Lewis Rubin Thompson
Doctoral Student, Medicine, Columbia University
Lewis is a student associate of On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics. He completed Columbia University’s post-baccalaureate pre-medical program in May 2019, and is currently in the process of applying to medical school.
Lewis Rubin Thompson
Lewis is a student associate of On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics. He completed Columbia University’s post-baccalaureate pre-medical program in May 2019, and is currently in the process of applying to medical school. Prior to beginning his pre-medical studies at Columbia, Lewis graduated with a degree in Piano Performance from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington and worked professionally as a pianist. He also spent several semesters studying harpsichord and is a proponent of early music performance. Lewis maintains an active life as a pianist and harpsichordist.
Working Group Affiliation
Fern Thompsett
Fern Thompsett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation research explores the Anti-Civilization Movement, an anarchist environmental movement that coheres around an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist critique of mass agriculture.
Photo Credit: Hudson Gardner
Fern Thompsett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation research explores the Anti-Civilization Movement, an anarchist environmental movement that coheres around an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist critique of mass agriculture. Fern conducts ethnographic fieldwork in the US Pacific Northwest, where the movement originated, to investigate how those inspired by anti-civilization ethics put these ideas into practice. Much of this work is oriented around people's relationships with plant species, whether in terms of foraging wild edibles, exploring animist and Pagan modes of relationality, or reckoning with the effects of climate change. Fern has previously published work on anarchist and egalitarian pedagogies, in the context of the free university movement.
Working Group: Seeds of Diaspora
Tess Skadegård Thorsen
Tess Skadegård Thorsen
Tess Skadegård Thorsen, PhD (she/her/hers), is a keynote speaker, researcher, educator, and consultant, specialized in representation in tech, media, and film practices. A former founding editor of the Danish decolonial journal, Marronage, and former managing editor of the Danish journal for gender research, Tess was awarded the 2022 Kraka Award for Danish gender research. Her research has been published internationally including in 'Women in the International Film Industry: Policy, Practice & Power' and 'Black Film British Cinema II'.
Miriam Ticktin
Professor, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center
Miriam Ticktin is Professor of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research in the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity: she has been interested in what these claims tell us about universalisms and difference, about who can be a political subject, on what basis people are included and excluded from communities, and how inequalities get instituted or perpetuated in this process.
Miriam Ticktin
Professor of Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center.
Miriam Ticktin is Associate Professor of Anthropology in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She publishes widely on topics such as immigration, humanitarianism, and racial and gendered inequalities. Most notably, she is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France, and co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. She is currently finishing a book on, and against, racial innocence.
Her research in the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity: she has been interested in what these claims tell us about universalisms and difference, about who can be a political subject, on what basis people are included and excluded from communities, and how inequalities get instituted or perpetuated in this process.
Working Group Affiliations
Lilith Todd
Lilith Todd is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia's Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she is studying 17th- and 18th-century British and Transatlantic literature. Broadly, her research interests include representations of domesticity, maternity, and bodily sensations, the histories of nursing, sex work, and surrogacy, and the various flows of water, bodily fluids, products, and poetic beats.
Lilith Todd
Lilith Todd is a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia's Department of English and Comparative Literature, where she is studying 17th- and 18th-century British and Transatlantic literature. Broadly, her research interests include representations of domesticity, maternity, and bodily sensations, the histories of nursing, sex work, and surrogacy, and the various flows of water, bodily fluids, products, and poetic beats. She has an article forthcoming from The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation on the nurse, washerwoman, and poet Mary Collier and her work with bodily fluids. Before coming to Columbia, she received her B.A. in English (with honors) and in History from Brown University.
Working Group Affiliation
Sonia Tolani
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Tolani received her medical degree with honors from New York University School of Medicine. She completed her internship, medical residency and her fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Dr. Tolani the co-Director of the Women’s Heart Center At Columbia University and a part of the Hypertension Center. As part of her cardiology fellowship, Dr. Tolani spent several years studying the interplay of cholesterol and inflammation and how this interaction impacts atherosclerosis.
Sonia Tolani, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Tolani received her medical degree with honors from New York University School of Medicine. She completed her internship, medical residency and her fellowship in cardiovascular medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Dr. Tolani the co-Director of the Women’s Heart Center At Columbia University and a part of the Hypertension Center. As part of her cardiology fellowship, Dr. Tolani spent several years studying the interplay of cholesterol and inflammation and how this interaction impacts atherosclerosis. Her research has been published in core journals including Atherosclerosis, Journal of Clinical Investigation and Journal of Immunology. In addition to being a full-time clinician, she frequently appears in local and national media as an expert on preventative cardiology and women’s health. She has been featured on Morning Edition on NPR and the Dr. Oz Show. She also actively donates her time to community outreach programs aimed at educating women on the signs and symptoms of cardiovascular disease. Dr. Tolani's areas of expertise include consultative cardiology, preventative medicine and women's health. She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Cardiology and Echocardiography.
Working Group Affiliation
Women’s Heart Disease Awareness: Digital Intervention, Creating Change, Project Director
Anja Tolonen
Assistant Professor of Economics, Barnard College
Anja Tolonen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She works on economic development and gender. One strand focuses on health and gender, including menstruation and school absenteeism, stigma around menstruation, and household health investment and knowledge.
Anja Tolonen
Assistant Professor of Economics, Barnard College
Anja Tolonen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She works on economic development and gender. One strand focuses on health and gender, including menstruation and school absenteeism, stigma around menstruation, and household health investment and knowledge. Another strand focuses on the local welfare effects of natural resource extraction in Africa, including effects on women’s employment, gender norms, health and criminality. Her research methods include quasi-experimental analysis and randomized control trials, and she often uses large datasets. She has peer-reviewed publications in World Development, The Economic Journal and Ambio. At Barnard, she teaches Empirical Development Economics and Econometrics. She is an affiliated faculty at the Center for Development Economics and Policy at Columbia University. Prof. Tolonen is an external research member at Oxford Center for Analysis of Resource Rich Economies (University of Oxford), and UNESCO and The World Bank has funded her research. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Gothenburg in 2015 and has been a visiting researcher at University of Oxford and University of California at Berkeley. During the academic year 2017-2018 she will be on an academic sabbatical at Princeton University (fall 2017) and New York University (spring 2018).
Working Group Affiliations
Solomon Torres
Doctoral Student, Genomic Medicine, Columbia University
Solomon Torres currently works at the Columbia University’s Institute for Genomic Medicine as the Operations Manager for the All of Us Research Program. In the present-day where big-data and genomics are shaping the future of medical care and public health, he is interested in gaining the skills in epidemiological research methods and biostatistical analysis to contribute to the advancement of biomedical and public health research. Through the PMEPC project, he hopes to gain additional insight as to the research that will make use of the precision medicine approach to address health disparities, inequalities, and emerging diseases nationally and globally with an emphasis in Latin America.
Solomon Torres
Operations Manager, All of Us Research Program, Institute for Genomic Medicine, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
Solomon Torres currently works at the Columbia University’s Institute for Genomic Medicine as the Operations Manager for the All of Us Research Program. In the present-day where big-data and genomics are shaping the future of medical care and public health, he is interested in gaining the skills in epidemiological research methods and biostatistical analysis to contribute to the advancement of biomedical and public health research. He has worked in research over the past 10 years in areas such as pulmonary medicine, epidemiology, pediatrics, and neurology; working closely with UBR participants in the research. He has been particularly interested in the incorporation of genomic data into healthcare. In addition, he has an MS in Biochemistry from City College of New York and currently pursuing an Executive MS in Epidemiology at Mailman School of Public Health. Through the PMEPC project, he hopes to gain additional insight as to the research that will make use of the precision medicine approach to address health disparities, inequalities, and emerging diseases nationally and globally with an emphasis in Latin America.
Working Group Affiliation
Kate Trebuss
Doctoral Student, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Kate Trebuss is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation, entitled "Critical Care: Medical Life Writing, Memory, and the Politics of Health," investigates how contemporary autobiographical stoies of illness and medical care facilitate the remembering and forgetting of certain histories and current conditions of violence, oppression, invisibility and inequality, as well as the connections between them.
Kate Trebuss
English and Comparative Literature
Kate Trebuss is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation, entitled "Critical Care: Medical Life Writing, Memory, and the Politics of Health," investigates how contemporary autobiographical stoies of illness and medical care facilitate the remembering and forgetting of certain histories and current conditions of violence, oppression, invisibility and inequality, as well as the connections between them. HEr work focuses on intersections between medicine and literature, in particular the ways in which illness narratives shape health policy and how literary knoweldge can contribute to the clinical and ethical training of medical professionals. Kate is currently a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow and the rapporteur for Columbia University's Cultural Memory Seminar. She holds a B.A. Hon. and an M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Toronto.
Working Group Affiliation
Zeynep Türkyılmaz
Fellow, History, Dartmouth College
Zeynep Türkyılmaz received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. Her dissertation, "Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire," is based on intensive research conducted in Ottoman, British, and several American missionary archives. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral at UNC-Chapel Hill between 2009-2010 and Europe in the Middle East/ The Middle East in Europe Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin between 2010-2011.
Zeynep Türkyılmaz
Assistant Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Zeynep Türkyılmaz received her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2009. Her dissertation, "Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire," is based on intensive research conducted in Ottoman, British, and several American missionary archives. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral at UNC-Chapel Hill between 2009-2010 and Europe in the Middle East/ The Middle East in Europe Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin between 2010-2011. She joined the Darmouth College as an assistant professor of history in 2011.
Her research and teaching interests include state-formation, gender, nationalism, religion with a focus on heterodoxy and missionary work in the Middle East from 1800 to the present.
Working Group Affiliation
Dennis Tyler
Fellow, English, Fordham University
Dennis Tyler is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University. He has published work on African American literature, disability studies, and popular culture. He is the recipient of the 2015-16 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. His current book project, Disability of Color, examines how disablement as experience and as discourse has shaped the racial subjecthood of African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Dennis Tyler
English, Fordham University
Dennis Tyler is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University. He has published work on African American literature, disability studies, and popular culture. He is the recipient of the 2015-16 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. His current book project, Disability of Color, examines how disablement as experience and as discourse has shaped the racial subjecthood of African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Professor Tyler's research and teaching Interests include: African American literature; Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century American literature; disability studies; critical race theory; cultural studies.
He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA) and University of California, Los Angeles (PhD).
Working Group Affiliation
Brendane Tynes
Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology, Columbia University
Brendane Tynes is a queer Black feminist scholar and storyteller from Columbia, South Carolina. She received her Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in Cultural Anthropology with a minor in Education from Duke University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University, where she studies the affective responses of Black people to multiple forms of violence within the Movement for Black Lives. Her scholarship receives generous support from the Ford Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Brendane Tynes
Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, Columbia University
Brendane Tynes is a queer Black feminist scholar and storyteller from Columbia, South Carolina. She received her Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in Cultural Anthropology with a minor in Education from Duke University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University, where she studies the affective responses of Black people to multiple forms of violence within the Movement for Black Lives. Her scholarship receives generous support from the Ford Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation. She is co-host of Zora’s Daughters Podcast, a Black feminist anthropological take on popular culture and issues that concern Black women and queer and trans people. Outside of academe, you can find Brendane dancing, singing, writing poetry, and creating healing spaces for survivors of interpersonal violence, who sit at the center of her commitment to Black feminist anti-oppression work.
Working Group Affiliation
Transnational Black Feminisms, Research Assistant
Elena Tzelepis
Fellow, Philosophy, New School for Social Research
Elena Tzelepis has completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. She works on social and political philosophy. She has taught at Columbia University and held visiting positions at the American University in Cairo and the University of Aegean, Greece.
Elena Tzelepis
Center for Advanced Study, Sophia
Elena Tzelepis has completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. She works on social and political philosophy. She has taught at Columbia University and held visiting positions at the American University in Cairo and the University of Aegean, Greece.
Elena Tzelepis has completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. She works on social and political philosophy. She has taught at Columbia University and held visiting positions at the American University in Cairo and the University of Aegean, Greece.
Alanna Valdez
Doctoral Student, Philosophy, CUNY
Alanna Valdez is a Master’s student in philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. She also holds a Master’s degree in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs from American University’s School of International Service, where she wrote her thesis on how the recently ratified UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities shifts disability rights to a human rights perspective. Her philosophical interests include: personhood, agency, and non-rational justifications for human rights.
Alanna Valdez
Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center
Alanna Valdez is a Master’s student in philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. She also holds a Master’s degree in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs from American University’s School of International Service, where she wrote her thesis on how the recently ratified UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities shifts disability rights to a human rights perspective. Her philosophical interests include: personhood, agency, and non-rational justifications for human rights. She is particularly interested in the intersections between the opposing models of disability and exploring possible ways for their compatibility.
Stephanie Valentinetti
Doctoral Student, Behavioral Cardiovascular Health, Columbia University
Stephanie Valentinetti is a Project Coordinator at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center and a graduate student in Columbia's Master's in Bioethics program. She studies ethical issues related to mHealth technology, wearable devices, and data ownership. Stephanie's thesis will focus on the ethics of professional athletes' use of wearable and biometric technologies. Prior to CUMC, she spent four years at Major League Baseball working in anti-doping for the Department of Investigations.
Stephanie Valentinetti
Graduate Student, Columbia University
Stephanie Valentinetti is a Project Coordinator at the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center and a graduate student in Columbia's Master's in Bioethics program. She studies ethical issues related to mHealth technology, wearable devices, and data ownership. Stephanie's thesis will focus on the ethics of professional athletes' use of wearable and biometric technologies. Prior to CUMC, she spent four years at Major League Baseball working in anti-doping for the Department of Investigations. Stephanie received her BA in Biology from Southampton College, Long Island University.
Working Group Affiliation
Ife Salema Vanable
Ph.D. Candidate, Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Ife Salema Vanable is an architect, theorist, and historian who holds professional and post-professional degrees in architecture from Cornell and Princeton Universities. Ife is founder and leader of i/van/able, a New York based architectural workshop and think tank. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union and a Ph.D. candidate in architectural history and theory at Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).
Ife Salema Vanable
Ph.D. Candidate, Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Ife Salema Vanable is an architect, theorist, and historian who holds professional and post-professional degrees in architecture from Cornell and Princeton Universities. Ife is founder and leader of i/van/able, a New York based architectural workshop and think tank. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union and a Ph.D. candidate in architectural history and theory at Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Her scholarly work asks questions of and seeks to unearth complex and seemingly banal relationships between the design of multi-family housing, municipal government machinations for its development, conceptions of racial difference, geography, finance, program, and family composition. This work engages histories of the private development of low-moderate income housing in the form of high-rise residential towers in 1970s New York under the program known as Mitchell-Lama. In this context, Ife studies modes of black subjectivity and dwelling in tall buildings, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home.
Working Group Affiliation
Carole S. Vance
Mailman School of Public Health and Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Carole S. Vance, PhD, works on integrating sexuality with human rights frameworks and rights-based health interventions. She has written widely on sexuality, science, gender, and policy; policy controversies about sexual expression and imagery; and sexuality theory and research methods. For the past ten years, she has directed a program on sexuality, gender, health and human rights, which advances policy-relevant scholarship and facilitates exchange between researchers and advocates on sexual health and rights issues.
Carole S. Vance
Mailman School of Public Health and Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
Carole S. Vance, PhD, works on integrating sexuality with human rights frameworks and rights-based health interventions. She has written widely on sexuality, science, gender, and policy; policy controversies about sexual expression and imagery; and sexuality theory and research methods. For the past ten years, she has directed a program on sexuality, gender, health and human rights, which advances policy-relevant scholarship and facilitates exchange between researchers and advocates on sexual health and rights issues.
Dr. Vance has extensive experience in training students from developing countries, particularly on research methods in sexuality, and the practical application of sexuality research in a range of cultural, national, and policy contexts. Dr. Vance currently is involved in research on trafficking into forced prostitution, also known as sex trafficking, with particular focus on the ways in which ethnographic research can inform policy, as well as health and rights interventions. Dr. Vance edited the landmark collection, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, and is completing the edited volume, Ethnography and Policy: What Do We Know about Trafficking?, with publication in 2007. In 2005, Dr. Vance received the David R. Kessler Award for lifetime contributions to studies of sexuality.
Working Group Affiliations
Naazanene Vatan
Doctoral Student, Health, Medicine and Society, University of Cambridge
Naazanene Vatan is a medical student at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Her interests include the intersections of literature and medicine; pregnancy and childbirth; and philosophies of scientific progress. Naazanene graduated with a B.A. from Columbia College in Biology and Medicine, Literature, and Society.
Naazanene Vatan
MPhil Candidate, Health, Medicine and Society, University of Cambridge
Naazanene Vatan is a medical student at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Her interests include the intersections of literature and medicine; pregnancy and childbirth; and philosophies of scientific progress. Naazanene graduated with a B.A. from Columbia College in Biology and Medicine, Literature, and Society. She earned her M.Phil from the University of Cambridge, where she wrote her dissertation on obstetric epidural anesthesia use in the U.K. in the 1980s.
Working Group Affiliation
Ayesha Verma
Ayesha Verma is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. She has a bachelor's in Biology and a prior master's in Gender and Sexuality. She has been a Commonwealth Youth and British Council Fellow [2013] for her work with sex workers in the red light district of Delhi. Ayesha is currently writing her dissertation on "Performing Stage Corpses in Early Modern British Drama" in which she particularly navigates the existing construction of binaries between subject/object, player/property, and how the stage corpse constantly defies, destabilizes, and dismantles these binaries.
This study, she feels, offers a way of reading early modern plays that are both feminist and queer; one that allows a re-reading of early modern histories as we re-read such plays.
Working Group Affiliation:
Luiz Fernando Vianna
Fellow, Web Radio, Instituto Moreira Salles
Luiz Fernando Vianna is a journalist. He has written for O Globo, Folha de S. Paulo and other venues. He is the author of books on popular music, and coordinates the Batuta Radio since 2013.
Luiz Fernando Vianna
Luiz Fernando Vianna is a journalist. He has written for O Globo, Folha de S. Paulo and other venues. He is the author of books on popular music, and coordinates the Batuta Radio since 2013.
Rádio Batuta is the web radio of Instituto Moreira Salles. It was created in 2010 to promote the IMS recordings collection and to perform special series, such as those dedicated to Noel Rosa and João Gilberto. Today it has a 24-hour program of Brazilian music, documentaries, interviews in their studios and regular attractions that include classical music and jazz.
The Moreira Salles Institute (IMS), founded in 1992 with its own resources from the Moreira Salles family, currently has three headquarters: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Poços de Caldas (MG). The IMS houses and lends collections of photography, music, literature and iconography. In music, the IMS owns the largest collection of 78 rpm records in Brazil, with over 50,000 records. Among several other activities, it develops Social Action projects and has a web radio, Radio Batuta.
Working Group Affiliation