Kimberly Shepard GS, Catherine Reilly GS, Yu Deng GS and Evan Hepler-Smith GS were awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship last Thursday.
The fellowship is awarded to a University student who has “evinced the highest scholarly excellence in graduate work during the year,” and the students were all nominated by their respective departments.
Reilly’s dissertation is titled “Naming Disorder: Psychiatry, Diagnosis and Literary Modernism in Russia and Germany, 1880-1929.” Reilly is a Ph.D. candidate in the comparative literature department. She explained that in contemporary psychiatric practice, there are two main systems for ordering, sorting and classifying mental pathologies. One, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, is used in the United States, and the other, theInternational Classification for Diseases,is used by the rest of the world.
“Those two function on different models that are supposed to coincide with one another, but don’t always,” she said. “The conflict between those two systems got me very interested in the question of how fixed, how standard, how truthful disease classifications were for mental pathologies.”
She added that the further she went back in historical literature, the more she began to realize that these categories were social constructions.
“I think comparative literature is the study of things that are always already compared,” she said. “Part of my dissertation is to say that it is not really the question of literature and medicine but the discovery that those two genres were already dealing with the same set of questions.”
She is currently doing research at the Institute for the History of Medicine in Berlin and plans to go to Russia later this year. Her future plans are to remain in academia and eventually to become a professor of comparative literature.
Shepard’s dissertation is titled “The Exceptional Properties of Glassy Plastics.” She is a doctoral candidate in the chemical and biological engineering department.
“I’m studying the behavior of these polymeric materials under extreme processing conditions,” she said, adding that polymers and plastics make up much of the world around us.
Shepard noted that although much of what has been written about her focuses on her eventual plans to go into academia, she is currently pursuing a career in industry.
She has a job with Bend Research in Oregon, a research and development firm for pharmaceutical-delivery technologies.
“I hope that once I gain that kind of practical experience, maybe decades from now I can go back and maybe teach at a local school or community college,” she said.
Deng is a doctoral student in the mathematics department who obtained his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after transferring from the University of Peking.
“There’s a model used in plasma physics. In the model they treat those plasma like fluids, and they study the equations,” Deng said. “What I do is describe and solve a particular problem about those equations.”
His dissertation also studies the Benjamin-Ono equation, Euler-Maxwell system and Klein-Gordon systems.
Deng has accepted a position at New York University, where he plans to join as a postdoctoral fellow. He said he hopes to stay in academia.
Hepler-Smith’s dissertation is titled, “Nominally Rational: Systematic Nomenclature and the Structure of Organic Chemistry, 1889-1940.” Hepler-Smith isa doctoral student in the history of science program who obtained his bachelor’s degree from Harvard.
“I’m interested in the vessels or databases into which scientific knowledge gets placed,” he said. “In my dissertation, I look at one vessel of storing knowledge. I look at chemistry, and I study chemical nomenclature and chemical reference works.”
Hepler-Smith hopes to find an academic job and teach history of science.
“I think it’s a really important field right now because science and technology are such a central part of our culture,” he said. “In understanding more about how science works, you can really engage in a thoughtful and active way in major public debates on things like climate change and [genetically modified organisms.]”
“I think I felt a bit overwhelmed honestly that the research had seemed meaningful enough to a large enough group of people to give me this award,” Reilly, a Ph.D. candidate in the comparative literature department who obtained her bachelor’s degree from Yale, said.
Shepard, a doctoral student in the chemical and biological engineering department, called the award “surprising.”
“I thought my advisor was being really generous when he even bothered nominating me for the fellowship, so the fact that I actually got this very prestigious award was really shocking,” Shepard said. “I am exceedingly flattered the University would consider me for something like this.”
Hepler-Smith said he was excited to receive the fellowship.
“It’s quite a prestigious award, and there are some really remarkable scholars who have had this honor in the past,” Hepler-Smith explained.
The four students will be honored during Alumni Day ceremonies on Saturday, Feb. 21.
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