Current Fellows

Herma Demissie is a PhD candidate in Chemical and Biological Engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering, where she works under Professor Julius Lucks to develop accessible diagnostic technologies to address public health challenges in low-resource settings.

Herma’s research addresses the need to balance high technical performance with the unique constraints required for diagnostic deployment in these contexts, including limited infrastructure needs, robustness, modularity and ease of use. To do so, she leverages synthetic biology to engineer a class of naturally occurring biological systems known as CRISPR-Cas to create programmable detection platforms for sensing applications spanning agriculture, water quality, and nutrition, with a particular focus on East Africa. Her work aims to make diagnostics more accurate, portable, resilient to challenging environmental conditions, and usable outside laboratory environments. 

 Herma’s research combines biosensor engineering approaches with human-centered design and field implementation. She has developed deployable biosensing technologies and led interdisciplinary field studies alongside engineers, biologists, and anthropologists in Kenya to evaluate biosensor technical performance and user adoption. Through her work, she aims to rethink and reshape diagnostic development for resource-constrained settings by centering user feedback and performance evaluation in real-world field conditions. 

Herma received a BS in chemical engineering from Columbia University. As an East African national, she is passionate about expanding access to biotechnology innovation, education, and research across sub-Saharan Africa.  

Fatima Gaw is a PhD candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program in the Department of Communication Studies at the School of Communication. She is advised by Dr. Erik C. Nisbet. 

Fatima Gaw investigates the restructuring of the digital public sphere through new forms of social influence, organizing her work across three strands of research. First, she studies political influencers as emerging media sources for news, political information, and opinion, in competition with traditional political media. Second, she accounts for influence operations as a contemporary form of propaganda that remains elusive to detection, correction, and regulation, with significant implications for democratic integrity. Lastly, she analyzes platformed extremism on social media and alt-tech platforms as infrastructures for hyperpartisan, reactionary, and conspiratorial communities and movements. 

To understand these phenomena, Fatima integrates a broad and rigorous set of methods spanning computational multimodal methods, large language model-assisted analysis, network analysis, content analysis, and field methods. 

Her dissertation advances political influencers as emerging epistemic authorities in politics. She theorizes their distinct media logic that differentiates them from other political media actors and explains their persuasiveness among audiences. She operationalizes it through multimodal communication encompassing visual, audio, and text dimensions and determines its effects on political attitudes and behavior. Through this research program, she explicates the mechanisms through which political influencers are recognized as epistemic sources by the public and engaged as political communication intermediaries by political actors and institutions. 

Fatima’s scholarship has appeared in leading journals across communication and the social sciences, including New Media & Society, Political Communication, Convergence, Media, Culture & Society, and Policy & Internet.  

She is a graduate affiliate at the Center for Communication & Public Policy and the Computational Media and Politics Lab at the School of Communication. Fatima holds a master of digital communication and culture degree from the University of Sydney, Australia, where she studied as an Australia Awards Scholar, and a bachelor of arts in broadcast communication from the University of the Philippines, magna cum laude. 

Elena González Prieto is a PhD candidate in astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. She is a member of Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Exploration in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI), where she is advised by Frederic Rasio.  

Elena's research centers on globular clusters, some of the oldest structures in the Universe, which provide important clues about how the Milky Way formed and evolved. Within globular clusters, stars and their remnants (such as black holes) are packed so closely together that they frequently encounter one another, and sometimes collide. When a black hole is involved in the collision, stars can be torn apart, giving rise to some of the most energetic observable phenomena in astrophysics. These fascinating outcomes of collisions establish globular clusters as unique laboratories for studying a broad range of high-energy phenomena in astrophysics.  

To study these systems, Elena develops advanced computational tools that combine high-performance supercomputing with physically motivated AI models. This interdisciplinary approach makes it possible to simulate globular clusters with unprecedented speed and accuracy.  Using these computational tools, she has produced some of the most detailed and realistic models of the Milky Way's largest globular cluster, providing a critical framework for interpreting observations from current and next-generation telescopes.   

Elena’s research has been supported by a Northwestern University Data Science Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Before joining Northwestern, she earned a BS in astrophysics from the University of Florida. Elena is also deeply committed to mentorship and service, serving in leadership roles within Graduate Womxn in Physics and mentoring students through the LAMAT and REACH programs. 

Peri Ella Green is a PhD candidate in the Department of Learning Sciences in the School of Education and Social Policy. She is advised by Nichole Pinkard.  

Born and raised in Decatur, Georgia, and shaped by time spent with family in Detroit, Michigan, Peri Ella Green’s work begins with a question rooted in her own understanding of place: how do the places we move through shape who we are able to become?

Her formal education extended that question. At the University of Miami and later at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she earned a master’s degree in technology, innovation, and education, Peri began developing tools to study learning, human development, and meaningful educational experience.

As a learning scientist, Peri understands learning as a practice of becoming: a social, spatial process through which people make sense of themselves and their futures. Her dissertation, "The 'Spatial' Grail," examines how youth’s out-of-school lives are shaped by the worlds around them. Rather than assuming opportunity exists because a program is nearby, Peri asks what it takes for youth to experience opportunities as reachable, safe, desirable, and meant for them.

Her research argues that infrastructure begets opportunity: transportation, time, safety, belonging, care, and social connection shape youth’s freedom of movement and learning beyond school. To make these conditions visible, Peri developed Freeze Framing, a youth-governed socio-spatial methodology, and co-designed Mappenings, a mobile geocapture app that helps youth document, interpret, and reframe their out-of-school experiences. This work received the Most Outstanding Design Paper Award at the 2025 International Conference of the Learning Sciences.

Across learning sciences, spatial theory, public humanities, technology design, and youth participatory research, Peri experiments with form, including her Alice Kaplan Institute-funded #CommunityCrawls project, so youth reflections can travel beyond the academy. Across these projects, her work insists that youth reflections are not just stories about where young people go. They are evidence of inherited worlds and blueprints for designing opportunity landscapes closer to the worlds youth deserve.

Gillian Hemme is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama Program in the School of Communication. She is advised by Elizabeth Son.  

Gillian is a theatre scholar, educator, and artist. She studies performance within and about sites of institutionalized violence in twentieth-century Ireland. Her mixed-methods research combines archival work with embodied practices to understand the role of theatrical and quotidian performances in the lives of women and children who were incarcerated in Catholic Church-run Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. Using walking as a primary ethnographic field method, Gillian’s project advances the performing body as a mode of metabolizing and memorializing the history of this violence, as well as the legacy of ongoing, survivor-led redress movements.  

Gillian has spent nearly two decades creating civically engaged performances, including her solo shows, Clean Start and Mad Like Us, and her work in jail and prison settings. In 2016, through Piven Theatre Workshop, Gillian co-founded and began directing EPIC (Ensemble Play in Cook County Jail), a theatre program for incarcerated women in Chicago (WGN, CBS, WTTW). As the recipient of a Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program award, she served as the artistic director of Drawing Our Sky, a collaborative children’s book she designed for parent-child visits, co-created with incarcerated mothers and outside artists. Recently, through the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP), Gillian taught a theatre class at Logan Correctional Center in which incarcerated women used improvisation to create original storytelling performances.  

Gillian’s work has been supported by the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, a Mellon Cluster Fellowship in Gender and Sexuality Studies (GSS), and The Graduate School’s Dissertation Proposal Development Program. She holds a BA in theatre from Grinnell College and an MA in theatre and performative practices from University College Cork in Ireland. 

Vineet Xie-Gupta is a sociology PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. He is advised by Claudio Benzecry. 

Vineet (he/him) studies the global circulation of knowledge, examining how expert systems produce geographic inequalities in visibility, authority, and power. His research on academic knowledge analyzes how bibliometric infrastructures, editorial practices, and transnational networks shape global hierarchies in the social sciences. 

His dissertation investigates transnational circuits of urban planning, specifically how cosmopolitan technical experts—consultants, planners, architects, and engineers—generate and circulate “best practices” in urban development. He focuses on experts based in the U.A.E. and the U.S., and their roles in informing rapid urban transformations across Asia and Africa. Methodologically, his research combines computational analysis of large-scale datasets to map circuits of knowledge with semi-structured interviews with experts. 

Vineet was born in India and grew up in Beijing and Dubai. He completed a BAS in mathematics and theater & performance studies and an MS in computational social science at Stanford University. He has conducted research with the Asia-Pacific Research Center, the Changing Cities Research Lab, and Inclusion Economics. His work is supported by the Buffett Institute and the Al Qasimi Foundation.  

Vineet is committed to broadening participation and redistributing resources within policy and academia. He is a member of the Ambedkar Du Bois Society (ADBS), a student collective that advocated for the inclusion of caste in the University’s nondiscrimination policy, platforms anti-caste scholars, and hosts campus celebrations of Phule-Ambedkar Jayanti. He also organizes with Northwestern University Graduate Workers. 

Eduardo Campos Chávez is a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences (IBiS) Graduate Program in the Department of Molecular Biosciences jointly through the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences and the McCormick School of Engineering. He is advised by Alfonso Mondragon. 

Eduardo Campos Chávez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern University, where he studies the role of RNA molecules in cellular regulation. His research primarily focuses on riboswitches—specialized RNA structures that control gene expression in response to cellular signals. By exploring the extensive yet poorly understood domain of noncoding RNAs, often described as genomic "dark matter," his research sheds light on the complex mechanisms these molecules utilize to modulate essential biological processes.

Eduardo's current work centers on T-box riboswitches, a distinctive class of RNA that regulates amino acid metabolism. Employing advanced biophysical methods, including single-molecule imaging techniques, he recently elucidated the mechanism by which T-box riboswitches from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a significant human pathogen, recognize specific transfer RNAs (tRNAs). These discoveries reveal important insights into the evolutionary adaptability of RNA and highlight potential avenues for developing novel antibiotic therapies.

To deepen the understanding of these molecules, he uses cutting-edge structural biology tools such as cryogenic electron microscopy (cryoEM) to obtain high-resolution molecular structures of various T-box riboswitches. His research seeks to unveil fundamental principles underpinning RNA structure, function, and evolutionary flexibility, providing critical knowledge with broad implications for medicine, agriculture, and biotechnology.

Eduardo earned his BSc in Biomedical Research at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he investigated RNA-protein interactions. Committed to interdisciplinary collaboration and science communication, he actively participates in scientific societies and outreach initiatives. He is especially dedicated to mentoring and engaging with underrepresented communities, striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity within STEM fields.

Lauren Cole is a history PhD candidate in the Department of History in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. She is advised by Barbara Newman.

Lauren Cole is a historian of medieval European medicine. Her research examines networks of medical knowledge c. 1000-1500 through the writing of twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Lauren works directly with manuscripts from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, as well as early printed books from the sixteenth century, in both medieval Latin and Middle German. Through these sources, her research demonstrates how cross-cultural contact and religious frameworks shaped theories and practices of healing in medieval convents. By tracing Hildegard’s text across centuries, Lauren’s dissertation highlights the impact of women’s knowledge on the development of the medical discipline in the later Middle Ages. 

Lauren is also a public historian. Under her handle @MedievalLauren on the platforms TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, she publishes educational videos on medieval history and its connections with our present world to over 90,000 followers. In addition, she regularly appears on podcasts and interviews about the medieval past. As a first-generation student, Lauren is passionate about historical outreach and widening access to research and universities. She has worked with first-generation mentoring programs for a decade, such as Northwestern’s Arch Scholars program. 

Lauren’s work has been supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Medieval Academy of America, the Newberry Library, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, as well as Northwestern’s Medieval Studies Cluster, Science in Human Culture Program, and the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN). Before coming to Northwestern, Lauren earned a BA and MA in History from the University of Bristol, UK. Her publications appear in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, Decoding Recipes: Histories of Knowledge and Practice Across Time and Space, and Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces, and Movements. 

Alisher Juzgenbayev is a political science JD/PhD candidate jointly through the Pritzker School of Law and the Department of Political Science in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. He is advised by Jordan Gans-Morse.

Alisher's dissertation project explores how ordinary citizens navigate everyday disputes with state officials, contesting decisions like denied benefits, fines, or refused permits. By studying post-Soviet countries, he seeks to understand how citizens, even in unfree societies, leverage diverse strategies to challenge official actions: writing formal appeals to supervisors and ministry offices, seeking intervention from prosecutors and ombudsmen, utilizing personal connections, pursuing remedies through specialized administrative courts, and organizing public petitions. His research explores the diversity of these mechanisms and how citizens' experiences with them shape their perceptions of rights and conceptions of citizenship.

Through this work, Alisher aims to understand how different countries create institutions that limit official discretion and draw implications for liberal democracies, considering alternative approaches to bureaucratic accountability and administrative justice.

Alisher's dissertation builds on his broader interest and commitment to interdisciplinary research connecting law and politics. His approach draws from both fields: as senior empirical editor at the Northwestern University Law Review, he worked to incorporate methodological approaches from social science into legal scholarship, while his externship at a federal court and client advocacy experience at Legal Aid Chicago informed his understanding of how legal institutions function in practice. Alisher's scholarship examines sources of judicial legitimacy, constitutional design, and courts' roles in democratic systems. Across these interests, he integrates interviews, surveys, and computational methods to develop empirically grounded research.

Originally from Kazakhstan, Alisher holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Nazarbayev University. He has written on current events for the International Journal of Constitutional Law Blog, and his academic work has appeared in the Journal of Law and Courts and the Handbook on Law and Political Systems.

Victoria Lang is an Earth & Planetary Sciences PhD candidate in the Department of Earth, Environmental, & Planetary Sciences in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. She is advised by Daniel Horton.

Victoria Lang is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of atmospheric modeling, air pollution, public health, and environmental justice. As a PhD candidate in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, her research centers on improving physics-based numerical models to better simulate air pollution from traffic at the neighborhood scale, capturing local emission sources that are often obscured in national-scale assessments. Her work identifies not only pollution hotspots and their associated health impacts, but also the communities most burdened by exposure.

Victoria’s work is grounded in the belief that quantifying pollution is not enough. While efforts to reduce air pollution have improved overall outcomes, they have also deepened inequities in exposure for marginalized populations. Her dissertation advances both the technical modeling of pollution and informs solutions that can meaningfully reduce disparities in exposure. She partners with community-based organizations and national nonprofits to align her scientific work with real-world on-the-ground efforts, including publishing research on the potential outcomes of the Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule in Illinois. Her findings highlighted how reducing emissions from medium- and heavy-duty vehicles could improve public health and advance environmental equity, supporting advocacy efforts as the rule was considered by the Illinois Pollution Control Board.

Victoria's research has been supported by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Health Effects Institute, and she was previously a Data Science Fellow with the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). She holds dual BS degrees in Meteorology and Business Administration from Northern Illinois University and Illinois State University, respectively, and an MS in Atmospheric Science from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Natalia Molebatsi is a Performance Studies PhD candidate in the Department of Performance Studies in the School of Communication. She is advised by Thomas DeFrantz.

Natalia Molebatsi is the daughter of Keganneng and granddaughter of Moshidi.

Natalia’s work focuses on how poetry and its performance contribute to building communities of lifelong learning and change. She deploys multidisciplinary Performance Studies methods that enable a praxis of voice and embodiment to disrupt systems of oppression, from racism and sexism to anti-queer hate. Natalia’s dissertation, Time travel poetics: Black feminist poetry-performance and geographies of liberation, examines the tangible socio-political action and spirituality inherent in Black feminist poetry-performance, positioning it as the “vital necessity of our existence toward survival and change” (Lorde 1984, 37). Natalia argues that Black feminist poetry produces what she has termed time travel poetics, a disruption of linear time, to bring together the living and the dead, to defend the dead and affirm the living. Her research explores how Black lesbian and queer feminist artists deploy poetry and performance as technologies of survival. Her research also illustrates how poetry-performance contributes to the possibilities of living freely. 

For over two decades, Natalia has created live performance and creative writing spaces across South Africa, including in schools and correctional facilities, as a way to facilitate the role of the arts in community education and healing. She is the co-founder of Black Girls Brilliance (BGB), which supports Black girls and gender expansive youth to develop leadership and social justice strategies.

Natalia is the author of two poetry collections, Sardo Dance and Elephant Woman Song. She has edited two poetry anthologies, We Are: A Poetry Anthology and the award-winning Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems, a literary gathering for Black feminist poets from across the world to reach and read one another beyond the global north-south borders that force us into silos. Natalia is also published in numerous books and peer-reviewed journals, including SASINDA FUTHI SISELAPHA, agenda feminist media, the National Political Science Review, Third World Thematics, Communicatio, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Nabeel Rehemtulla is an astronomy PhD candidate in the Department of Physics & Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. He is advised by Adam A. Miller.

Nabeel Rehemtulla is an astronomy PhD candidate in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. He is also a member of Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Exploration in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI).

Nabeel’s research centers on building cutting-edge AI tools to advance studies of supernovae—the spectacular, explosive deaths of stars. Although they mark the end of a star’s life, supernovae also trigger the birth of a new generation of stars and accompanying planets enriched with new elements produced by the explosion, many of which are elements that pervade our daily lives.

Nabeel has developed a state-of-the-art AI tool that identifies new supernovae in astronomical images in real time. Once his AI finds a new event, it commands secondary telescopes across the globe to quickly conduct additional, more detailed observations. These observations help Nabeel link the explosion we observe with the star that preceded it, a task which has remained challenging for decades. This link helps us better understand the contributions of supernovae to the present-day Universe as factories for life-critical elements and as key pillars in the stellar circle of life.

Nabeel’s research has been supported by two NASA Illinois Space Grant Consortium Graduate Fellowships. Before attending Northwestern, he obtained a BS from the University of Michigan in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Since leaving Michigan, he has continued the research he began there, mapping dark matter in the Milky Way with Dr. Monica Valluri. Nabeel is also dedicated to producing effective and exciting visualizations that bring his research to broad audiences, and to serving his religious community through leadership roles in its professional and student networks.

Soumya Shailendra is a comparative literary studies PhD candidate in the Comparative Literary Studies Program in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. She is advised by Laura Brueck.

Soumya Rachel Shailendra is a writer and arts programmer. She is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies (CLS) with a home department in Asian Languages and Cultures (ALC), specializing in postcolonial theory, modern South Asian literature, and the histories of caste radicalism. Her dissertation examines how law and literature serve as important sites of reform and redress in the global anti-caste movement. Working within a multilingual and multimodal archive, she investigates how Dalit writers—authors from historically marginalized castes—deploy legal idioms to challenge their incorporation into institutions of liberal statehood.

Soumya is a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Comparative Race and Diaspora (CRD) and served as the 2023–2024 Graduate Fellow at the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES). She co-directs Translators Adda, a public-facing translation workshop series focused on critical issues in South Asian politics and culture across the Chicagoland region.

Her collaborative work includes projects with the SpaceShift Collective, such as Starlight and From Panther to Panther, that raise awareness around caste violence and anti-caste cultural practice in Chicago’s North Side. She was a 2022–2023 Public Humanities Fellow and currently serves as the graduate assistant for the Public Humanities Graduate Practicum at the Kaplan Institute. Additionally, she has programmed artists’ and writers’ residencies for the Race, Caste, and Colorism project at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

Soumya’s writing has appeared in public media platforms including Scroll.in, The Indian Express, and The Quint, as well as academic journals such as Verge: Studies in Global Asias and EuropeNow.

Esther Yoon is a PhD candidate in the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) and the Driskill Graduate Program in Life Sciences (DGP) in the Feinberg School of Medicine. She is advised by Gemma Carvill.

As an aspiring physician-scientist, Esther is dedicated to understanding the genetic causes of rare diseases and developing targeted therapies to improve patients’ lives. Her thesis focuses on an emerging class of diseases caused by non-coding RNAs. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to probe how non-coding RNAs play a critical role in brain development and leverages such insights to develop RNA-based therapies that get to the root cause of the condition. Her work raises awareness about the importance of non-coding elements in our DNA, expanding our understanding of human health and our capacity to diagnose and treat diseases.

A strong advocate for conducting patient-centered science, Esther works closely with patients, families, and physicians to find a cure together. She regularly attends Coalition to Cure CHD2 meetings, where she interviews families about their experience living with rare disease and helps them understand genetic test results and current research progress. Esther’s gratitude for her mentors and peers also drives her to give back to her communities as a mentor, musician, and medical student.

Prior to becoming a Wildcat, Esther received her BS in Neuroscience from Indiana University and spent two years conducting neurogenetics research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). At Northwestern, she has been supported by the NIH T32 Physical Genomics Training Program.