Faculty
Research Interests:
Medieval Latin Philosophy; Classical Arabic Philosophy; History and Philosophy of Logic; Aristotle; Avicenna
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Environmental health, environmental epidemiology, air pollution, exposure science, data analytics
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Medieval art, architecture, and visual culture in Europe and the Byzantine-Slavic cultural spheres; image theory; historiography; patronage; monasticism; cross-cultural interactions
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Music and identity, music and spiritual experience, music and advocacy, and the impact of technology on the transmission of tradition.
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Science focused on energy, development and environmental management. Computational
modeling of electrical grid integration of renewable energy and storage. Interaction of science and
policy in academia, industry and government
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Moral philosophy, practical rationality, moral psychology, action theory
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engineering education, geoenvironmental and geotechnical engineering
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Physical Chemistry, Surface Science, and Nanoscience. The Sykes group utilizes state of the art scanning probes and surface science instrumentation to study technologically important systems. For example, scanning tunneling microscopy enables visualization of geometric and electronic properties of catalytically relevant metal alloy surfaces at the nanoscale. Using temperature programmed reaction studies of well defined model catalyst surfaces structure-property-activity relationships are drawn. Of particular interest is the addition of individual atoms of a reactive metal to a relatively inert host. In this way reactivity can be tuned, and provided the energetic landscapes are understood, novel bifunctional catalytic systems can be designed with unique properties that include low temperature activation and highly selective chemistry. Newly developed curved single crystal surface are also being used to open up previously inaccessible areas of structure sensitive surface chemistry and chiral surface geometries. In a different thrust, the group has developed various molecular motor systems that are enabling us to study many important fundamental aspects of molecular rotation and translation with unprecedented resolution.
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French Language; Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition; Integration of Technology into Second Language Acquisition; Hybrid Courses (face-to-face and online learning)
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Modern Literature (American, British), Modern Intellectual History (American, British), Aesthetics, Literary Theory
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Matrix completion, compressive sensing, distance geometry
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Spatial Cognition, Language, Memory
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To each point on a curve, one can often associate in a natural way a line or plane (or higher dimensional linear variety) that moves with the point in the curve. This set of linear spaces is called a vector bundle. Vector bundles appear in a variety of questions in Physics (like the computation of Gromov-Witten invariants) . Moreover, they provide new insights into old mathematical problems and have been used to give beautiful proofs to long standing conjectures as well as striking counterexamples to some others.
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Memory and Aging
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American Literatures in English; African, African-American & African Diaspora Studies; Colonial & Post-Colonial Discourse/ Race & Empire/ Black Radical Traditions; Cultural Studies; Body Politics / Gender & Sexuality Studies; Philosophy and Critical Theory
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Organic Materials Chemistry
Our group applies the philosophy of physical organic chemistry to organic materials, in the forms of polymers, crystals and surfaces. Specifically, we investigate new materials that show macroscopic changes in properties upon exposure to external stimuli. Our main focus has been new materials that respond to light, which has a unique combination of characteristics: i) easy control over where light goes and when it goes there (spatiotemporal control), ii) easy control over intensity and energy, and iii) the ability to pass through many solid materials that traditional chemical reagents cannot. Our research has focused in three separate areas.
1. Photochemical control of charge. As interactions between charges dictate much of molecular behavior, controlling charge can yield control over matter. We have developed a series of materials in which light switches the charge-based interactions between polymer chains from attractive. By combining this top-down fabrication approach of with the bottom-up fabrication method of layer-by-layer assembly, we have developed thin films in which photochemical lability is confined to individual nanoscale compartments, yielding photo-delaminated free-standing films and multi-height photolithography.
2. Using functional side chains to control conjugated materials. Conjugated materials hold great promise for applications including solar cells and displays. We have focused on expanding the role of the side-chains of these materials, which occupy up to half of their mass but are typically reserved only for solubility. Early work in our group focused on integrating photolabile side chains for negative conjugated photoresists. This has evolved to using the non-covalent interactions of aromatic side-chains for controlling interactions between molecules, and therefore their material properties, including the use of mechanical force to control luminescence—mechanofluorochromism.
3. Singlet-oxygen responsive materials. Singlet oxygen (1O2) is a critical reactive oxygen species in photodynamic therapy for cancer as well as in damage to plants upon overexposure to light. Its photochemical production is also chemically amplified through a photochemical reaction, which is the lynchpin of several commercial bioanalytical technologies. Through a combination of fundamental physical organic chemistry and materials chemistry, we have luminescent conjugated polymer nanoparticles as probes for 1O2 in water that shows improved limit of detection over the commercially available luminescent probe for 1O2.
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nanoelectronics, biosensing, biomaterials, tissue engineering, drug delivery
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I am a developmental scientist and Research Associate Professor at Tufts University in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. With the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development (IARYD), I study positive youth development (PYD), seeking to understand what goes "right" in the lives of youth, by engaging in researcher-practitioner partnerships with youth-serving organizations around the world (currently Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, and El Salvador).
My research is broadly focused on character development--I am interested in how people become good people. With a focus on person-context relations across development, I also explore how good people shape, and are shaped by, good communities and cultures. Specifically, my work has focused on the potential role of forgiveness as a character strength and civic virtue. This interest has steered me toward working with individuals and organizations interested in peacebuilding and restorative justice, for instance, in Rwanda as well as the Boston area.
Lessons learned from this work are timely and important for civil society and human flourishing, perhaps especially in an era of increasingly polarized social and political climates. Forgiveness, restorative justice, and peacebuilding seem to be linked by common threads of empathy, curiosity, generosity, listening, and dialogue, as well as critical thinking, personal responsibility, community action, and civic engagement.
Please find my CV in LinkedIn for more information on my professional experiences, research grants, editorial and consulting activities, teaching experience, and publications.
Research Interests:
Experimental condensed matter physics; physics education
My primary physics research is in experimental surface science. In my lab at 574 Boston Ave., my students and I study what happens when foreign atoms and molecules form chemical bonds with metal surfaces. We examine how the interaction between the foreign molecule and the metal modify properties of both of them. In recent years a particular focus has been on how the attachment of the foreign molecule changes the electrical resistivity of the metal substrate. This area of research has relevance to a range of potential applications including catalysis, chemical sensing, and the growth of thin films and nanoparticles on surfaces.
A second area of activity is physics education, particularly at the elementary school level. Together with collaborators at a local nonprofit organization and at other universities, I am working to develop and study curriculum materials and professional development strategies for teachers to improve instruction in science in grades 3-5.
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functional languages, compilers for embedded systems, program analysis and optimization, embedded domain-specific languages
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Control of locomotion and the neural processes that organize sensory and motor information
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Algebraic geometry, topology, and differential geometry
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film theory, philosophy and aesthetics of film, avant-garde film, film and modernism
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Biomechanics and Neural Control of Locomotion
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stem cell and tissue engineering, optogenetics, diabetes
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Industrial and Urban U.S., Immigration
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Population genetics, evolution, ecology, computational biology
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Emotion and Emotion Regulation
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Physical and Surface Chemistry. The Utz group studies how molecules react on surfaces. Reactions at the gas-surface interface are highly dynamical events. Large-scale atomic and vibrational motions transform reactants into products on sub-ps and Å scales. The experiments probe ultrafast nuclear motion and energy flow dynamics that underlie heterogeneous catalysis and chemical vapor deposition. The goal is to to better model existing processes and direct the rational design of new catalytic materials and deposition techniques. The experiments use vibrational- and rotational-state selective laser excitation of molecules in a supersonic molecular beam to provide precise control over the energetics and orientation of the gas-phase reagent as it approaches the surface. Reaction probability and product identity is then quantified as a function of the reagent's energetic configuration. These experiments have shown that the vibrational state of the incident molecule can have a profound effect on reaction probability, and suggest that energy redisribution within the reaction complex is not complete prior to reaction and that the competing kinetics of energy redistribution and reaction might be manipulated to control the outcome of a reaction. This has been subsequently confirmed by exerting bond-elective control over a heterogeneously catalyzed reaction.
Research Interests:
- Resilient and equitable infrastructure
- Impacts of extreme events (e.g., drought, flood, wildfire) in a changing climate on infrastructure and communities
- Climate adaptation of infrastructure
- Slopes, dams, and levees
- Unsaturated soil mechanics
- Multi-physics (e.g., hydro-mechanical, thermo-hydro-mechanical) processes in soils
- Analytical and numerical methods in geotechnical engineering
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Synthetic Biology, Chemical Biology, Protein Engineering, Antibody Engineering, Drug Discovery, Genetic Code Expansion, Noncanonical Amino Acids, Tumor Microenvironment.
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Interaction of light with matter, physics of nanostructures and interfaces, metamaterials, material science, plasmonics, and surfactants, semiconductor photonics and electronics, epitaxial crystal growth, materials and devices for energy and infrared applications.
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Petrology and Mineralogy
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applied mathematics and mechanics for geophysical and engineering problems
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Theoretical cosmology
I do research on cosmic inflation, dark energy, cosmic strings and monopoles, quantum cosmology, and the multiverse.
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computer security and privacy, secure development, security professionals, human-computer interaction, mobile security
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wireless communications, millimeter wave communications, 5G/6G systems and techniques, energy-efficient communications, machine learning techniques, applied convex optimization
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Hyperbolic manifolds and orbifolds, low-dimensional topology, group actions
David Walt
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Chinese Language Pedagogy, Second Language Acquisition, Social linguistics, Curriculum design
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Chinese Language, Chinese characters, second language acquisition and pedagogy, and application of technology in language learning and instruction
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Chinese orthography and the Chinese reading process, utilizing approaches applied within a transactional socio-psycholinguistic framework that includes eye movement research and miscue analysis.
Research Interests:
Applied Cognition