Faculty
Research Interests:
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 Interests:
Labor Economics, Economics of Education
Research Interests:
Bioorganic Chemistry and Chemical Biology. A significant frontier in chemical biology lies in the ability to develop new, selective chemical transformations that transpire at mild temperatures amidst many other reactive species and in parallel with the countless transformations that occur inside of a living cell. Research in the Scheck laboratory focuses on the invention and application of encodable, bioorthogonal chemical strategies. These tools will be used to report on inducible changes in protein function in living cells. Current efforts in the lab fall into two broad categories: 1) The development of new chemical methods that are used to study complex posttranslational modification networks and 2) The study of native and unnatural posttranslational modifications to provide valuable chemical and synthetic biology tools.
Research Interests:
Finance and banking in East Asia
Research Interests:
Artificial intelligence, artificial life, cognitive modeling, foundations of cognitive science, human-robot interaction, multi-scale agent-based models, natural language understanding.
Research Interests:
Print Media, Multiples, Performance, Sculpture, Installation, Site-Responsive Projects, Writing, Sound, Graphics, Publications, Ephemera
Research Interests:
20th and 21st Century French and Francophone literature, Women's Studies, Film Studies
Research Interests:
Special Education, human development, teaching and learning, adolescence, gender, equity in education, qualitative research methods, child and adolescent literature and literacy, writing
Research Interests:
ethical leadership, social justice, and public speaking.
Research Interests:
Economics of Education, Labor Economics
Research Interests:
Geographic information system; urban geography; housing; critical GIS
Research Interests:
Housing; Education; Inequality; Policy Implementation; Community Development
Research Interests:
programming languages, software systems, concurrency, distributed information systems
Research Interests:
Clinical Neuroscience
Research Interests:
Algorithmic human-robot interaction for robust and socially appropriate assistance to human users, especially
users with disabilities.
Research Interests:
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 Interests:
Quantum Information, Computation and Communication
Electronic Nanomaterials
Quantum Photonics
Semiconductor Optoelectronics
Research Interests:
Artificial Intelligence, Developmental Robotics, Computational Perception, Robotic Manipulation, Machine Learning, Human-Robot and Human-Computer Interaction
Research Interests:
Urban Anthropology and Ethnography; Global Poverty and Development; Housing and Infrastructure; Gender and Kinship; Latin American Studies; Political and Legal Anthropology
Research Interests:
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.
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 Interests:
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
Research Interests:
Algebraic Geometry
Research Interests:
Engineering for Health -> Physics of cancer and aging -> Mechanics of biomaterials at the nanoscale, Synthesis and study of functionals nanomaterials for biomedical imaging and drug delivery, Advanced imaging for medical diagnostics, Novel processes and materials for dentistry: nano-polishing and self-healing materials
Research Interests:
social perception and judgment; psychology of racial equity and group diversity.
Research Interests:
Bioelectronics, Biomedical microdevices, Wearables, Ingestibles, Biomedical circuits and systems, micro and nano fabrication, lab-on-chip microsystems, global health and precision medicine, CMOS image sensors for scientific imaging, analog to information converters, analog computing, brain inspired machine learning, active metamaterial devices, circuits, and systems, terahertz devices and circuits
Research Interests:
computational geometry, design and analysis of algorithms, computational complexity
Research Interests:
Political Economy, International Economics, Economic Growth and Development
Research Interests:
Transportation; Health; Spatial models; Geographic Information Systems
Research Interests:
Biological Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, Quantum Mechanics
My research interests cover a broad array of topics in biological physics, condensed matter physics and quantum mechanics. In biological physics our group is performing both experimental and theoretical work to uncover fundamental physical principles that underlie the formation of functional neuronal networks among neurons in the brain. One of the primary challenges in science today is to figure out how as many as 100 billion neurons are produced, grow, and organize themselves into the truly wonderful information-processing machine which is the brain. We combine high-resolution imaging techniques such as atomic force, traction force and fluorescence microscopy to measure mechanical properties of neurons and to correlate these properties with internal components of the cell. Our group is also using mathematical modeling based on stochastic differential equations and the theory of dynamical systems to predict axonal growth and the formation of neuronal networks. The aim of this work is twofold. On the one hand we are using tools and concepts from experimental and theoretical physics to understand biological processes. On the other hand, active biological processes in neuronal cells exhibit a wealth of fascinating phenomena such as feedback control, pattern formation, collective behavior, and non equilibrium dynamics, and thus the insights learned from studying these biological systems broaden the intellectual range of physics. I am also interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics, particularly in decoherence phenomena and in applying the theory of stochastic processes to open quantum systems. My interests in condensed matter physics include quantum transport in nanoscale systems (carbon nanotubes, graphene, polymer composites, hybrid nanostructures), as well as scanning probe microscopy investigations of novel biomaterials.
Research Interests:
modeling, control, and estimation in electric energy processing, power electronics, power systems, and electric drives
Research Interests:
Tourism, museums, myth and ritual, cultural performance, culture-led redevelopment, mobilities, farm history/heritage
I am an interdisciplinary scholar and practitioner working at the intersection of cultural anthropology and public history. My published work focuses largely on the uses of history, heritage, and culture in redevelopment projects, particularly in former industrial settings. I am particularly interested in foregrounding the presence and contributions of knowledge producers and cultural workers within processes of postindustrial transformation. My 2006 book The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City explores the role of those who helped to reframe a New England textile city for the "new economy" of the late 20th century. My current research and writing asks about the potential for workers in these settings to engage productively with the realms of advocacy and activism, particularly around issues of energy use and food production. A book project in progress, co-authored with Michelle Moon and subtitled How History Can Help Reinvent the Food System, sets out a rationale and methodology for nudging historic sites and practice into closer dialogue with the contemporary "food movement," with the goal of bringing greater historical nuance and critical complexity to present-day understandings of the dominant industrial food system and other possible models.
As an engaged scholar, I have served as a consultant to the U.S. National Park Service's Ethnography Program for more than 15 years, producing a number of peer-reviewed, publicly-accessible book-length studies of military reenactments, farming, and ethnic, avocational, and seasonal communities associated with national parks. I also have an interest in digital scholarship and publication, mostly through my involvement with the National Council on Public History and its evolving digital publications (particularly its History@Work blog, of which I was the founding editor).
Research Interests:
Animal Behavior: Recognition systems, evolution of sociality, parasite and host relationships, behavioral & chemical communication, invasion genetics
Research Interests:
German language and culture teaching as a vehicle to intercultural citizenship, second language acquisition, and teacher language education.
Research Interests:
Dr. Stopka's current research focuses on the intersection of opioid use disorder, overdose, and infectious diseases (HCV, HIV, STIs, COVID-19). He employs GIS, spatial epidemiological, qualitative, biostatistical, and laboratory approaches in multi-site, interdisciplinary studies and public health interventions. He currently leads and contributes to clinical trials and observational studies funded by the NIH, CDC, and SAMHSA to assess the effectiveness of a mobile, telemedicine-based HCV treatment and harm reduction model for rural opioid users in Northern New England, to reduce opioid overdose deaths by 40% in Massachusetts, and to evaluate the overdose prevention impacts of administration of medication for opioid use disorder in houses of correction. Dr. Stopka is also Co-PI of the Tufts research priority group focused on equity in health, wealth, and civic engagement. He teaches courses in GIS and spatial epidemiology, research methods for public health, and epidemiology. He enjoys mentoring research assistants, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty in ongoing research studies and collaborative publications.
Research Interests:
Development and Growth, Urban Economics