Faculty

Research/Areas of Interest: Twentieth century Latin American fiction; song and songwriting; poetry and poetics; translation studies; Jorge Luis Borges; Oulipo

Research/Areas of Interest: Philosophy of Language, Logic, Philosophy of Logic, History of Logic, Critical Thinking Pedagogy

Research/Areas of Interest: process control

Research/Areas of Interest: Silk chemistry and biomedical materials design, Biopolymers, Hydrogels

Research/Areas of Interest: Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean art and architecture, especially in the 1st millennium BCE; materiality studies; ancient magic and religion; reception and museum histories.

Research/Areas of Interest: materials engineering, materials science, manufacturing processes, quality control

Research/Areas of Interest: Extragalactic astrophysics How did galaxies and their central black holes co-evolve from the Big Bang to the present? Despite much progress through large scale galaxy surveys as well as ever more sophisticated numerical simulations, we are still hampered by the fact that much of the star-formation activity and black hole growth are buried in thick cocoons of dust and gas. Observations suggest that much of this activity took place in the past, before the Universe was half its present age, and likely involved mergers of nearly equal sized galaxies. As the merger progresses, gas and dust are more and more concentrated, triggering prodigious star-formation and gradually increasing accretion onto the central black hole (Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN). The process is short lived as supernovae- or AGN-driven winds lead to a 'blow-out' event which disperses the intervening gas and dust halting further star-formation and black hole growth. Indications that starbursts and AGN may regulate each other as above can be seen in the local correlation between the mass of a central black hole and the stellar mass of its host galaxy. The same galaxy observed at different stages of this process can appear very different. Therefore observations of different types of galaxies at different epochs and in different wavelength regimes are crucial to build a more complete understanding of the whole process.

Research/Areas of Interest: So, as a scholar diving into Child Study and Human Development, I've got a fun mix of psychology, education, and Transgender studies in my toolkit. My research focuses on how kids and teens navigate their social lives, especially those who shake things up regarding gender and family norms. I'm super interested in how young people challenge the old-school gender binary and what that means for their lives, education, and well-being. And seriously, if you haven't checked out Christopher Goodey's book, "Development: The History of a Psychological Concept", you're missing out! Here's a juicy tidbit: he argues that we should consider the idea that humans—yes, even the little ones—don't just develop; they change! And there's no reason to box that change into the old-school 'development' box (Goodey, 2021, p. 4). Basically, he's saying that development is just one way of looking at change, and it's stuck in a specific time frame. This whole 'development' idea often paints people as locked into a rigid path, aiming for stability and constancy—especially regarding gender. Lately, I've been all about being true to myself and my intersecting identities, so I'm stepping away from the term 'development' to embrace the complexity of change instead. In a climate where Trans people—especially Trans youth—are targets of political campaigns and media debates about our right to exist (Daniels, 2022), my work alongside these young people has become more urgent than ever. Since 2020, a disturbing number of anti-Trans laws have been proposed and passed, primarily aimed at controlling Trans and Nonbinary (TNB) youth's bodies and limiting their lives. This climate of fear stifles the joy, imagination, and hope that every child deserves (TfS, n.d.). My research aims to confront these challenges head-on, co-creating and advocating with TNB youth to ensure their experiences are recognized and celebrated. I strive to Trans-form our understanding of childhood, parenting, and educational environments to make them inclusive and supportive of all gender identities and expressions, regardless of institutional legibility. By employing innovative approaches (like Youth Participatory Action Research) and methodologies (such as Reflexive Thematic Analysis, RTA), I aim to expand existing developmental theories to better account for the experiences and changes of TNB youth. This approach not only advances our academic understanding but also has practical applications for creating more inclusive policies and practices in schools and families. Our groundbreaking series of articles are the first of their kind globally: 1. We established minimum criteria for nonbinary gender identification in young children (Salinas-Quiroz & Sweder, 2023). 2. We explored how nonbinary children, ages three to eight, perceive and understand their gender identity (Salinas-Quiroz et al., 2024). 3. We investigated how parents learn to support their nonbinary children, examining their emotional processes and the Trans-formative nature of this journey (Sweder, Garcia, & Salinas-Quiroz, 2024). These studies utilized RTA within a framework of ontological relativism and epistemological constructivism—an innovative approach, especially within the traditionally quantitative realms of child studies and human developmental. I am committed to fostering collaboration across disciplines, viewing my research as an 'intellectual trading zone' (Billard et al., 2022) where insights from child studies, psychology, education, and Trans studies can generate new understandings of human growth. This applied Trans-disciplinary approach allows me to address complex questions about identity formation, social relationships, and supportive environments for children and youth of all genders. To tackle the urgent issues facing TNB youth, I've initiated a YPAR program with Trans Formative Schools in New York City. This project, co-designed by TNB students, seeks to revolutionize educational practices by centering Trans joy and social justice. In collaboration with Mocha Celis, the first Popular Transgender High School in the world, located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I've extended my work to examine the educational experiences of Trans students in Latin America, where the struggles for basic rights are compounded by ongoing colonial and racial violence. Ultimately, my goal is to contribute to a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of child and youth growth—one that recognizes and celebrates all gender modalities (Ashley, 2022). Through my teaching and research, I aim to prepare future professionals in Child Study and Human Development to create more affirming and equitable spaces for all children and youth. In doing so, I hope to foster a world where the joy, imagination, and hope of every child, regardless of their gender identity, can flourish.

Research/Areas of Interest: Cloud computing, evolvability, debugging distributed systems.

Research/Areas of Interest: Bridge structural health monitoring, building train-induced vibrations, nondestructive testing of full-scale structures, fatigue life prediction of structures with nonproportional multi-axial loading.

Research/Areas of Interest: Contemporary Italian literature, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, border studies, environmental humanities, second language acquisition.

Research/Areas of Interest: Embodied AI approaches for performing complex tasks that require creativity, reasoning, and alignment with social and ethical norms.

Research/Areas of Interest: near-infrared spectroscopy, diffuse optical tomography

Research/Areas of Interest: Children's development as earth stewards, children's play, Approaches to children's challenging behaviors, religious and spiritual development across the lifespan, the arts in support of children's development.

Research/Areas of Interest: Labor Economics, Economics of Education

Research/Areas of Interest: Chemical Biology and Bioorganic Chemistry. The post-translational modification (PTM) of proteins is an essential cellular vocabulary that allows critical information to be communicated within and between cells. The Scheck lab pioneers new chemical biology tools that enable the decoding of PTM networks. We use these methods to unlock previously unattainable information about how PTMs are integrated into signaling networks in living cells. Our focus is on PTMs with unusual mechanisms that make them particularly complicated to study using traditional tools, which typically inhibit or profile specific enzyme activities. We use an integrated mass spectrometry and chemical biology approach to develop new, selective chemistries and chemical methods that can predictably modulate, track, or capture specific PTMs, like glycation, ubiquitination, or phosphate B-elimination. Learning how these signals are interpreted or degraded will provide access to new therapeutic targets for preventing or treating neurodegenerative diseases, bacterial infection, autoimmune disease, cancer, diabetes, and age-related diseases.

Research/Areas of Interest: Finance and banking in East Asia

Research/Areas of Interest: Artificial intelligence, artificial life, cognitive modeling, foundations of cognitive science, human-robot interaction, multi-scale agent-based models, natural language understanding.

Research/Areas of Interest: Print Media, Multiples, Performance, Sculpture, Installation, Site-Responsive Projects, Writing, Sound, Graphics, Publications, Ephemera

Research/Areas of Interest: 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone literature, Women's Studies, Film Studies

Research/Areas of Interest: Special Education, human development, teaching and learning, adolescence, gender, equity in education, qualitative research methods, child and adolescent literature and literacy, writing

Research/Areas of Interest: ethical leadership, social justice, and public speaking.

Research/Areas of Interest: Economics of Education, Labor Economics

Research/Areas of Interest: Geographic information system; urban geography; housing; critical GIS

Research/Areas of Interest: Housing; Education; Inequality; Policy Implementation; Community Development

Research/Areas of Interest: programming languages, software systems, concurrency, distributed information systems

Research/Areas of Interest: Clinical Neuroscience

Research/Areas of Interest: human-robot interaction, accessibility, robotics, human-in-the-loop machine learning, assistive technology Applying human-centered design and disability community values to the development, deployment, and evaluation of AI and machine learning for robotics, including: human-centered human-in-the-loop machine learning; disability-friendly assistive robotics; autonomous HRI in groups, public spaces, and other human-human contexts; and accessibility and disability inclusion in robotics education and the computing research community.

Research/Areas of Interest: Physical Chemistry and Surface Science. The Shultz group applies physics and chemistry to understand the inner workings of hydrogen bonding. Hydrogen bonding plays key roles in environmental, biological, and atmospheric chemistry. Our program has research thrusts in all three directions. We specialize both in devising environments that clearly reveal key interactions and in developing new instrumentation. The most recent focus is on icy surfaces and on clathrate formation. Probing the ice surface begins with a well-prepared single-crystal surface. We have unique capabilities for growing single-crystal ice from the melt and for and preparing any desired ice face. Our clean water efforts are aimed at developing new materials to fill the significant need for safe drinking water. According to the World Health Organization, over one billion people lack safe drinking water. Our program is based on using photo catalysts to capture readily available sunlight to turn pollutants into benign CO2 and water. We developed methods to grow ultra-nano (~2 nm) particles that have well-controlled surface structures and chemistry.

Research/Areas of Interest: Experimental development of novel semiconductor nanostructures for quantum information sciences. Tailoring crystal symmetry and strain at the nanoscale to produce next generation optoelectronic devices. AREAS OF RESEARCH EXPERTISE • MBE growth, chamber maintenance, and system support. • Low-temperature, high-field magnetoresistance quantized carrier/spin transport (quantum Hall effects, Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations, 1D quantized conductance, 0.7 structure, etc.). • Atomic force microscopy (AFM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and photoluminescence (PL), Raman spectroscopy, ellipsometry, Rutherford back scattering, etc. • Cleanroom-based micro/nanofabrication including photo- and e-beam-lithography, metallization, and device packaging

Research/Areas of Interest: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental Robotics, Computational Perception, Robotic Manipulation, Machine Learning, Human-Robot and Human-Computer Interaction

Research/Areas of Interest: Urban Anthropology and Ethnography; Global Poverty and Development; Housing and Infrastructure; Gender and Kinship; Latin American Studies; Political and Legal Anthropology

Research/Areas of Interest: Physics of elementary particles The Standard Model, gauge theories; also topology, differential geometry and other branches of modern mathematics to better understand quantum gauge theories, the origin of mass and the structure of space-time, matter and all interactions, including gravity. I am a member of the ATLAS collaboration at the LHC. Studies of Higgs boson and top quarks. The main objective is to find out whether the new particle discovered in 2012 is a minimal Standard Model Higgs, or some other kind. Studies of top quarks are very interesting on their own. Because of very large mass of the top quark, its lifetime is very short, ~ 5x10^{-25} seconds, much shorter that the characteristic time of the strong interactions. As a consequence, top quark decays before any strong interaction effects may take place. This allows a direct access to the information about the quark spin, which is very difficult, if not impossible, for any other quark. Studies of top quarks are very important for other searches, as top quarks will constitute the most important background for almost any final states due to "new physics" and have to be understood very well. We are using very advanced multidimensional analysis techniques, developed by our group (Ben Whitehouse and I). Topology and geometry of the Universe In the Standard Cosmological Model (SCM), the starting point is an interpretation of the observed redshift of spectral lines from distant galaxies as a Doppler shift in the frequency of light waves as they travel through an expanding Universe. Acceptance of this hypothesis led to the ideas of the Big Bang and the LambdaCDM, the Standard Model of cosmology. Remarkably, there exist another explanation of the cosmological redshift. As shown by Irving Ezra Segal, a mathematician and a mathematical physicist, the same axioms of global isotropy and homogeneity of space and time, and its causality properties, are satisfied not only by the Minkowski spacetime R x R^3, but also by a Universe whose geometry is R X S^3. In Segal's model, the geometry of the spatial part of the Universe is that of a three-dimensional hypersurface of a four-dimensional sphere. Locally, it is indistinguishable from the flat Minkowski spacetime. It is the geometry of the Einstein static Universe, which he abandoned when the interpretation of the increase of redshift with distance was universally accepted as evidence for expanding Universe. If the universe is R1 x S3 but observations are made in flat Minkowski frame, then such an observer measures the "projections" from R1 x S3 into flat R1 x R3. The redshift in Segal's model arises in a geometric way analogously to distortions which appear when making maps using stereographic projection from S^2, a two-dimensional curved surface of a sphere in three dimensions, onto a flat surface of a map, R^2. Segal's theory makes a verifiable prediction for the redshift as a function of distance. The comparison, although in principle very simple, is non-trivial. For more distant objects, one can only estimate the distance using various proxies, for example the magnitude, if one assumes that the chosen sources have the same absolute luminosity. Surprisingly, Segal's model cannot be falsified with the currently available data. The magnitude-redshift data for supernovae agree very well with SCM, but it also agrees with Segal's model. There exist another independent observable, the number of observed galaxies as a function of redshift z, N(< z). Assuming that galaxies are uniformly distributed in the Universe, their number is proportional to the volume enclosed in a given fixed angular field of view, and the dependence of this volume on the manifold distance is sensitive to the geometry of the Universe. Two Tufts undergraduate students, Maxwell Kaye and Nathan Burwig, joined me in this analysis. We examined the data from several Hubble Deep Fields, and found that the number of observed galaxies as a function of redshift is also in very good agreement with Segal's model. We are continuing with a study of these fundamental questions about the topology and geometry of our Universe. Interestingly, I have also shown recently that one can explain the observed value of the CMB temperature, following Segal's original idea that the CMB appears unavoidably as a result of light traveling many times around a closed spatial part of the R X S^3 Universe. Magnetic monopoles I am also a member of MoEDAL, a small collaboration looking for magnetic monopoles at the LHC.

Research/Areas of Interest: data science, algorithms for analysis of biological networks, gene and pathway regulation in human development, algorithms for precision medicine, computational approaches to pharmacogenomics and drug discovery or repositioning