Join the CU-Boulder Graduate School for the premier of Fresh Minds: New Graduate Student Research on March 13, 3:30-5 p.m. in the Center for Irish and British Studies. This event showcases five-minute (or less) presentations from recipients of the Dean's Research Grants - some of CU-Boulder's top graduate students. A great event to learn more about what our graduate students are doing, as well as an opportunity to see how to present research clearly and concisely to the public.
Participants include:
Adriann Kroepsch
Adrianne Kroepsch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Environmental Studies program and a graduate instructor and research assistant at the Center of the American West. Kroepsch studies energy and water governance in the American West, with a focus on Colorado's Front Range and Four Corners regions. She received her M.A. in Geography from CU-Boulder in 2011, supported by a Chancellor's Fellowship. Before graduate school, Kroepsch was a journalist in Washington, D.C., where she covered science and technology policy for Congressional Quarterly and other publications. She earned her B.A., magna cum laude, from Cornell University in Science and Technology Studies in 2003. When she isn't working on her dissertation, Kroepsch enjoys skiing and hiking with her husband, Corey, and dog, Karma.
Alex Corey
Alex Corey听is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department and works in the field of American studies. Corey explores the intersection of literature, music and听popular culture in the United States during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In his dissertation, 鈥淯nruly Intimacies: U.S. Literature and Music from Ragtime to Modal Jazz,鈥� he questions how popular music鈥檚 seductive force has fostered听attachments within and beyond social boundaries. Corey also serves as the lab manager for the Laboratory for Race and Popular听Culture (RAP Lab) at CU-Boulder under Director Adam Bradley and works as the program coordinator for the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College under听Director Donald Pease.
Amanda Hund
Amanda Hund is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department and she is working to understand how parasites cause populations to diverge and become separate species.听
Her听research focuses on several barn swallows subspecies and听aims to understand how evolving with local parasite communities drives female preferences for different male ornaments. Hund's graduate work has brought her to the Czech Republic, Israel and Egypt where she has worked and made friends with amazing scientists. She earned her B.A. in biology from Carleton College in Minnesota.
Andrew Detch
After graduating from听CU-Boulder in 2008听cum laude听with a B.A. in Classics, Andrew Detch received an M.A. from Brown University in 2009 and taught middle school and high school for two years in Colorado Springs. He returned to CU-Boulder in 2011 and is currently a fourth-year Ph.D. student focusing on the history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. In particular, his work examines the ways in which peoples throughout the Atlantic World interacted during the 鈥淎ge of Democratic Revolutions鈥� from 1765-1804. His dissertation examines how a shared symbolic lexicon both defined the arena of revolution and drew people together in trans-national cultural coalitions, which are often marginalized in today鈥檚 nationalistic histories of the revolutionary era.
Brittany Demmitt
Brittany Demmitt is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology program. She is currently studying environmental and host genetic associations with the oral microbiome. Generous funding from the Dean鈥檚 Graduate Student Research Grant has allowed her to analyze individuals who use tobacco, marijuana and methamphetamine and the associated changes with their oral microbiome.听
Dave Smith
Dave Smith grew up in Columbus, Ohio where he also attended the Ohio State University. In 2010, he earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry. While an undergrad, he spent a lot of time in the lab and really enjoyed it. After graduating, he continued to work in the lab for another year before starting graduate school at CU-Boulder. His interest in structural biology (and the outdoors) solidified his choice to pursue a Ph.D. in biochemistry at CU-Boulder. After his first year, his research interests shifted towards the immune system.
Eric Stewart
Eric Stewart is a multimedia artist and educator who combines visual anthropology with experimental film to ask: How the does the past write itself into the landscape and how does the tradition of landscape painting and photography construct contemporary ways of looking at this written record? Through chemical and physical manipulations of the surface of 16mm film, Stewart examines the history of landscape, place and cultural identity in the American West.听
He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a current MFA Candidate in the Department of Film and Film Studies at CU-Boulder.
Helen McCreery
Helen McCreery studies how complex group behavior emerges in ant colonies. Ants are remarkably good at problem solving, and this ability is largely due to their cooperation. McCreery studies how they become coordinated in a particular task: cooperative transport, which is when a group of ants gets together to move something really heavy. She's interested in the behavioral rules that individuals use that cause the whole group to become coordinated.
John Darcy
John Darcy graduated with a degree in molecular, cellular and developmental biology from CU in 2010. Shortly thereafter, he realized he hated everything about medicine while doing an internship. He took a year off to work in various labs, eventually finding himself in Australia, taking photos of mosses and fungi. Having found his true calling in the microbial realm, Darcy was accepted into CU's EBIO Ph.D. program in 2011. He is in his 4th year now, developing mathematical models to better understand the geospatial distributions of different microbes.
Mike Ortiz
Michael Ortiz specializes in the history of the British Empire and Modern Europe. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, he graduated with a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University before enrolling at the CU-Boulder in 2011. He is currently working on a dissertation examining the Indian Independence Movement through the lens of global anti-fascism. 听
Sarah Hernandez
Sarah Hernandez is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. She is a doctoral candidate in the English Department. Her research interests focus upon contemporary Native American literature and criticism. Her dissertation tentatively titled, 鈥淐olonizing the Dakota Literary Tradition,鈥� traces the evolution of the Dakota literary tradition from an oral to a written form. Dakota literature is often regarded as an extinct oral storytelling tradition. Hernandez's dissertation will demonstrate that the Dakota literary tradition is not extinct, but rather has been re-imagined in a modern form as literature.听
She is currently using the Dean鈥檚 Graduate Student Research Grant to conduct archival research at the Minnesota Historical Society, the Dakota Indian Foundation and the American Philosophical Society. These three trips will allow her to examine how early Christian missionaries such as Reverend Stephen Return Riggs colonized ohunkakan (i.e., the Dakota oral storytelling tradition) and how modern/contemporary Dakota writers and scholars such as Ella Deloria and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn have reclaimed and revitalized these stories. This dissertation is the first to bring to bear a deeply archival and linguistic frame to these long overlooked and unquestioned works.