Past Fellows

Dr. Bucsek is now Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Ashley Bucsek earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering at Colorado School of Mines as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Ashley studies twinning and phase transformation in solid materials using micromechanical theory, phase engineering, and in situ three-dimensional X-ray diffraction techniques. Recently, she worked as a Visiting Scientist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility under an NSF GROW award where she conducted the first-ever Dark-Field X-Ray Microscopy experiments on shape memory alloys. At UMN, she is developing a highly reversible ferroelectric capacitor to be used in a system that converts waste heat to electricity.

Hannah Cory is a registered dietitian and public health nutrition researcher. Her work uses social epidemiologic, mixed, and participatory methods as a means to better understand and dismantle the systemic barriers young people face in building healthy relationships with food and their bodies. At the University of Minnesota, her research will explore how young people's experiences of racism and other forms of discrimination and stigma intersect and impact inequities in chronic disease risk. She received her Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and is also an alumna of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Scholar program.

Katerina Gonzales is a climate scientist who bridges the gap between climate research and practice. She studies extreme weather events and communication practices that advance climate adaptation. She earned her Ph.D. in Earth System Science at Stanford University in 2021 where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and Diversifying Academia, Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellow. Her undergraduate training was in Geophysics at Colorado School of Mines. Born and raised in Colorado, she remembers growing up with wildfires erupting across the region in the summer, and warmer winters leading to more pine beetle tree deaths. Her career mission is now focused on helping communities address the climate crisis through research, education, and service. Kat’s postdoctoral project at UMN engages western water utilities to understand their needs and practices around communicating precipitation impacts.

Christopher Hammerly is a descendent of the White Earth Nation. He earned his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2020, where he was funded by the National Science Foundation, and his B.S. in Psychology and B.A, in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota in 2014. His research explores how grammar is represented in the mind and deployed by speakers and listeners in real-time. He especially works with speakers of his ancestral language Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe). In this work, he combines traditional documentation methods with experimental techniques to understand how speakers of Ojibwe use the language’s complex verb marking system to understand actions and events.

Mari Jarris is a Provost New Faculty Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies. Trained as a comparatist, they work across German- and Russian-language literature and theory, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their research areas include feminist and queer theory, transnational socialisms, utopian literature and science fiction, Marxist aesthetics, and Critical Theory. They have previously taught courses in Gender & Sexuality Studies and German Literature at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Middlebury’s German School, South Woods State Prison in New Jersey, and Princeton University.

Jarris’s current book manuscript, Utopia as Revolution: Marxism’s Queer Pasts and Futures, posits that utopia has been a site for theorizing queerness and Marxism together since the nineteenth century. It offers a counternarrative to the dominance of scientific socialism by tracing the transnational queer Marxism that emerges from a rereading of canonical German, Russian, and French socialist texts as utopian. At the same time, Utopia as Revolution seeks to expand the Marxist archive to include overlooked visions of polyamory, androgyny, the socialization of motherly care, and queer kinship. They have also begun a second book project that examines the literary and visual representation of queerness in the Weimar Republic and early Soviet Union against the backdrop of German and Russian colonialism, arguing that ethnoracial hierarchies were co-constitutive of “modern” queer identities.

Robyn Macdonald received her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018 where she also received her B.S. in 2013. Her research interests focus on constructing physics based models to study high speed chemically reacting flows, helping to bridge the knowledge gap between the field of quantum chemistry and computational fluid dynamics. During her Ph.D. she had the opportunity to work with scientists and engineers at both NASA and the Air Force, as well as present her work at conferences and program reviews. Her Ph.D. research was supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate fellowship.

My research investigates the use of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research methods with marginalized and vulnerable populations to design technologies with them rather than for them. I use surveys, interviews, observation, and participatory design methods in both in-person and online settings. In particular, I employ Participatory Design (PD) under the lenses of value-sensitive and speculative design to involve stakeholders in the design and development of a more ethical, inclusive, and equitable technology from the very beginning and throughout all the stages of the design process. I strive for amplifying the voice of those who are impacted by technology and allowing researchers and practitioners to be aware of potential negative impacts that such technologies may have on stakeholders.

Anna Posbergh is a qualitative critical feminist scholar who examines the governance and regulation of women athletes and their bodies, particularly through policies and media representations. She received her Ph.D. in Kinesiology specializing in Physical Cultural Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park in May 2022 where she was an American Association for University Women (AAUW) dissertation fellow and received funding from multiple organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Olympic Studies Centre. Her research interests focus on how the category and definition of “woman” (in sport as well as more broadly in society) is dynamic, contextual, and fluid, and draws from multiple scientific, sociocultural, and (geo)political forms of knowledge. At the University of Minnesota, her research will investigate how transgender participation/eligibility policies are created and implemented, with a particular emphasis on how and why such policies are influenced by social, political, cultural, scientific, and medical understandings of “transgender.”

Andrew Proctor earned his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 2019. His research explores questions about identity politics and American political parties with an emphasis on how political institutions shape the mobilization of political constituencies. He is especially interested in understanding how constituencies are constructed through representation and how these dynamics intersect with the politics of sexuality, gender, race, and class. As a fellow, he will be working on a book manuscript about the political mobilization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the United States.

Bolivar (Boli) Reyes-Jaquez received his B.A. in Psychology from Instituto Tecnologico de Santo Domingo (2007). After spending three years as an analyst at the Research Unit of the Dominican Presidency, he pursued a Ph.D. in Psychology from The University of Texas at Austin (2015). Prior to joining the PPFP at Minnesota, he spent two years as a research associate at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra. Selected honors include a Fulbright fellowship, a David Bruton Jr. graduate fellowship, a Holtzman best student paper in developmental psychology award, and travel awards from organizations such as the Jacobs Foundation, Association for Psychological Science, and Max Plank Institute for Human Development.

Alayo Tripp completed a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Maryland College Park. Their doctoral work introduces a theory of sociolinguistic development, motivated by computational modeling of data from infant experiments. As a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences Department, Dr. Tripp is conducting behavioral studies with both children and adults to empirically assess the impact of social group membership on language processing.

Elizabeth Wijaya received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in August 2018. She earned a B.A. (1st) in English Literature under an ASEAN Scholarship and M.A. in Literary Arts at the National University of Singapore with a Research Scholarship. At the University of Minnesota, she will work on her book project: Luminous Flesh: Visible and Invisible Worlds of Diasporic Chinese Cinemas. She is the co-founder of E&W Films.

Ron Martin Wilson was born in New Orleans and, following a Henry Luce Fellowship year in Japan, taught high school in Los Angeles and Tokyo. After completing a master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at New York University, he went on to start and finish his doctoral studies in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he focused on modern Japanese literature and film. 

Daphne Wui Yarn Chan is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Chan’s research interests center around designing polymers to address global sustainability challenges. She earned her B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from John Hopkins University in 2013 and her
Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2019. Under the supervision of Bradley Olsen at MIT, she developed strategies for designing engineering plastics from renewable protein feedstock and approaches for recycling waste tire rubber. From 2019 to 2022, she served as a postdoc with Marc Hillmyer at the University of Minnesota, where her research focused on self-assembled block polymers and their applications in ultrafiltration membranes.

Chan has earned several awards recognizing her research contributions, including the University of Minnesota’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship and the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design Fellowship.