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Saskias Casanova is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Applied Psychology within the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Saskias will receive her PhD in Developmental and Psychological Sciences (Education) from Stanford University in 2011.She also received her MA in Psychology and her BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Psychology from Stanford University. Saskias studies topics of race, ethnicity, and culture in adolescent development. Her research uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine psychological and behavioral processes, and educational outcomes of immigrant adolescents. Saskias? dissertation, Ethnic Identity, Acculturation, and Perceived Discrimination for Indigenous Mexican Youth: A cross-cultural comparative study of Yucatec Maya adolescents in the U.S. and Mexico, explored how ethnic identity, acculturation levels, perceived discrimination, and sense of school belonging compare across Yucatec Maya Indigenous Latina/o adolescents in the U.S., non-Yucatec Maya Latina/o adolescents in the U.S., and Yucatec Maya Indigenous adolescents still in Mexico. The study revealed that Indigenous adolescents have different psychological and cultural experiences when compared to non-Indigenous Latina/o adolescents. Saskias is the recipient of the Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship (2009-2011) from Stanford University and of a Dissertation Support Grant from Stanford University School of Education. Saskias has presented scholarly papers at national research conferences such as the American Psychological Association and American Educational Research Association.



Satarupa Dasgupta is an assistant professor and faculty fellow at the NYU College of Nursing. She did her Ph.D. in health communication from Temple University in 2011. She has a M.A. in media studies from Temple University, a M.A. in journalism from Calcutta University, India, and a B.A. in English literature from Calcutta University, India. Her doctoral dissertation examined community mobilization, contextualization of health behavior, and participation in a HIV/AIDS intervention and development initiative among sex workers in a red light district of India. Her research interests include sexual health behavior among high-risk populations, community health advocacy, risk reduction communication, entertainment education and South Asian popular culture. She received a university fellowship from Temple University (2006-2010), an award from AYCN-UNESCO (2009) for excellence in research on HIV/AIDS intervention, National Merit Scholarship from the Government of India, and several other awards and conference travel grants. She is a member of the International Association of Media and Communication Research where she is the vice-chair of participatory communication research division, a member of the International Communication Association, a member of the Asian Media Information and Communication Center, a member of the New Jersey Communication Association and a member of the South Asian Journalists Association. Her articles have been published as book chapters and in peer reviewed journals, and she serves as a reviewer for several journals.



Yael Elmatad is a theoretical physical chemist who uses theoretical and computation techniques to understand the statistical mechanics of soft condensed matter such as supercooled liquids. She is also interested in developing new methods for rare-events sampling in materials with long timescales and large free-energetic barriers. Her thesis is titled "Analysis & Simulation of Dynamics in Supercooled Liquids ". Yael recieved her B.S. from New York University (College of Arts & Sciences) in Chemistry, 2006 Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in Physical Chemistry, 2011.





Michele Insanally is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Neural Science. She received her B.A. in the Biological Sciences from Barnard College/Columbia University in 2004 and will receive her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. Her dissertation titled "Development of complex sound representations in the rat primary auditory cortex" explores how acoustic experience early in life changes the brain; with a focus on how complex sound representations develop in the primary auditory cortex. This work establishes for the first time that the brain processes auditory information in a series of sensitive periods that increase in complexity during development. She plans to further extend her dissertation research to rodent vocalization learning by studying the physiological effects of cortical oxytocin with Robert C. Froemke at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine. Michele Insanally is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Elizabeth-Roboz Einstein Fellowship in Neurosciences and Human Development, and the Summer Institute for Preparing Future Faculty Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.



Eduardo Moncada is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Moncada completed his Ph.D in Political Science at Brown University in May 2011. His dissertation and now book project focuses on the role of business interests in shaping urban government responses to violence and insecurity in Latin America. Moncada has published work in Comparative Politics (2009) and Ethnic and Racial Studies (2010). His research has been supported by the American Society of Criminology, Brown University?s Graduate Program in Development (GPD) and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Ford Foundation and National Academy of Sciences, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays program, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and Yale University's Program on Order, Conflict and Violence.



Matthew Vernon, fellow at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study, is a scholar of medieval literature. His teaching and research emphasize discovering points of contact between the Middle Ages and later periods. His points of entry into this include the themes of migration, errantry, genealogy, race and vernacularity, in addition to historical inquiry. His research follows some problems with the idea of literary inheritance: the invisible accretion of ideas through time and how writers engage or resist the work of earlier generations. As part of this inquiry, he considers the question of how meaning is generated collaboratively, between authors and across centuries in literature, while he also endeavors to create spaces for collaborative work, in the classroom and among scholars. His current book project, entitled Strangers in a Familiar Land, is a historical and literary study of the relationship between medieval and modern African-American literatures. B.A. 2004, Cornell University; M.Phil. 2008, Yale University; Ph.D. 2011, Yale University.



Juan Sebastian de Vivo is an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of Classics at NYU. His research centers upon the significance of objects, their display, use, contemplation, collection, and representation, and how these then come to constitute narratives of identity, particularly within traumatic and interstitial spaces: battle, emigration, rites of passage. His dissertation, entitled “The Memory of Battle in Ancient Greece: Warfare, Identity, and Materiality,” focuses upon the experience of warfare in Archaic and Classical Greece, asking how the material culture of battle—particularly armor—shaped the experience, representation, and commemoration of warfare during a critical transitional period in Greek history. Other interests include Greek epic, Roman portraits, the anthropology of diaspora and transnationalism, border studies, monumentality and urbanism, Goya, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar.



Catherine M. Vu received her B.S in Economics/Management Science from the University of California, San Diego. She holds a Master of Public Administration from Cornell University and an MSW and Ph.D from the School of Social Welfare at University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in the relationship between human service agencies and their organizational capacity to serve minority groups. Her dissertation explores the contextual and organizational factors associated with service utilization by ethnic minority populations. As an Assistant Professor-Faculty Fellow for the McSilver Institute for Poverty and Policy Research at the Silver School of Social Work, she hopes to build on this research by collecting data and designing studies that explore 1) the strategies used by ethnic agencies to engage minority clients, and 2) how ethnic agencies can provide positive individual and community outcomes for the populations they serve. She has research and practice experiences with a number of different ethnic agencies providing a wide range of human services for low-income populations including housing, mental health, and child care. She is a recipient of the Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and has presented her scholarly work at national conferences including the Urban Affairs Association and the Council on Social Work Education.