TiA Exchange Presenters:
Roundtables
Olutoye Adegboro
A double American Studies and Literary Arts concentrator, Toye hails from Chicago, IL, and studies the narratives of immigrants and diasporic groups in the United States. Fueled by his family's own immigrant background and his interest in media, Adegboro developed "Give Me Your American, Your Multicultural, Your Hilarious Masses" for his senior thesis project which examines the way stand-up comedians Margaret Cho, Maz Jobrani, and Trevor Noah engage immigrant and ethnic humor in their comedy.
Nora Aimee McDonnell
Nora is from Bucks County, Pennsylvania concentrating in Africana Studies and Comparative Literature. Her thesis, "Where Personal and Political Merge: Locating Women’s Prison Narratives in a Legacy of Female Slave Memoir," compares the autobiographies of enslaved and incarcerated authors in order to examine the history of policing female voices in America as well as the personal and political impacts of these narratives.
Kyle Albert
Kyle is from outside Chicago studying Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies. They are passionate about community building (online and off), LGBTQ+ youth movements, and intramural soccer. Their project is entitled, " Racial Microaggressions on TrevorSpace: Constrained Support in an Online LGBTQ+ Youth Community ."
Lauren Behgam
Lauren is concentrating in Environmental Studies originally from the Dallas area. For her senior capstone project, she partnered with a local non-profit, Farm Fresh Rhode Island, to interview various producers around the state about ugly fruits and vegetables. The goal of the project is to better understand what happens to ugly produce and future opportunities for better utilizing them.
Divya Bhatia
Divya is concentrating in Health and Human Biology with a focus on global health and development. She has coordinated the Interfaith Exchange, a mentorship program for high school students rooted in interfaith literacy and social responsibility, since her freshman year and considers it one of her most challenging, influential, and inspiring experiences at Brown.
Natasha Blackadar
Natasha is from Warwick, Rhode Island concentrating in Development Studies. Her project is her senior thesis, "Recentering Development Discourse: Social Capital, Expertise, and Knowledge Production at BIARI."
Colin Blake
Colin is from Richmond, Virginia concentrating in Africana Studies. His project focuses on Queer Rights in Jamaica, analyzing the issue through spatial boundaries, queer theory, and a human rights framework. With this research, he hopes to converge his personal life and academic pursuits in a way that will be beneficial to himself and those like him.
Katherine Byron
Katie is from New Jersey and a dual concentrator in Computational Biology and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is an activist who promotes survivor-centered, trauma-informed approaches to sexual violence. Her project looks at sexual violence policy recommendations based on interviews she and Will Furuyama did with survivors of sexual violence.
Benjamin Chesler
Ben is an Economics concentrator from Newton, Massachusetts. At Brown, he has devoted himself to reducing food waste wherever it can be found. He will be presenting with three other wonderful people on the topic of Food Systems Thinking.
Eliza Dexter Cohen
Eliza is concentrating in Science and Society, focusing in the History of Biology. She is interested in research that integrated diverse methodologies to ask questions about large and small processes at the same time. Her favorite word this semester has been "resonance."
Kendra Cornejo
Kendra is concentrating in History and Ethnic Studies. She is from Brentwood, New York. Her project is titled, "Examining Access to Higher Education for Children of Latino Immigrants Living in the Suburbs."
Kalena Crafton
Kalena is double-concentrating in International Relations and Literary Arts.
Austin Draycott
Austin is from Brooklyn, New York and concentrating in Biology.
Hannah Duncan
Hannah is a Classics concentrator.
María Eugenia Pabón
Maru is a from Puerto Rico concentrating in Comparative Literature. Her project, "Multilingual Writing and the Mother Tongue," examines the metaphor of the "mother tongue" in relation to Caribbean authors who write in more than one language.
Mara Freilich
Mara is an applied math concentrator from Kennett Square, PA. After Brown, she will pursue a PhD in physical oceanography. She was a member of the GISP: "Race and Gender in the Scientific Community".
Emily Fu
Emily is double concentrating in English and Neuroscience. She will be starting medical school at Brown in the fall.
Will Furuyama
Will is concentrating in chemistry in the Chemical Biology track. He is from Los Angeles and is co presenting with Katie Byron on a project they worked on together. She probably has a better description of their project.
Sam Gilman
Sam is a public policy and history concentrator from Washington, DC. He is presenting on Common Sense Action (CSA), which is the first bipartisan advocacy group and think tank of and for Millennials based on 40 campuses across the country. CSA recently joined forces with Run for America to recruit and work to elect 12 candidates to the house of representatives in 2016. Sam is also an avid Yankees fan, history buff, and runner.
Amelia Grant-Alfieri
Amelia is excited to graduate with the Class of 2015! She is from Miami, Florida and is studying Visual Art and Perception, an Independent Concentration. At TiA she will be discussing her capstone project titled Visual Art for Environmental Education.
Ardra Hren
Ardra is a Computer Science concentrator who’s baffled that she’s programming at all. She’s interested the importance of personal networks in learning -- especially how relationships with peers impact learning outside the classroom. She’ll draw from her work creating inclusive communities and promoting diversity in CS through TAing and Women in Computer Science.
Jules Kortenhorst
Jules is a philosophy concentrator from The Hague, The Netherlands. A Nietzsche fanatic from the moment he first picked up The Antichrist in freshman year, Jules wrote a senior philosophy thesis on Nietzsche's concept of selfhood. He is convinced Nietzsche can provide invaluable guidance to college students looking to shape their own identity.
Taylor Lanzet
Taylor is an Environmental Studies concentrator from West Orange, NJ. She is passionate about fixing our national food system, which she believes, marginalizes and exploits farmers, workers, and the act of eating itself. For her senior practicum, she helped the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management write and improve state food policy.
Marguerite McCray Joutz
Marguerite is a concentrating in Education Studies: History and Policy from Bethesda, Maryland. The Brown Conversation is (was) a group of students dedicated to asking big questions about Brown, the purpose of education, and life – over dinner on Saturday night.
Mara McCrickard
Mara is from Cleveland, Ohio concentrating in Sociology. Her project is entitled, "Race in Sociology: Towards a More Inclusive and Critical Curriculum."
Ria Mirchandani
Ria is from Mumbai. She has been an Independent Studies Co-Coordinator at the Curricular for the past two years. She is double concentrating in Computer Science and Migration Studies (an independent concentration).
Kate Nussenbaum
Angie Ocampo
Angie Ocampo is double-concentrating in Sociology and Ethnic Studies. She was born in Bogotá, Colombia but was raised in White Plains, New York. Angie's project is her senior thesis for Sociology titled "The Experiences of Undocumented Latino College Students at Elite Universities."
Antonia Piccone
Antonia is from Washington D.C. and "graduated" in 2014.5, though she chose to remain in frigid Providence this spring to finish her Thesis. Her project, completed for her concentration in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, is titled "King of Clowns: Benjamim de Oliveira and the Politics of Race, Class, and the Traveling Circus in Transitional Brazil, 1870-1930." As indicated by its too-lengthy title, her project attempts to evaluate the political and racial realities that both enabled and restricted the black clown, Benjamim de Oliveira's rise to fame in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century.
Abigail Plummer
Abby is from Madison, Connecticut and is concentrating in Mathematical Physics. Last year, she helped create a GISP called Race and Gender in the Scientific Community.
Destin Sisemore
Ivy Sokol
Ivy is pursuing an independent concentration in Social Innovation with a specific focus on racial inequality in education. She is also the co-founder of Moving Mountains, an organization that provides multicultural environmental education programs to urban youth in Providence. Her thesis paper -- Radicalizing Environmentalism: Toward Multicultural Environmental Education -- explores how people of color interact with environmental issues and argues for the implementation of multicultural environmental education.
Maahika Srinivasan
Maahika is a apparently (!) a senior, concentrating in the weird Brown-esque amalgamation of Science and Society. Maahika is currently the President of the Undergraduate Council of Student- Brown's equivalent of Student Government- and has spent the year exploring the role and form of student voices within the framework of University governance.
Darian Surratt
Darian is from Antioch, California and is concentrating in Social Analysis Research. Outside of the classroom, Darian has been involved in Health Leads, Meiklejohn Advising, a Matched Advising Program for Sophomores (MAPS) mentor, the Kappa Delta Sorority and Bruin Club. Her project is entitled, "Race in Sociology: Towards a More Inclusive and Critical Curriculum."
Jamelle Watson-Daniels
Jamelle is a combined degree Africana and Physics major from the St. Louis area.
Lukas WinklerPrins
Lukas is a mathematician and dilettante. He is in Applied Math, class of 2015.5, and likes a lot of things, especially mathematics and pedagogy. These two interests rolled themselves together into a variety of projects over his time at Brown, and he will discuss ways to improve mathematics education for future generations.
Sara Winnick
Sara Winnick has spent the past four years tutoring and coordinating Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE). As a double History and Education Studies concentrator, her academic studies focus on racial inequality in America. Providence is her favorite small city in the country.
Sienna Zeilinger
Sienna ("Writing with Empathy") hails from Cleveland, Ohio, though she's making the transition to becoming a real Rhode Islander. As an English/Nonfiction Writing concentrator and one of the student directors of the Writing Fellows Program, she has spent much of her time at Brown engaging with words and those who write them. Most of the time, you can find her outside.
Posters
Chanelle Adams
Chanelle '15.5 is a Science and Technology Studies (STS) concentrator originally from Montclair, NJ. This project, "Imagining Circulation & Situating Justice," is an attempt to co-create methodology for studying epistemologies with a community of traditional health practitioners in Northern Madagascar.
Nia Campinha-Bacote
Nia is a fun-loving girl hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio. During her four years at Brown she has studied Health and Human Biology with a focus on race and ethnic disparities in health and disease. Her project is entitled "Predictors and Characteristics of HIV Mortality among the Adult In-Patient Population of Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana".
Sarah Day Dayon
Sarah Day is from Carol Stream, IL double-concentrating in Ethnic Studies and Biology. Her project "Student Voices in a Worker's Movement" analyzes student oral histories from the Summer for Respect: Voices of Walmart Program and explores concepts of Engaged Scholarship, Organizing, and Solidarity.
Leah Eickhoff
Leah is a Community Health concentrator from Hanover, NH. She fell in love with running as an escape when she wanted a break from writing college applications during the summer before senior year of high school. Now a senior at Brown, she is a distance runner and captain on the Women's Cross Country and Track & Field teams. The concept for this research came about while she was on a run, surrounded by a group of teammates. As she ran, she realized that running with the group, she had found a mobile, supportive space where she was able to productively output negative emotions and where she was able to both think in silence or process her thoughts out loud. She visualized team membership and active space as a natural solution to the isolation and integration issues that presently plague multitudes of U.S. veterans in transition.
Elaine Hsiang
Elaine is from Arcadia, California, studying Health and Human Biology with a focus in Global Health Disparities. Her senior honors thesis is titled "Mapping (Un)Safe Spaces: Trans* Health and the Affordable Care Act."
Samuel Kase
Originally from New York City, Sam is pursuing an Independent Concentration called Medical Humanities. his concentration explores the socio-cultural factors that influence health, healing, and illness with an emphasis on the individual patient. His project looked at the use of military metaphor within the context of cancer - from newly diagnosed patients to terminally ill patients.
Erin Kelley
Erin grew up in and often talks about San Antonio, Texas. Now, she is a senior concentrating in Environmental Studies, with a focus on environmental health and housing. She has collaborated extensively with the Rhode Island Center for Justice here in Providence and hopes to work in the field of social justice lawyering.
Hannah Kerman
Hannah is a Health and Human Biology concentrator.
Sydney Mondry
Sydney is a nonfiction writing concentrator from Aspen, CO. Her thesis, "The Eyes Eat First," explores food culture in the age of social media, specifically how photo-sharing platforms have changed society's relationship with food. Follow her on Instagram: @smondry
Anna Plumlee
Anna is a political science concentrator from Brooklyn, NY. She will be presenting on A Better World by Design, and the work she did during her three years on the planning committee. Anna hopes to take what she learned from ABWxD into the real world to keep making things better.
Allison Reilly
Allie is concentrating in Environmental Studies from Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Her project is titled "A New Era of Living on the Coast," which focuses on community level adaptation to climate change-related risks in New Jersey and Rhode Island. Allie's work comments on the tensions between different levels of government and the resilience of human systems in light of climate change.
Adriana Saavedra
Adriana is a first-generation senior from Edinburg, Texas. She is concentrating in Health and Human Biology. She is pleased to present on a global health project that she commenced last summer thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health. She will be presenting on "Predictors and Characteristics of HIV mortality among the Adult In-patient Population of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana."
Jordan Shaw
Jordan is concentrating in Neuroscience. She is from Dallas, TX. Jordan has been working on a project aimed at elucidating the relationship between two social cognitive processes, Theory of Mind and Joint Attention, in a non-clinical sample of adults.
Benjamin Siranosian
Ben is concentrating in Computational Biology. He will be using his computational biology knowledge for a job in the Boston area after graduation.
Leigh Thomas
Leigh is from Irvington, New York and double concentrating in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Public Health. Her project, "Activist Narratives and ACT UP: Rights, Sovereignty and Responsibility in AIDS Treatment Organizing" served as a Capstone Project for her Gender and Sexuality Studies concentration.
Sophia Tsang
Sophia is a Geological Sciences concentrator from Redmond, WA. She is really excited to share some of experiences from her year abroad in Christchurch, New Zealand in "Some Times Life Knocks You Down: Land Use Change And Lessons From The Christchurch Earthquake Sequence In Christchurch, New Zealand."
Alexandra Urban
How does mathematics teaching reflect the science of learning? With the Brown International Scholars Program Fellowship, Alexandra traveled to New Zealand to observe their high-performing secondary school math classes and analyzed these findings in her thesis for her Independent Concentration in Educational Neuroscience. Talk with Alexandra to find out what neuroscience-based factors these teachers are using and the implications for US schools!
Jie Ying Wu
Jie Ying is a computer engineering concentrator from Toronto, Canada. She is interested in the application of technology in the medical field, and plans to pursue a PhD in medical robotics after graduation. For Theories in Action though, she is excited to present her work with Brown Engineering After School Team to teach engineering to Providence high school students.