Graduate Fellows: Where are they headed?

After a year of diving into one another’s disciplines over monthly dinners of pad thai and probing questions, the 2017–2018 Arts, Science + Culture Initiative graduate fellows will soon be heading off to a diverse set of conferences, archives, and other adventures. Dana Simmons from Neurobiology attended the largest neuroscience conference in the world in Washington, DC, along with around 30,000 other leaders in the field. Nicole Morse will head to Australia where they’ve been invited to speak at SymbioticA, “an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning, critique, and hands-on engagement with the life sciences.” On the heels of her riveting MFA thesis exhibition in the Department of Visual Arts, Franny Levitin will head to Canada for a variety of cultural site visits and interviews as well as Mutek, an electronic music and digital arts festival in Montreal. Anthropology’s Agnes Mondragón will split her grant between the coasts: first to Miami to interview employees of Telemundo who worked on the TV narcoseries she studies, and then to Los Angeles and San Jose to interview the creative staff of the Netflix series Ingobernable. Both Clara del Junco from Chemistry and Paul Jerger from the Institute of Molecular Engineering will head to Germany—Clara to Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, and Paul to Konstanz for the Conference on Spin-Based Quantum Information Processing. Composer Alican Çamci from the Music department will prepare for the performance of valse triste redux, a duo for amplified violin and piano, at the mise-en Festival in New York City, followed by a residency at ACRE in Wisconsin. The English department’s Bill Hutchison will head to New Mexico to talk to AI and robotics researchers in Santa Fe and Albuquerque about how we should feel about robots. We look forward to following up with everyone in the fall.