniques, Xukai aims to address complex issues related to future performance and structural integrity. His research supports risk-based decision-making processes, contributing to the development of more resilient infrastructure systems.
Round Two
Weiqi Guo is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education and Human Development. Her research investigates how task features influence language learning, particularly in pragmatics—the use of language in context. By examining the effects of various task conditions and complexities, her dissertation aims to generate insights to enhance second language acquisition. The research emphasizes the integration of cognitive and intercultural dimensions into language learning tasks, helping learners’ pragmatic competence for effective real-world communication. The findings contribute to task design in second language education, contributing to the growing need for culturally aware communication in diverse global contexts.
Tristan Krause is a Ph.D. Candidate in the graduate history program at Texas A&M University. A native of northern Wisconsin, Tristan completed his Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018 and worked in the Wisconsin State Assembly as a Legislative Aide before starting at A&M. Tristan’s broad research interests include 20th century U.S. military history and conflict archaeology. His master’s thesis examined the cooperation between the U.S. Army and allied civilian organizations to recover and identify missing in action (MIA) military personnel in Europe after World War II. For his dissertation, Tristan is writing an international history of post-World War II American remains recovery efforts in occupied Germany.
Griffin Nicholson is a doctoral candidate in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Interdisciplinary Program. His home department is the Ecology and Conservation Biology Department in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. His dissertation research focuses on invasive frogs and has two primary aims: 1) to understand the trends and factors behind anthropogenic frog invasions; and 2) to investigate the existence and impact of ecological interactions between invasive frogs and native frogs. As the arrival of a new species to a region can result in a complex web of new interactions, he investigates interactions between frogs across life stages and interaction types. Using the opportunity provided by frog invasions, his research also advances a deeper understanding of the ability of different species of frogs to co-exist, including knowledge on evolution and adaptability in frog acoustic communication when faced with potential acoustic interference from other frog species.
Tanner Ogle is an History Ph.D. candidate in the College of Arts & Sciences specializing in the intellectual and political history of the British Atlantic World. His dissertation reinterprets the causes of British imperial reform and the American Revolution by examining how participants understood their historical moment within a politicized generational memory. Specifically, his research analyzes how the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 (Britain's last civil war) influenced policies and incited conspiratorial fears on both sides of the Atlantic during the American Revolutionary Era (1760-1783). Significantly, by maintaining a transnational & generational perspective, this work challenges ahistorical nationalistic and presentist impulses, and reminds us of the potence generational memory had and can still possess over policies and perceptions today.
Breann Richey is a doctoral candidate in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Program, affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Her research focuses on the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms facilitating invasion success in a globally invasive group of herpetofauna. Breann’s research explores how behavior, response to ecological pressures, and morphology are impacted by invasion. Her research provides global-scale insights into the impacts of invasion in both native and invasive species, and identifies behavioral, ecological, and morphological predictors of invasion success. Through this research, Breann endeavors to refine current recommendations for protection against invasive species and improve conservation efforts for native species impacted by invasion.
Zihang Wei is a doctoral candidate in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering within the College of Engineering. His research focuses on unraveling the complex dynamics of traffic networks to improve the efficiency, safety, and sustainability of transportation systems, thereby facilitating the implementation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). His dissertation introduces innovative physics-informed frameworks that leverage neural networks, physical model discovery techniques, cooperative control algorithms, and traffic flow theories. Zihang’s work seeks to bridge the gap between theoretical modeling and practical implementation, contributing to advancements in scalable traffic prediction and control strategies that enhance the efficiency, safety, and reliability of ITS.
Yingying Zhao is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education and Human Development. Her research focuses on young children’s development, specifically cognitive development (e.g., literacy) and socio-emotional development, and how families and schools can promote these developmental domains. Yingying’s dissertation explores early writing development through a comprehensive, multi-level analysis of child, family, and classroom factors. To examine the relative contributions of various child-level predictors for writing skills, she uses a statistical approach that compares the importance of multiple theoretically relevant predictors simultaneously. The findings of her empirical and review studies will provide valuable insights into how diverse environments shape young children's writing skills. Her research has the potential to inform educational strategies that promote early literacy development and long-term academic success for young learners.