What is a Mellon Forum?
Mellon Senior Forums at Branford College seek to foster in our Seniors the sense of belonging to the community of scholars. Organized in the form of dinner meetings to which both Seniors and their advisers are invited, they provide some of our most talented students the opportunity to present the results of their independent research projects. The Forums also offer the possibility of especially close interaction between the Head of the College, the Dean, and Branford Seniors in comfortable and intimate surroundings. Branford holds a number of Senior Forums in the Spring semester. After dinner is served, students deliver research papers, usually fifteen to twenty minutes in length, to an audience of fellow Seniors. Attempts are made to cover a wide range of topics in various branches of the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Natural Sciences. Each paper is immediately followed by a lively and intense question and answer period which permits the Senior to clarify (and perhaps modify) his/her critical stance.
Branford’s Mellon Forum coordinators are HOC De La Cruz, Dean Galindo, and resident fellow Steve Blum. Each senior participating in the Forums are matched with one of our Graduate Affiliates who mentor them. An info session is held in the Fall semester for those seniors interested in participating.
What is the Mellon Forum schedule for Spring 2026?
January 13th
Janic Aguirre
“Traditions and Intentions: Pseudo-glyph Writing in Classic and Post-Classic Societies in Ancient El Salvador and Honduras”
The Copan valley and Western El Salvador are known for the presence of pseudo-glyphic writings painted and inscribed on ceramic objects (Longyear, 1952; Sharer 1979; Viel 1993). Different styles such as Copador, Arambala, Gualpopa, and Machacal contain varieties of signs that look similar to Maya hieroglyphic writing found elsewhere but are not necessarily legible. Several scholars have systematically studied pseudo-glyphs on Maya vessels: Longyear (1952), Calvin (2006), Aldana (2011), Caballero Diaz (2017), and Houston (2018). This project seeks to contribute to pseudo-glyphic studies by expanding Calvin’s Pseudo-Glyph catalogue and comparing different pseudo-glyphic signs across archaeological sites. This project tests the following hypothesis. While in certain Maya societies pseudo-glyphs played a role as a symbolic alternative to bone fide hieroglyphs, pseudo-glyphs found in regions with Copador were the product of deliberate, stylized form of expression. We test this theory by analyzing the degree to which pseudo-glyphs repeat across sites and analyzing the burial and provenience these vessels were found in. We hope this thesis can shed light on larger questions, such as the transmission of hieroglyphic knowledge across the ancient Mesoamerican world.
Sydney Scheller
“Removing Single Points of Failure in Privacy-Preserving Record Linking Systems for Medical Data”
General patient information and test results often lack the level of detail required for modern medical and public health research, which increasingly relies on large-scale, granular datasets. To support this work, infrastructure systems must securely connect records across multiple sources while ensuring that sensitive patient information remains private. Privacy-preserving record linking (PPRL) systems are designed to achieve this goal by linking datasets without revealing patient identities or increasing risk to the individuals whose data is used.
This thesis presents a PPRL-compatible system that is secure by design rather than relying on staying ahead of the technical arms race. Security is achieved by eliminating single points of failure, specifically the researcher and the encrypted shared file system, which are the primary sources of vulnerability in current systems. The proposed infrastructure preserves the existing regulatory mechanisms for data procurement, such as Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and Data Use Agreements (DUAs), while enhancing both the security of the system and the researcher’s workflow.
The first half of the thesis evaluates current practices for handling sensitive medical data, including login protocols, access controls, and regulatory oversight, against a non-collusion threat model. The second half constructs a new PPRL-consistent infrastructure that mitigates identified risks.
This system demonstrates that it is possible to create PPRL infrastructure that both facilitates legitimate research and maintains strong privacy protections, even in the presence of adversaries. By shifting from a reliance on technical arms races to security by design, this approach provides a robust framework for future medical research infrastructure.
Lucy Ton That
“‘You Can’t Destroy My True Red Heart’: A Reading of the 2008 Translations of Hồ Xuân Hương”
The phrase “you can’t destroy my true red heart” comes from Marilyn Chin’s 2008 translation of Hồ Xuân Hương, an eighteenth-century Vietnamese poet famed for her use of the erotic lyric. Together, with John Balaban, a second major translator of Hồ’s work, Chin and Hồ comprise the protagonists of this essay. In this essay I read Hồ Xuân Hương’s literary afterlife through her two contemporary American translations. I use different points of comparison to evaluate the continuities and divergences between the two translations, from the “scandal” of the “Marichiko” translations to the subfield of female poetic performance with the political poetess; from Anne Cheng’s critical work on Ornamentalism to the acrimonious letters sent back and forth between the translators and their allies. This essay sets out to chronicle a literary dispute between John Balaban and Marilyn Chin over who has the right to translate across nation, race, culture, and gender and concludes with the impossibility of that task, instead seeing Balaban and Chin—rather than as adversaries—as two (unwitting) collaborators.
January 20th
Daniela Chaclan & Victoria Fenton
“On the Brink of a Nuclear Iran”
Iran’s nuclear policy has long been a point of tension for the United States, Israel, and Iran’s neighboring countries in the Middle East. Iran’s theocratic regime structure is difficult to assess and impossible to predict from a foreign perspective. The recent bombings in June and the ongoing protests in Iran demonstrate how quickly policy can shift.
While Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon and states their nuclear enrichment program is entirely peaceful, U.S. intelligence analysts generally believe that Iran is seeking to maintain a “threshold” capability, meaning Tehran has the knowledge and infrastructure to produce a nuclear weapon in a fairly short period of time should its leaders decide to do so.
This Global Affairs capstone project aimed to analyze how likely it is for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon in the next two years and the implications that would follow. As a capstone group, our team developed a memo for our client Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm with offices in New York, London, and San Francisco. Together, we will share our findings and discuss recent events that have affected our analysis since completing our capstone project.
Andrew Tran
“Teaching Language Models to Understand Molecules: Integrating Language and Molecular Structure in Biomedical AI”
Modern biomedical research uses machine learning models to understand molecules such as small-molecule drugs and proteins. However, most existing models rely on only a single way of representing molecules, such as text descriptions or two-dimensional structural representations. At the same time, models that emphasize molecular structure often fail to incorporate the vast body of biomedical text that describes molecular function and interactions.
This work presents MolLM, a unified language model that learns simultaneously from biomedical text, two-dimensional molecular structures, and three-dimensional molecular structures. By integrating these complementary sources of information, the model is able to perform a range of downstream tasks, including matching molecules to written descriptions, predicting molecular properties, generating descriptions of molecules, and editing molecules based on text prompts.
January 27th
Luca Girodon
“On The Brink of a Nuclear Iran”
Iran’s nuclear policy has long been a point of tension for the United States, Israel, and regional partners. While Tehran states its nuclear enrichment program is peaceful, the reality of a “threshold” state means the infrastructure to produce a nuclear weapon exists in a short timeframe should leadership decide to do so. This Global Affairs capstone project, developed for the advisory firm Greenmantle, analyzed the implications of Iran moving beyond this threshold.
This presentation focuses primarily on the strategic and military architecture of a United States response to such a potential escalation. The discussion will explore the mechanics of U.S. policy, ranging from kinetic to cyber disruption and intensified sabotage targeting nuclear command and control networks. Finally, we will investigate the potential shift in long-term U.S. posture from non-proliferation toward a policy of permanent containment and implicit regime change. By focusing on these response mechanisms, the presentation provides a detailed look at the strategic path Washington would likely follow in the event of Iranian nuclearization.
Rena Liu
“The Labor Market Impacts of US Grocery Mergers, 2011 to 2016”
Roughly 5 million Americans work at grocery stores and supercenters (IBISWorld). Since the 1980s, waves of mergers and acquisitions have swept through the grocery industry. As a result, independent groceries and small chains operate fewer stores today, falling behind companies like Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, and Costco. If consolidation gives people fewer options for where to work, then grocery companies might have the power to decrease wages. On the other hand, grocery workers may be able to find employment in many industries beyond grocery. I track grocery mergers from 2011 to 2016 and use a difference-in-differences analysis to study what happens to wages and employment rates in US counties where mergers took place.
Daniel Zhang
“Oceanic Chorus”
I compare Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy to examine the ideological import of an enduring literary form: the Greek chorus. Originating in Athenian drama, the chorus is a collective body that offers reactions, judgments, and interpretations in response to a play’s events. As such, the chorus embodied Athens’ burgeoning democratic spirit by expressing the values of the play’s political community—and often that of the spectators—in a unified voice. I argue, however, that Sophocles and Cusk alike are suspicious of the chorus’ claim to aggregate and distill multiple perspectives through single-voiced summary. They wonder what is lost when the whole eclipses the part, an apprehension that Oedipus and Outline both dramatize. I also trace how this tension unfolds within the broader reception history of the chorus, by turns figured as a utopian commune and a senseless mob. Mapping an intellectual history that draws from diverse episodes, from the revolutions of 1848 to contemporary innovations in large language models, my essay interrogates the fantasy of representing many voices through one.
February 3rd
Aiden Healy
“A great yearning, a greater Life: themes of Reconciliation and World in the Thought of Goethe and Hannah Arendt”
My project aims to understand reconciliation as a process by which humans enter into communion with each other and their surrounding world. First, I examine the notion of reconciliation at the heart of Goethe’s Faust. In this study, I look at both nature and the human person as mediators between Faust and his world. Through these mediators, Faust eventually merits salvation: an eternal reconciliation with the world. Turning to Arendt, I ask if such reconciliation is possible even in the wake of crises which have destroyed our trust in the legitimacy of political institutions and the capacity of human nature for good. In particular, I analyze how storytelling may facilitate the reconciliation of persons with the public sphere in times of great darkness.
Javier Pardo
“The Impossible Aesthetic: The Pairing of the Plantain and the Crabapple in Dream of the Red Chamber”
In Chapter 17 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu, his father, and a group of his fathers “literati-guests” tour the newly constructed garden 大觀園, coming up with names and couplets for the garden’s various attraction sites. At what will later become Baoyu’s residence, the group encounters multiple plantains growing across from a crabapple tree. Baoyu insists that the “red” and “green” imagery conjured by the two plants must both be used to name the location. But the two plants have different seasons, and from a botanical standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense for them to appear beside each other. Plantains have a tradition of aesthetic impossibility, which can date back to “The Plantain in the Snow”, painted by Tang poet and artist Wang Wei 王維. This project seeks to explore the inherited literary conventions attached to crabapples and plantains, specifically: How does the author, Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹, use plant imagery to negotiate between truth and fiction, void 空 and emotion 情?
Noe Topping
“‘We Care Too!!’: Warren County Youth and the Fight for an Environmentally Just Future”
In September of 1982, hundreds of residents in Warren County, North Carolina, took to the streets to protest the siting of a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill in their community. Farmers, teachers, pastors, mothers, and young students lay in the roads to block massive trucks from dumping the toxic soil into the landfill. They believed that their community had been chosen by Governor James B. Hunt and the EPA because it was poor, rural, and predominantly Black. Over six weeks of protests, more than 500 people were arrested, including children as young as four years old. Although the protests were ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the landfill, they are largely seen as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement.
Despite this recognition, there remains little scholarship on the participation and experiences of young people. Thus, my thesis aims to answer the question: how were young people empowered to become active participants in the Warren County PCB protests? Recognizing that environmental justice is as much about access to information as it is about clean air and water, I worked with Warren County community members to design a curriculum for local middle school students about the movement and the broader history of the county. Grounded in place-based pedagogy that emphasizes community and environmental stewardship, this curriculum seeks to empower students to identify injustice, understand their community’s history, and see themselves as capable actors in shaping a more just future.
February 10th
Ishan Narra
“The Characterization of Rhenium on Silicon for Applications in Superconducting Quantum Computers”
Quantum computers are an emerging technology that possess the ability, if realized, to help solve a plethora of scientific problems, ranging from developing pharmaceuticals to simulating the universe’s origins. In the past two decades, circuits made out of superconducting materials have emerged as an extremely promising platform to build quantum computers. However, in order to reach practical quantum computing capabilities, significant progress needs to be made on protecting quantum bits (qubits) from external noise which can cause them to lose their information. Recently, circuits made out of tantalum films deposited onto sapphire and silicon substrates have shown to exhibit lower information losses compared to other materials combinations. Still, other superconducting refractory metals such as rhenium have been largely unexplored. In this talk, I will discuss my investigation of rhenium thin films deposited onto silicon wafers as a potential candidate for high-performance superconducting circuits. I observe that superconductivity can be observed in these thin films, and note a series of material characterizations of these films which could lead to a greater understanding of how they would perform as qubits.
Laura Ospina
“Signals of Authority or Danger?: Security Structures and Civil-Military Relations in the Colombian Armed Conflict”
A regular discussion of state security structures in civilian settings might evoke echoes of omnipresent surveillance or repressive checkpoints. In this easy-to-reach-for imagery, the built environment of conflict — military and police bases, walls, concrete barriers, and the like — antagonistically projects state authority and discipline to civilians. But what role do security structures play when the state seeks to instead gain civilian confidence during a domestic insurgency? In an ideal scenario for the state, a structure communicates to civilians that the physical protection of the state is both near and substantive. In practice, however, this may be far from the truth.
My thesis explores whether proximity to military bases and other state security installations influenced Colombian civilians’ confidence in the Armed Forces during the late ’90s and early ’00s. Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict — characterized by a spike in confidence in the Armed Forces post-2002 and attacks on military bases and police stations by non-state actors — offers rich case material. In August 2025, I traveled to Colombia to conduct interviews with nine national security experts, including researchers, former government officials, and a former high-ranking general. My qualitative findings will be complemented by an in-progress quantitative analysis of public opinion survey data.
February 17th
Mia Cortes Castro
“Mothers’ Tongues: A Collection of Poems”
“Mother’s Tongues” is a collection of fifty poems that explores the experiences of undocumented women in New Haven as they live and work in the city. As a collection of poems, it reckons with themes of womanhood, motherhood, and the purpose of life and its difficulties, exploring how these themes are affected by instincts of survival and feelings of displacement. All of the poems were inspired by interviews with twelve women, who were asked open-ended questions about their experiences with immigration in New Haven, and the reconstruction process that follows it; each of the poems is either based directly on events or themes discussed in an interview, or is an exploration of a phrase said during it. The collection focuses both on the women telling their stories and on the linguistic tensions that come with being a poetic voice and attempting to accurately represent translated emotional descriptions.
Tenzin Dhondup
“Deported by Hospitals and Ambulances: Medical Repatriation and the Privatization of Migration Control, 1945–Present”
This thesis examines the practice of medical repatriation, the cross-border transfer of ill or injured patients by hospitals and ambulances, from 1945 to the present. In America, the practice has drawn public attention through cases in which severely ill, injured, or comatose patients have been expelled from hospitals and deported without due process. These cases have generated public outrage and scrutiny, yet they represent only the most visible instances of a far broader and largely hidden phenomenon. Because medical repatriation is obscured by medical privacy laws, there are no public databases that systematically document its scope or operation. In response, this thesis develops new and inventive methods for investigating the practice using publicly accessible sources. This thesis contributes an original archive of 720 newspaper articles from international news databases, alongside a supplementary dataset of 75 GoFundMe campaigns that document family efforts to secure medical repatriation or resist forced return. Together, these materials illuminate practices that are otherwise obscured within institutional systems of care. The thesis situates medical repatriation within a global landscape that includes undocumented patients in American hospitals, temporary migrant workers in Canada, Overseas Filipino Workers, and injured travelers managed through private insurance systems. Across these contexts, the project shows how decisions about care, belonging, and removal are increasingly delegated to private actors such as hospitals, employers, insurers, and transport companies. By reconstructing the conditions that make medical repatriation possible, the thesis renders visible how sites of care have become sites of control within contemporary health and migration systems.
Seung Min Baik Kang
“Confrontations at the Border: Veterans for Peace and the Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement, 1965-1991”
On June 7, 1988, 106 veteran volunteers and 37 vehicles carrying over thirty tons of humanitarian aid gathered in Laredo, Texas, a city at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Veterans Peace Convoy (VPC), organized by groups including Veterans for Peace (VFP), sought to deliver aid to Nicaragua in solidarity with the Sandinistas amid the Reagan Administration’s staunch support for the Contras. But Washington deemed the convoy a violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, sparking a national confrontation over the criminalization of humanitarian aid.
This thesis traces an institutional history of the VFP within the Central America Peace and Solidarity Movement (CAPSM), arguing that veterans’ role in the movement has been largely overlooked in the historiography. Drawing on archival collections from Swarthmore College, the Wisconsin Historical Society, Yale University as well as oral histories conducted by the author, this thesis also uses the VFP’s participation in the VPC as a case study of Cold War border politics, illustrating how the border functioned to restrict entry and exit. The convoy ultimately reached Managua on July 29, 1988, and its subsequent legal victory in Veterans Peace Convoy v. Schultz opened the border (so to speak), marking a new model of transnational solidarity—an enduring legacy of the VFP and the CAPSM at large.
February 24th
Stephen King
“Tillman’s Shadow: Benjamin Tillman and the Long Road from Reconstruction to Jim Crow”
From 1876 to 1896, South Carolia experienced a series of political changes and revolutions which unraveled the gains made by black voters. Intertwined with these changes was Tillman, a southern populist and virulent racist whose dedication to erasing black political power remained constant throughout his political career. This makes Tillman somewhat unique compared to other populists in North Carolina and Georgia, who were willing to ally with black voters for the sake of political expediency. Through tracing Tillman’s development from 1876 to 1896 however, one can see how Tillman was able to develop a remarkably successful populist political identity despite remaining steadfast in his support of white supremacy. Many historians have questioned whether populist movements during the Gilded age had a chance of ushering in multiracial democracy to the post-reconstruction south. Tillman however is an unfortunate demonstration of how economic populism and racial exclusion could coexist.
Kristen Kim
“Phonetic Variation in Korean-English Code-Switching”
Heritage speakers of Korean who are dominant in English face the unique challenge of experiencing phonological interference from their dominant language while simultaneously navigating social pressures to maintain cultural identity through linguistic choices. Existing works explore phonetic interference effects, but few investigate whether speakers strategically manage phonetic variation to express identity. This thesis explores the gap between production, perception, and identity in code-switching research. More specifically, it addresses three linked research questions: (1) Do heritage speakers’ Korean vowels shift toward English during code-switching? (2) Are these acoustic shifts perceptually salient to listeners? (3) Does identity and language dominance predict phonetic shifts? The experimental design focuses on Korean-American heritage speakers who produce target words in two conditions: pure Korean sentences and English sentences with Korean target words inserted. The analysis focuses on the vowel pair Korean [e~ ɛ] versus English [æ], which have distinct F1 values. For each token, F1 is extracted and a Differences-in-Differences (DiD) analysis will quantify the distance of Korean vowels relative to English vowels. Expected results would support a three-component model where interference occurs automatically with English dominance causing phonetic shift; interference is perceptually salient as listeners notice and judge shifted vowels as less authentic, and identity mediates interference, with speakers of stronger Korean identity shifting less. This thesis bridges individual identity with community-based patterns, illustrating that the phonetics of code-switching involve both subconscious transfer and intentional identity expression.
March 3rd
Zachary Reich
“Bad News”
For my senior project in graphic design, I’m creating a JavaScript program that allows users to rearrange the words, letters, and images of the front page of the New York Times in real time. This program offers an opportunity for users to transform the news into collage, found poetry, and other original artwork. Through “Bad News,” stories of excitement and tragedy alike become the materials of play.
Linden Skalak
“St George: A Film Reckoning with Media Radicalization and Mental Health”
An isolated, paranoid man believes that an apocalyptic disease is infecting the country and turning people into violent, senseless creatures in this short film, which addresses how isolation creates media radicalization and the necessity of community and mental health support to combat unhealthy beliefs. In an age of constant media consumption, misinformation and sensationalized news have become major forces shaping mental health. A 2025 publication in the Psychiatric Times reviewed the statistics from the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey and found that in 2025, 83% of Americans reported stress over the nation’s future, and in 2023 that 73% of Americans felt overwhelmed by the number of crises in the world. Alexander Lamgenkamp’s 2025 review suggested that right-extreme radicalization and extremist antifeminism are related to social deprivation and loneliness. St. George addresses the growing social problem of how isolation, fear, and echo chambers distort a person’s perceived reality. Through this psychological short film and accompanying essay, I aim to bridge art and advocacy and spark important conversations about both how the media affects mental health and how mental health is portrayed in the media.
Kennedy Stafford
“Religion as a Tool of Power: Social Control and Resistance in Colonial Antigua”
This senior thesis will explore the following question: How did various actors in Antiguan society utilize religion to justify authority and influence the social order, especially across positions of unequal power? Religion played a central role in colonial Antigua and was used not only for personal belief but also to achieve social, political, and economic goals. This thesis aims to examine the ways in which religion functioned as a tool for asserting influence, negotiating social relations, and maintaining dominance in colonial Antigua, particularly around the period of emancipation. Key actors include enslaved people, freed people, plantation owners, abolitionists, church leadership, and others who engaged with religious institutions and practices for different ends. This study will draw on archival and textual sources from early 19th century Antigua, as well as existing scholarship on Caribbean religion. By examining these dynamics in Antigua, this thesis seeks to explore the effectiveness of religious strategies for people at different levels of the social order. More broadly, it considers how religion, used as a tool of power, can affect the economy, politics, and stability of a society.
March 24th
Isabella Barboza-Rodriguez
“A Rank-and-File Leader, George Patterson: How South Chicago Steelworkers Successfully Unionized, 1933-1937”
The Roosevelt administration passed, amongst a flurry of other New Deal legislation, the Wagner Act in 1935. In doing so, the federal government cemented and protected workers’ rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Many labor organizers took quick notice of this change in policy and began forming new coalitions to uplift workers. John L. Lewis was one of these leaders and formed the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO) to support workers who had been overlooked by past national unionization efforts. The CIO was a success, helping unionize millions of workers in just a few years.
Though organizations such as the CIO evidently played a major role in helping workers, particularly industrial ones, unionize, they were not the only factors. Rank-and-file workers at plants across the country also helped ensure the success of unionization. One such worker was named George A. Patterson, a steelworker in South Chicago’s South Works mill. By studying a portion of Patterson’s time at South Works, 1933-1937, and his changing role in labor organizing, this thesis seeks to examine the extent to which ordinary industrial workers provided a strong foundation for national organizations, including the CIO and its subgroup, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, to take root.
Hannah Kurczeski
“ ‘Lady Peaceful, Lady Happy’: Performing Femininity as Both Resistance and Conformity”
At the end of February, I played Sally Bowles in Cabaret as my Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies acting thesis. Set in Weimar Berlin amidst a period of rapid social and political change similar to the world we live in today, John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Joe Masteroff’s 1966 musical reveals the ways we try to escape a changing reality and the responsibilities that come along with it. Each character is confronted with the chance to act and most—including Sally Bowles—choose complacency and therefore, complicity. My research is centered around investigating the ways in which the performance of gender, both in the context of the show and today, can serve simultaneously as a means of rebellion and of conforming to societal standards and oppressive systems. Through this production, I explore the commodification of the female body and its relation to the spectator, a real or imagined audience, and how that relationship—the “to-be-looked-at-ness” described by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema”—influences the decision of both Sally, as a character, and myself, as a performer, to conform to or resist the gendered and political “norms” imposed by society. No matter where she is, Sally as a character is constantly performing. When is it a genuine method of liberation, and when is it a shield with which to distract herself and others from larger issues? And how does feminine gender expression serve simultaneously as a form of commerce and connection and as an agent of distance?
Victoria Vilton
“New Investigations of Seismicity in Moodus, Connecticut Using a Dense Array of Raspberry Shake Seismometers”
In 1791, Moodus, a town in central Connecticut, experienced what would be known as the largest earthquake in Connecticut history. Though the historical record is sparse, seismologists today estimate the magnitude at 4.5-5, large for any area with little seismicity and even less cause. But this sesimicity would not end with the 1791 earthquake. Instead, almost two centuries later, seismologists would go on to explore the curious phenomena of four distinct microearthquake swarms that occurred over the course of the 1980s.
The tectonic setting of Moodus does not quite justify these peculiar seismic events – it exists on a passive continental margin, meaning that millions of years of tectonic processes have pushed a former active plate boundary into the North American continent. This project hopes to further quantify the seismicity in this region through the installation of a series of low-cost seismometers called Raspberry Shakes. With the data gathered from these instruments, we aim to apply a template matching approach to search for low-magnitude events that are not large enough to be included in the national catalog. Additionally, we hope to gain further insight into the crustal structure of Moodus using data from the magnitude 1.9 earthquake on January 7th. Our study is also a proof of concept for low-cost, ultra-dense monitoring networks in regions with low-magnitude seismicity, particularly in settings away from plate boundaries.
March 31st
Chloe Edwards
“Comparing France’s ‘Anti-Fast Fashion’ law to state-level legislation in the United States to determine the potential for federal replicability in the States”
According to the United Nations Environmental Program, 92 million tons of textile waste are produced every year, and much of this textile waste is made up of garments that were never purchased or worn. Beyond creating tremendous amounts of waste, the fashion industry also produces greenhouse gas emissions and pollutes water through microplastics.
In June of 2025, France’s National Assembly unanimously passed a law that aims to limit the environmental impact of the textile industry. The law has been referred to as the “Anti-Fast Fashion” law due to the way it seeks to impose taxes on ultra-fast fashion brands, limit advertising language (e.g., prohibiting the usage of the word “free”), and increase awareness of a garment’s lifecycle.
My paper seeks to analyze this law and understand if, or how, a similar law could be passed in the United States on the federal level. Questions I’m asking are: Is there a cultural component that makes a law that targets the fashion industry more successful in France? Why have several states devised similar laws, but not federal legislation? Is policy the answer to the textile waste problem, or just a starting point?
In an effort to answer these questions, I am comparing and contrasting France’s “Anti-Fast Fashion” law with proposed and enacted state legislation, specifically in New York, California, and Washington. Additionally, I am consulting, through interviews, with industry leaders, the architect of New York’s Senate Bill S4746B, and others with varying roles in fashion, sustainability, and policy.
Marisa Poe
“The Polarizing Forces Sustaining Democratic Breakdown after the January 6th Insurrection”
On January 6th, 2021, thousands of Americans traveled to attend the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, DC to protest the election results. President Trump concluded his speech by directing the crowd to march towards the United States Capitol to pressure lawmakers into overturning the certification of the 2020 election results. This march culminated in a violent and destructive uprising that constituted an attack on democracy itself. In the immediate aftermath, it seemed to many that Trump’s role in the insurrection had stripped him of his credibility as a future presidential candidate. Yet four years later, after continuing to deny the results of the 2020 election and vowing to pardon the January 6th defendants, President Trump was back in the White House.
This Ethics, Politics, and Economics senior essay explores how the nation has reached a point where 49.8% of the American electorate voted for a candidate who wields executive power beyond constitutional limits and continuously exhibits authoritarian tendencies. The first section argues that heightened political polarization has caused many voters to prioritize partisan goals over democratic values. The second section draws on the socio-economic backgrounds of the January 6th defendants to contribute to the literature connecting the impacts of globalization to the rise of right-wing populism. The final section employs Kantian duty ethics to construct a normative examination of the role of journalists in a healthy democracy, and how failure to fulfill this role increases the likelihood of democratic breakdown.
Abby Scott
“Workers and Visitors: How Children and Adults Understand Social Roles and Expectations”
My research explores how we understand social roles and use them to make sense of the world around us. Specifically, we investigate how the ability to use roles to predict and evaluate behavior develops from childhood into adulthood.
In our studies, both children (ages 5–10) and adults watched agents labeled as either a “worker” or a “visitor” perform different tasks in a garden setting. Sometimes the agent went out of their way to pick plants of a specific color; other times, they blocked or allowed another agent to pass. We then asked participants to explain why the agent acted that way and what they might do next. What seems like a simple evaluation revealed striking developmental differences.
We looked for two kinds of explanations in our participants’ responses. Normative answers were those that used the role of the agent in the situation to explain their behavior. Personal answers were responses that used personal characteristics of the agent, such as wants, needs, desires, preferences, and beliefs to explain and predict the agent’s behavior.
In this presentation, I will explain our study and demonstrate our findings based on our participant free responses. There were significant differences found between young children, older children, and adults, suggesting marked changes in role-based reasoning throughout development. This work sheds light on how we acquire fundamental tools for navigating social life.
April 7th
Luis Tomas Orozco
“Online Re-Enchantment: Affect, Irony, and Myth in Contemporary Digital Culture”
My paper explores how mystical reverence towards online infrastructure persists in contemporary digital culture. I conduct an ethnographic study of a loose field of Instagram accounts, paying special attention to recurring motifs and affective structures in their posts. I treat these digital artifacts as elements of a symbolic system endowed with an affective force. I find that individuals in this sphere treat the Internet as more than a communicative technology. Importantly, and in contrast to the early digital era, the social imaginaries surrounding these symbolic systems are marked by dystopian ideas and awareness of the contradictory nature of the individuals’ reverence to the Internet. I base my analysis on Marcel Mauss’s 1902 General Theory of Magic to illustrate how this mystical reverence is a modern instance of magical thought.
Eleanor Valentin
“The Architecture of Ownership: Genentech, Patent Law, and the Commercialization of Recombinant DNA, 1978–1994”
Biotechnology did not become a therapeutic industry through scientific discovery alone. While the founding of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s made new forms of medicine possible, it was the legal struggles of litigation and patent negotiation that determined how those discoveries became marketable therapies. This thesis argues that Genentech’s legal involvement was not a peripheral conflict but a dominant institution through which innovation became own-able and investable. As the first-of-its-kind venture-backed biotechnology firm, Genentech’s success tested whether private equity could survive the long research horizons and regulatory uncertainties of biological engineering, ultimately proving that capital could carve a path into a new epistemic enterprise. By tracing the shift from the mid-century pharmaceutical model of natural extraction to a modern era of laboratory synthesis, this research explores how a regulatory and proprietary vacuum was filled by aggressive legal foresight.
The thesis demonstrates how Genentech pioneered a new university-industry relationship, transforming academic discovery into a financial and strategic asset through non-traditional licensing and fiduciary frameworks. It further examines how landmark litigation between 1978–1994 mobilized scientific expertise to reshape legal doctrines like novelty and equivalence. In these cases, the courtroom functioned as an extension of the laboratory, where the boundaries of “invention” were argued into place. Ultimately, Genentech’s legacy is the normalization of a model where scientific authority, corporate strategy, and legal doctrine are tightly interwoven. This history reveals that the “modern medicine” we know today is not just a story of breakthroughs, but a durable legal architecture designed to convert scientific uncertainty into private control.
April 14th
Ayush Iyer
“Tracking Deworming Resistance in Hookworms: From Rural Ghana to the Molecular Lab”
Hookworm infection affects over 500 million people worldwide, causing chronic anemia, malnutrition, and impaired development in some of the world’s most resource-limited communities. The cornerstone of global control efforts is mass drug administration of albendazole, a deworming benzimidazole drug. But what happens when the drug stops working?
During the summer of 2024, I conducted field research in the villages surrounding Beposo, Ghana, as part of a longitudinal study tracking hookworm prevalence and treatment response in a cohort of 588 participants. Of those treated with albendazole, 52% remained hookworm-positive ten days later, a treatment failure rate that raises urgent questions about the integrity of current deworming programs. Using samples brought back from the field, I am conducting a genomics study to identify molecular signals that may be arising due to deworming resistance selection.
This presentation traces the scientific journey from that field observation to the molecular lab. Drawing on my undergraduate thesis, I review the evolution of tools used to detect anthelmintic resistance in hookworms and why earlier methods likely missed resistance signals that more sensitive approaches can now detect. I then present novel data from ongoing work in my lab, where sequencing of beta-tubulin resistance-associated loci in pre- and post-treatment samples from Ghana reveals enrichment of specific single nucleotide polymorphisms following albendazole exposure. These findings represent an early molecular signal consistent with active selection for benzimidazole resistance in human hookworms, and underscore the urgency of building robust, scalable surveillance systems before resistance becomes widespread.
Ivana Nique
“Shaping a Nation: Plasticity Across 20th Century Politics of Peru”
In 1968, Juan Velasco Alvarado overthrew the democratically elected government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry in Peru. For the next seven years, General Velasco attempted to dismantle the ruling class of landholding elites and reconstruct Peru’s national identity. Through the use of cultural policies, Velasco succeeded in establishing a new sense of national pride, one based on a reconstructed past which centered the role of Indigenous populations and Pre-Columbian civilizations. This senior project specifically focuses on the role of pre-Columbian ceramic forms and how they were repurposed as instruments of the state, appearing in currency, educational programs and political propaganda. Once tied to specific regions and peoples, these forms were reframed as symbols of a unified national identity.
Focusing on Velasco’s military regime, the project highlights the malleability of cultural identity in Peru. Through indigenismo and incanismo, culture became a site of negotiation. Under Velasco, this process intensified: Indigenous imagery replaced European ideals, and Pre-columbian civilizations became a source of national pride. This tension is explored analytically and creatively, culminating in ceramics showcase which reinterprets pre-Columbian forms to reflect on their role in shaping Peru’s modern national identity.
Ava Ospina
“Exploring Zinc as an Alternative to Copper in Non-Hormonal Intrauterine Devices: Evaluating Contraceptive Efficacy and Mechanisms in Human Sperm”
Although hormonal contraception is highly effective, many individuals experience negative side effects such as bleeding irregularities, mood instability, and weight gain, demonstrating the growing demand for more non-hormonal contraception options. Currently, the only non-hormonal long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) available is the copper IUD, which works primarily through its cytotoxic effects on sperm and induces an inflammatory response in the uterus. However, the inflammation caused by the Cu-IUD, more specifically the released cupric ions, is known to cause adverse side effects due to their inflammatory effects on the endometrium. Previous studies suggest that zinc (Zn) may serve as a promising alternative to copper (Cu), demonstrating equivalent contraceptive efficacy. Histological studies have also shown that Zn-IUDs cause significantly less endometrial inflammation compared to Cu-IUDs. However, the effects and contraceptive efficacy of Zn on human sperm are yet to be elucidated. We evaluated Zn as a potential substitute for Cu in IUDs by characterizing its effects on sperm motility. Our results show that Zn²⁺ suppresses sperm motility in a dose-dependent manner, with complete motility suppression occurring at concentrations comparable to Cu²⁺ (around 10⁻⁴ M). These findings suggest Zn may achieve contraceptive effects similar to Cu while potentially reducing inflammation-related side effects. A limitation of this study was the low baseline motility characteristic of cryopreserved samples. Our findings provide preliminary data that Zn-IUDs may maintain the contraceptive efficacy of Cu-IUDs while reducing adverse effects caused by Cu-induced inflammation. Further development of Zn-IUDs could expand the range of safe, effective, and tolerable LARC options.
April 21st
Theo Kubovy-Weiss
“A Cold and Broken Hineni: Leonard Cohen’s Spiritual Struggle on You Want It Darker”
Leonard Cohen’s spiritual restlessness was lifelong—from his elite Montreal Jewish upbringing through flirtations with Scientology, Buddhism, psychedelics, and Christianity—and he never managed to settle into stable faith. His final album, You Want It Darker, finds a dying Cohen confronting God with unusual candor. Rather than achieving resolution, the album cycles through submission, blasphemy, and desperate longing.
Ty Kushi
“Mineral Governance in Socialist Tanzania, 1961 - 1979”
In 2015, the Tanzanian government revived the State Mining Corporation (STAMICO), a parastatal originally established in 1972. Its re-establishment signaled a renewed commitment to state participation in the mining sector after decades of liberalization, evoking the earlier era of African Socialism. This project takes that period as its focus, examining the state’s relationship to the mining industry from independence to the Mining Act of 1979. Drawing on archival research conducted at the University of Dar es Salaam, it analyzes legislation, parliamentary debates, development plans, and case studies such as the Williamson Diamond Mine. In doing so, it demonstrates how mining policy was shaped by the persistent tension between ideological aspirations—self-reliance, collective ownership, and national “development”—and structural constraints, particularly limited capital and technical expertise. The project argues that this tension produced a hybrid system of mineral governance that was neither fully socialist nor conventionally pragmatic, but instead reflected the negotiated and contingent nature of postcolonial state-building.
Rediet Taye
“The Nomadic Lion and the Geometry of his Uncertainty”
This presentation is about the uncertainty of movement and my investigation of a system which conceals that uncertainty. My thesis examines the use of geofence-based early warning systems (EWS) for mitigating human–lion conflict in southwestern Kenya’s Greater Mara Ecosystem. The conservation fraternity is using centralized digital monitoring platforms to deploy GPS collars on lions in order to generate automatic alerts when they cross virtual boundaries. These alerts are communicated to local pastoralists under the assumption that this knowledge of proximity could prevent livestock depredation. The system transforms lions into a moving risk object. It rests on the central promise that continuous, recursive, creative, dynamic, multipurposeful wandering through invisible borders can be transformed into discrete, actionable signals of risk. I interrogate this assumption through a computational audit of the alert’s geometry.
I explore a single month of movement of a single nomadic, dispersing sub-adult male lion through his GPS telemetry trace. I reveal the indeterminacy of his movement. I disentangle a technosolutionist system designed to anticipate risk, but which is ultimately built on a temporally delayed, spatially uncertain, and behaviorally uninformative substrate.
Matthew Verich
“Evaluating an Auditory Evoked Potential Paradigm for Neural Plasticity: Implications for Music-Based Research in Borderline Personality Disorder”
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by emotional dysregulation and interpersonal instability. Because music can support emotion regulation and musical experience has been associated with enhanced neural plasticity, these relationships may be relevant for future work in BPD. Before pursuing that question, however, it is necessary to establish reliable methods for measuring auditory plasticity.
This study evaluated the reproducibility of an auditory evoked potential (AEP) paradigm designed to produce Long Term Potentiation (LTP)-like neural plasticity using electroencephalography (EEG). In a pilot cohort of six healthy controls, we tested whether high-frequency auditory stimulation would increase the amplitude of the N1 component, as predicted by prior work. Contrary to this hypothesis, no significant post-tetanus increase in N1 amplitude was observed. To further assess reproducibility, an additional dataset of 22 healthy control participants from a previous study using the same paradigm was analyzed. This dataset similarly showed no significant potentiation effect.
These findings raise questions about the reliability of this AEP paradigm as a measure of auditory plasticity. The results suggest that further methodological refinement is needed before this task can be used to investigate relationships among neural plasticity, musical experience, and BPD.