Northwestern University
Record four PhD candidates win dissertation fellowship
May 13, 2021
The Office of Fellowships is thrilled to announce a record-breaking number of Northwestern recipients among this year’s class of Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship winners! With funding from the award, Ashley Dennis, Hayana Kim, Andrea Rosengarten, and Azadeh Safaeian will finish their PhD studies next year.
Inspired by her commitment to educational equity and the dearth of Black history curriculum in the
predominantly Black and brown schools she attended, Ashley’s research in the Department of African American Studies considers how and why Black women educators promoted Black history and culture to children during the mid-twentieth century. Her dissertation examines teachers, librarians, and authors who challenged stereotypes in texts for children and supplemented or replaced them with antiracist writings of their own. Their writings in
The battle between awareness of the COVID-19’s severe consequences and fatigue from nine months of pandemic precautions shows up in the oddly shaped case, hospitalization, and fatality-count graphs, a new study suggests.
The tension between awareness and fatigue can lead to case-count plateaus, shoulder-like dynamics, and oscillations as rising numbers of deaths cause people to become more cautious before they let down their guard to engage once again in behaviors that increase risk for transmission, which, in turn, leads to rising death counts and renewed awareness.
“Human behavior is complicated.”
“Epidemics don’t necessarily have a single peak after which the risk subsides,” says Joshua Weitz, professor of biological sciences and founding director of the Interdisciplinary PhD in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. “People’s behaviors are both influenced by and influence epidemic dynamics, potentially driving plateaus, and oscillations in