Graduate Fellows
Doctoral Student, Cultural Studies, Sabanci University
Bürge Abiral is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She received her BA from Williams College and her MA in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University, Turkey. Her research interests include human- environment relations, climate change, agriculture, political violence, and gender and sexuality. Her translation of Toward an Anthropology of Women (ed.
Doctoral Student, Narrative Medicine, Columbia University
Olamide Adejumo is a student of narrative medicine at Columbia University. He is a graduate of medicine and surgery from Obafemi Awolowo College of Health Sciences in Nigeria passionate about narrative care practices in medicine. His interests includes clinical care and research in Narrative Medicine, Personalized Medicine, Medical Humanities and Genetic Technologies in Disability Care.
Doctoral Student, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Fatemeh Adlparvar is a recent graduate of the Narrative Medicine program. She will begin her graduate studies at the Mailman School of Public Health where she hopes to study the intersections of narrative medicine, social work, and public health. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley with a major in Environmental Science with an Education minor. She went on to complete her MSW at Columbia School of Social Work, with a minor in Law and a concentration in health, mental health, & disability.
Ph.D. Candidate, Performance Studies, New York University
Luis Rincon Alba is a Colombian artist and scholar based in New York City since 2010. He has taught at the departments of Art and Public Policy and Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Doctoral Student, Performance Studies, New York University
Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Sociology, and his M.A. degree in Philosophy from Bogazici University. Ertuğ’s primary fields of research are the politics of gender and sexuality in Turkey, with a focus on artistic and everyday performance, visual practices, fashion, and queer historiography.
Doctoral Student, Human Rights, Columbia University
Sydney Amoakoh is a Human Rights Studies MA candidate at Columbia University whose research takes a look at the considerations and constraints behind the drafting of human rights into humanitarian guidelines, with specific focus on the recent inclusion of a section on menstrual health management (MHM) in the 2018 edition of the Sphere Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response.
PhD Candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Patrick Anson is a PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature. He is writing a part-ethnographic, part-literary-critical dissertation about programs that propose reading groups focused on 20th and 21st century narrative literature as a means to address a range of social problems, from mass incarceration, where a reading group functions as an alternative sentence for people convicted of an offense, to military trauma, where a reading group helps to establish social connections among veterans.
Doctoral Student, International Affairs and Journalism, Columbia University
Teresa holds a BA in International Relations from Brown University and is currently pursuing a Master of International Affairs and an MS in Journalism at Columbia University. She previously worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (Rome), where she was responsible for the coordination and editing of high-profile publications. Among others, she edited the joint FAO-EL PAÍS publications series “The State of our Planet”. She is interested in how documentary video, photography and journalism at large can drive social action and improve public policy across geographical boundaries.
Doctoral Student, Narrative Medicine, Columbia University
Matthew Argame is currently a graduate student in the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia University. Upon graduation, Matthew will continue on to medical school as an aspiring psychiatrist, advocating for the needs of vulnerable communities. Matthew hopes that his engagement with the Precision Medicine: Ethics, Politics, Culture program will produce interdisciplinary dialogue on improving patient care by addressing societal injustices and by bringing attention the unique needs of queer and disabled communities.
Doctoral Student, Divinity, Union Theological Seminary
Linda Aristondo is a Latina bilingual woman of color and attorney championing the needs of vulnerable populations. Her field of interest is collaborating with nonprofit service organizations dedicated to serving the legally disenfranchised, including vulnerable undocumented immigrants and refugees.
PhD Student, Sociology, Columbia University
Larry Au is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Columbia University. He is broadly interested in science and technology studies, economic sociology, and political sociology. His dissertation examines the rise of precision medicine in China and the United States, focusing on the diffusion of the concept and its associated technologies, as well as the ways in which debates around ethical, legal, and social issues are constructed locally and globally. He is also interested in the recent controversies over human gene editing and the modernization of traditional medicines.
PhD Student, History, Bowdoin College
George Aumoithe focuses on 20th century American history and the history of public health, science, and medicine. He received his B.A. from Bowdoin College with a double major in history and Africana studies and a minor in gay and lesbian studies. His studies were supported by the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and Point Foundation , the national LGBTQ scholarship.
PhD Student, Counseling Psychology, Columbia University
Michael Awad is a completing his Ph.D. in counseling psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. He earned dual master’s degrees in mental health counseling and professional counseling from Seton Hall University. He has experience working with diverse populations across the lifespan at every level of behavioral health care, including inpatient psychotherapy at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, neuropsychological assessment at the Cognitive and Research Center of NJ, intensive outpatient psychotherapy at Overlook Medical Center, community mental health at the Dean Hope Center, behavioral medicine at Morristown Medical Center, addictions counseling at the NJ Department of Veterans Affairs, and integrated health care through the Health Resources and Services Administration Graduate Psychology Education Program.
Doctoral Student, Health Promotion, Research and Practice, Columbia University
Olivia Balderes is an MPH Candidate at Mailman in the department of Sociomedical Sciences with a focus on Health Promotion, Research and Practice. She is interested in applying her Intervention Design and Evaluation background to improve community involvement within Precision Medicine programs/studies, maximize efficiency and efficacy of return of genetic results in clinical settings, and explore the determinants of genetic and general health literacy.
Doctoral Student, Global Health, Columbia University
Kayleigh Barrett is a current MPH candidate in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, working toward a certificate in Global Health. In the last three years, she worked as a Research Scientist at the University of Washington in the Division of Allergy and Infectious Disease and was involved in a structural genomics pipeline for an early structure-based drug design projects targeting a number of pathogens. Her current interests include research ethics, infectious disease, reproductive health and medical anthropology.
PhD Student, Sustainability Management, Columbia University
Naomi Batzer graduated from Barnard College with a degree in economics in 2017. She is particularly interested in the roles of health and gender in development economics and wrote her final paper on the effect of Ebola on maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. She is in her first semester of the Sustainability Management program at Columbia University.
Doctoral Student, History, Columbia University
Iuri Bauler Pereira holds a B.A. in History from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). His research focus on the transnational connections and geopolitical imagination of Latin American Countercultures (underground press, literature and film), Brazilian Critical Geography, and the Intellectual History of the Americas.
Doctoral Student, Disability Rights, Columbia Law School
Odelia Bay is a master’s student at Columbia Law School where she hopes to specialize in disability rights in North America, with a focus on comparative constitutional and civil rights jurisprudence. Odelia received her J.D. from the University of Ottawa in Canada and was admitted to the Ontario bar in 2012. She worked with one of Canada’s leading labor and civil rights law firms and has also participated in disability-related work with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and a community legal clinic in Ottawa.
PhD Student, English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Veronica Belafi is the graduate assistant for PRECISION MEDICINE: ETHICS, POLITICS AND CULTURE and a PhD candidate in English & Comparative Literature. Her academic interests stem from the history and philosophy of science and technology, including the medical humanities, modern and contemporary media poetics, ecocriticism, and the growing field of petrocultures.
Doctoral Candidate, English, Princeton University
Joshua Bennett is a second-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Princeton University. His academic interests include but are not limited to: black studies, disability studies, affect, animal studies, and 19th century Afro-Protestantism(s). In addition to his graduate work at Princeton, Joshua is a also a full-time performance artist, and has recited his original work at events such as The Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, the ESPN documentary "One Night in Vegas," and President Obama's Evening of Poetry and Music at The White House.
Doctoral Student, Oral History, Columbia University
Nicki Pombier Berger is an oral historian, educator, and interdisciplinary artist.
Nicki is on the faculty at The New School College of Performing Arts, where she teaches in the Drama BFA program. In collaboration with playwright Suli Holum, she is currently working as dramaturg on THE BAKKEN, an investigation of the Bakken shale, a rock formation roughly 350 million years old sitting deep below the surface of North Dakota.
PhD Student, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Liz Bowen is a Ph.D. candidate in English and comparative literature who works at the intersections of 20th and 21st century American literature, disability studies, and critical animal studies. Her dissertation, “Animal Abilities: Disability, Species Difference, and Aesthetic Innovation in the Long 20th Century,” traces the intertwined deployments of disability, animality, and cognitive otherness as sites for literary experimentation, from Faulkner to the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary poetics.
Doctoral Student, Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University
Christopher is a second year Master of Public Health student at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences. His certificate is in History, Ethics and Law. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His research interest is in using ethics to assess how policies in the fields of public health and medicine work to balance efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness.
PhD Student, Integrated Program in Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies, Columbia University
Christopher Cardona is a first year doctoral student in the integrated program in Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies. He is excited to learn about the multiple aspects of precision medicine and how we can begin incorporating these in scientific research. He is currently working on muscle invasive bladder cancer in mouse models and will be working on Alzheimer's next semester. Both labs use comprehensive and computational tools to identify important regulators of these processes.
PhD Candidate, French and Romance Philology, Columbia University
Noni Carter is a historical and speculative fiction author. She has published work in RSA Journal, Kweli Journal (forthcoming August 2019), and is the author of the YA historical fiction novel, Good Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2010), winner of the Parent’s Choice Gold award. She is a 2016 graduate of Voices of Our Nation and the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for her work-in-progress novel Womb Talk.
Doctoral Student, Cultural Studies, New York University
Henry Castillo is a doctoral student in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He holds a B.A. in Applied Linguistics (Honors) from the University of California--Los Angeles and an M.A. in Performance Studies form New York University. His research interests include race and ethnicity; women, gender, and sexuality; memory and "Intangible Cultural Heritage" in the Americas; Blackness in Latin America; and Afro-Colombian "heritage" practices and performance.
Doctoral Student, Performance and Cultural Theorist, Columbia University
Luca A Castro Figari is a performance and cultural theorist, organizer, survivor and healer, and multimedia artist specializing in behavioral, ideological, and intimacy control structures. They've received awards in poetry and creative writing, perform and play-write professionally, are recording their first album, publish film and social criticism, and were Peruvian National Champion in Tae-Kwon-Do.