New Undergraduate Research and Creative Collaborations Office announces fellowships for faculty-student partnerships

Thirty-one undergraduates have received awards from Brandeis fellowship programs to partner with university faculty on unique and ambitious research projects.

The fellowships were awarded this spring through a collaborative effort between the Fellowships Advising Office and the Undergraduate Research and Creative Collaborations Office. The Undergraduate Research and Creative Collaborations Office is a newly formed unit within the Division of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis designed to centralize information and resources for students, faculty, and staff. 

Margaret Lynch
Photo/Heratch Ekmekjian

Margaret Lynch

"Brandeis has a longstanding tradition of faculty-mentored undergraduate research and creative activities," said Margaret Lynch, director of the Undergraduate Research and Creative Collaborations Office. "Our goal is to strengthen that tradition and assure that every student has access to a research experience or creative collaboration with a faculty mentor and to know that these opportunities are available and how to access them."

The office will serve as an initial point of contact for students across all disciplines looking for opportunities to collaborate with faculty, and will be a resource for faculty who are looking to expand their work with students, Lynch said. It was established through funding from a Davis Educational Foundation grant secured by Dean of Arts and Sciences Dorothy Hodgson and Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives Wendy Cadge.

The creation of the office will allow the Academic Fellowships team - which previously oversaw these research fellowships - to focus on helping students secure external grants. The fellowships office a long history of success supporting Brandeis students in securing prestigious grants like the Boren, Truman, and Marshall awards.

The URCC office was established to promote, expand, and increase access to undergraduate research at Brandeis across all disciplines, initially targeting relatively undersung undergraduate research opportunities in the humanities, creative arts, and social sciences. The Division of Science already runs a successful summer undergraduate research program, with support from the National Science Foundation and individual and foundation donors. Together, the URCC and Division of Sciences programs now support nearly 200 undergraduates each summer, working closely with Brandeis faculty and graduate students, in Brandeis labs and libraries, advancing original research in the humanities, creative arts, and social and natural sciences.

Brandeis' laboratories are now gradually scaling up, so faculty mentors and their students have adapted projects and timelines to focus initially on reading, planning, and computing components that can be pursued remotely while saving on-campus work for later in the summer or the fall semester.

The 31 projects awarded funding this spring by the URCC come from four different fellowship programs: The Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice Fellowship; the School of Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research and Creative Collaborations Fellowship; the Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program; and the Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship. The projects vary in scope, areas of study and timeframe, but they all partner undergraduate students with faculty to focus on research.

The following students were awarded fellowships:

Student: Carter Yee '21
Project: Tessaku: Examining the Poetry of Tule Lake
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Matthew Fraleigh
Department/program: East Asian studies
School of Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Research and Creative Collaborations Fellowship

Student: Jason Frank '22
Project: Fairies and Funnies: Gay Men in Standup Comedy
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Brian Horton
Department/program: Anthropology
Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice Fellowship

Student: Andre Kish '22
Project: United States Government Prosecution of American Foreign Fighters for ISIL
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Jytte Klausen
Department/program: Politics
Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice Fellowship

Student: Ellie Kleiman '21
Project: The Cultural is Political: Institutional Memory and Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities at Brandeis University
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Yuri Doolan
Department/program: History and Asian-American Pacific Islander studies
Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice Fellowship

Student: Jason Walter '23
Project: Cuban Missile Crisis: A Case Study of Negotiation and Leadership
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Eugene B. Kogan
Department/program: Heller school and Politics
Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice Fellowship

Student: Chengrui Wu '22
Project: Relations between depression symptoms and physiological reactivity to controllable and uncontrollable stressors
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Hannah Snyder
Department/program: Psychology
Louis D. Brandeis Legacy Fund for Social Justice Fellowship

Student: Alex Bazarsky '23
Project: Excavation and Understanding of the Sak Tz’i’-Lacanjá Tzeltal Marketplace
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Charles Golden
Department/program: Anthropology
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Hannah BenDavid '22
Project: Optimizing CaMPARI: Activity and light dependent marking of active neurons
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Gina Turrigiano
Department/program: Biology
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Stephanie Brody '21
Project: Role of Bud14 in polarized growth and cell morphology in S. cerevisiae
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Bruce Goode
Department/program: Biology
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Amanda Cao '22
Project: Effects of Obstructed Growth on Pattern Formation
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Irving Epstein
Department/program: Chemistry
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Yuezhu Chen '22
Project: The Influence of Orthodox Russian on Harbin Society in 1920-1976
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Yuri Doolan
Department/program: History
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Billy Frankel '21
Project: Peace Room Mural
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Gordon Fellman
Department/program: Sociology and Peace, Conflict and Coexistence studies program
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Lucy Frenkel '21
Project: Are Child Sex Offenders, and their Subtypes, Really a Different Kind from Extrafamilial Child Molesters?
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Raymond A. Knight
Department/program: Psychology
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Prabu Gugagantha '22
Project: Uncovering the Causes of Discontinuous Shear Thickening via Computational Models
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Bulbul Chakraborty
Department/program: Physics
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Jake Havelas '20
Project: When Ottomans Came to Boston: Armenian, Greek, and Syrian Migration to the Greater Boston Area, 1890-1940
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Amy Singer
Department/program: History
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Ben Helzner '23
Project: Responsible Actors: Compatibilism, Identity, and Moral Agency
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Kate Moran
Department/program: Philosophy
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Han Kang '22
Project: Carbon Fiber Electrode Project
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Stephen Van Hooser
Department/program: Neuroscience
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: David Qi '22
Project: The Development of Methods of Testing the Effectiveness of Hidden Markov Models
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Paul Miller
Department/program: Biology
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Yancey Thomas '20
Project: Comparing the Radio Structure of Quasars at high redshift (young universe) to those at low redshift (old universe)
Faculty mentor/sponsor: John Wardle
Department/program: Physics
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Iria Wang '22
Project: Simulation for the New ATLAS Tracking Detector at the LHC
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Gabriella Sciolla
Department/program: Physics
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Max Weinstein '21
Project: Percy Shelley: Romantic Attitudes Towards Mathematical Truth and the Sublime
Faculty mentor/sponsor: William Flesch
Department/program: English and Math
Provost’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

Student: Eric Blum '22
Project: Greek Particles: Creating A Learner-Friendly Database of Contemporary Scholarship
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Joel Christensen
Department/program: Classical studies
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Haley Brown '23
Project: A Useable Past? New England Flirtations with Disunion, 1812-1815, and 1850-1861
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Dan Breen
Department/program: Legal studies
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Hunter Kessous '22
Project: Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Knowledge and Attitude Amongst Volunteers
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Keridwen Luis
Department/program: Women's, Gender and Sexuality studies
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Luochen Liu '22
Project: Investigating the ribosome-specialized translation of vesicular stomatitis virus using rpL40-binding nanobodies
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Amy S. Y. Lee
Department/program: Biology
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Issac Rose-Berman '22
Project: The American Media’s Role in Altering Issue Salience
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Lucy Goodhart
Department/program: Politics
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Angela Self '22
Project: Is Christianity in Decline in the United States?
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Wendy Cadge
Department/program: Sociology
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Yoo Ra Sung '23
Project: Uncovering the Intergenerational Effects of Trauma on Korean and Korean American Women Through Oral History
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Yuri Doolan
Department/program: History
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Leah Trachtenberg '21
Project: Bunnies and Nachasim: Jews in Playboy Magazine
Faculty mentor/sponsor: ChaeRan Freeze
Department/program: Near Eastern and Judaic studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality studies
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Amy Wang '21
Project: Are Soft Sciences Theories More Easily Rejected than Hard Science Theories?
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Teresa Mitchell
Department/program: Psychology
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

Student: Richard (Quinn) Weiner '21
Project: Generations of Impactful Scholarship
Faculty mentor/sponsor: Tom King
Department/program: English
Jerome A. Schiff Undergraduate Fellows Program

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