Kevin Escudero specializes in the comparative study of race/ethnicity and Indigeneity, immigration, social movements, and law. A central thread of his research is the potential for cross-group coalition building as part of communities’ participation in social movement activism. His award-winning book, Organizing While Undocumented, examined Asian and Latinx undocumented immigrant youth activism. He is currently researching two book-length projects, one that explores immigrant student experiences in graduate school, particularly those with undocumented status in the US, and the other that focuses on immigrant and Indigenous communities’ efforts to decolonize Guam. He received the Association for Asian American Studies’ Early Career Achievement Award, and his research has been supported by an NSF CAREER Award, Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship, and Institute for Citizens and Scholars’ Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award.

Morganne Kraines’ work focuses on affective-cognitive factors that act as mechanisms and predictors of change in mood disorders and health behaviors such as depression, anxiety, smoking cessation, and alcohol use disorder. Her research also focuses on adapting evidence-based mindfulness interventions for at-risk populations. She is the principal investigator of a Career Development Award (K23) from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, which involves testing whether affective executive functioning serves as a mechanism of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. She is also a primary faculty member within the Mindfulness Center at Brown University and is a member of the Legorreta Cancer Center. Alongside her scholarship, she practices as a clinical psychologist, seeing patients at Brown-affiliated Butler Hospital.

Ellie Pavlick researches Natural Language Processing (NLP), the subfield of AI that aims to build systems capable of understanding and communicating with humans through speech and text. She works on computational models of semantics and pragmatics, which mimic human inferences. Recently, her work has been centered on understanding how and why neural networks succeed and fail. She is one of the leading researchers investigating these important questions. Her research has been supported by $8.5 million in federal grants from DARPA, IARPA, and NSF, the majority of which she leads as the principal investigator. She collaborates with the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences to support fundamental research that links artificial and natural intelligence. She also works as a research scientist at Google Deepmind.

Maricruz Rivera-Hernandez is a gerontologist and health services researcher dedicated to improving health and health care for vulnerable older adults. She has secured external grants totaling nearly $4.5 million and is the principal investigator on two NIH-funded R01 grants. Her research examines the quality of care and healthcare disparities for older adults living in Puerto Rico. Until her work, fundamental questions about healthcare and outcomes in Puerto Rico, particularly for patients with chronic health conditions, largely went unaddressed. Her research sheds light on the healthcare needs of Puerto Rico’s older adults and highlights the healthcare system’s disparities. She is considered one of the nation’s most innovative and impactful early-career researchers in health disparities among older adults.

Caroline Klivans specializes in algebraic, geometric, and topological combinatorics. She is a leading expert in the field and has made significant advances to our understanding of discrete structures, including matroids. Her research is known for its great breadth of application and connection to other fields. Klivans’ work is also praised for exhibiting simplicity and elegance both in exposition and insight. Her recent book, the Mathematics of Chip-Firing, has been widely adopted in the field. She currently serves as deputy director of the NSF-funded Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), and on the Executive Committee of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Felipe Martínez-Pinzón specializes in research on Latin American literary and cultural studies, particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He has published two influential monographs, one focusing on elite representations of tropical climates in 19th-century Colombia and its relationship to the country’s history of violence. The second monograph examines the political uses of the sketch of manners in the print cultures of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela after their independence. On an international scale, he is considered one of the leading scholars of 19th-century Latin American literature and is one of the most visible, prolific, and cited scholars of our generation in 19th-century Latin American studies. He has received numerous awards, including an honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Kovacs Singer Prize.

Thomas Serre is widely recognized as a world leader in AI, computational neuroscience, and computer vision. He is one of the few experts who can effectively connect AI, neuroscience, and cognitive science, making a significant impact on our understanding of brain function and the growth of AI algorithms. His neural network model of vision, introduced in the past, has contributed to the AI revolution of the last decade. More recently, his lab has developed interpretability tools to guide the field of AI and build real-world computer vision applications. His computational vision research and collaborative research projects have received funding from prestigious organizations such as the NSF, NIH, ONR, and DARPA. He has also played a vital role in establishing a strong presence for computational neuroscience at Brown.

Corey Ventetuolo is a practicing pulmonary/critical care physician at Rhode Island Hospital and has dedicated her career to improving care for patients suffering from pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), right heart failure, and requiring extracorporeal life support. She has investigated the longstanding observation that PAH is a fatal disease of predominantly women. Her groundbreaking work has led to hormonal modulation as a treatment strategy in PAH, and she has led two NHLBI-funded clinical trials in this area. She is a nationally recognized leader in the field who has addressed barriers to translational research and advanced precision medicine approaches. She has also received numerous teaching awards recognizing her dedication to education and inclusive mentoring of emerging investigators.

Oriel FeldmanHall is an Associate Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences. Her research focuses on the cognitive and neural processes governing human social behavior. Her lab explores the motivations underlying pro-social behavior and the conditions that uphold and break social norms. She is cited for her transcontinental reputation as an exceptional, rigorous and innovative researcher. She has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed papers in her six years at Brown, and has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Association for Psychological Science Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions and Brown University’s Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship for excellence in teaching and scholarship.

Brian Lander is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of History and a Fellow of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. His research focuses on the environmental history of China, particularly the long-term transformation of the Yellow and Yangzi River valleys into human ecosystems. His book, The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire is the first book in English on the environmental history of early China. It won the American Historical Association’s 2022 Prize for the best book in any field of history prior to CE 1000.  

Dr. Alan R. Morrison is a physician-scientist whose career bridges clinical cardiology, basic and translational research, and teaching.  He is a board-certified cardiologist practicing at Providence VA Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at the Warren Alpert Medical School. Dr. Morrison’s research focuses on mechanisms of immune-mediated vascular remodeling in the context of angiogenesis, atherosclerosis and vascular calcification, and pulmonary hypertension. He is cited for establishing a highly funded research program with a parallel clinically focused program, conducting translational research with national impact, and engaging trainees at all levels of his research. He is the principal investigator for 2 R01s from NHLBI and a Merit Review Research Award recipient from the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2021, he became the first Brown faculty recipient of the prestigious Geneen Charitable Trust Award.

Jonathan Pober is an experimental astrophysicist and a world leader in cosmology. His research focuses on building ultrasensitive low-frequency radio telescope arrays to detect signals from the first stars and galaxies formed 12 billion years ago. An assistant professor in physics, he leads research projects at the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope facility in Western Australia, supported by multiple NSF grants. He received two NASA grants to develop a radio telescope experiment on the far side of the moon and is developing Machine Learning for radio astronomy data analysis. He was named a NASA Nancy Grace Roman Technology Fellow for his lunar mission and received Brown University’s Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship for excellence in teaching and scholarship.

Mary A. Carskadon is an authority on adolescent sleep and circadian rhythms. She serves as director of the Chronobiology and Sleep Research Laboratory at Bradley Hospital and is a Professor of Psychiatry & Human Behavior at the Alpert Medical School. One focus of her scientific activities has been research examining interrelations between sleep regulatory systems (circadian timing system, sleep homeostat) and sleep/wake behavior of children, adolescents, and young adults. Her findings have raised public health issues regarding the consequences of insufficient sleep for adolescents as well as concerns about early starting times of schools. Her work has affected education policy, prompting the AAP and others to promote later school timing for adolescents and many school districts to delay school start times.

Lina M. Fruzzetti is a cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, and documentary filmmaker. Her research focuses on India, North East Africa, and Italy, exploring the social and cultural aspects of gender, kinship, marriage, feminism, identity, culture, and citizenship in Muslim and Hindu-based societies. A professor of anthropology, she has published eleven books, and with her husband, Ákos Östör, co-produced six films. They are the first two anthropologist-filmmakers selected to have their films and research materials archived by The Smithsonian Institution. Her work has received numerous awards, and she is cited for being truly distinguished in the world of South Asian ethnography, African development, and documentary filmmaking; for her tireless and generous teaching and deeply collegial service in her 48 years at Brown; and for being the moral center of the anthropology department.

David I. Kertzer’s research focuses on Italian politics and history, anthropological demography, and European social history. His work has been awarded prizes for over four decades, including Fulbright, Guggenheim, and NEH fellowships. A professor of anthropology, he has published scores of peer-reviewed articles, and written, edited, and co-edited dozens of books, including The Pope and Mussolini, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2015, and the 2022 New York Times bestseller, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler. He served as Brown’s Provost from 2006-2011. He is cited as the preeminent U.S. social historian of modern Italy whose work has gained him a stellar reputation as one of the most internationally recognized Brown scholars.

Diane Lipscombe’s research focuses on the expression, regulation, and function of voltage-gated calcium ion channels in different regions of the nervous system and their role in chronic pain and mental illness. A professor of neuroscience, her research discoveries particularly in the area of cell-specific RNAs, have impacted the field of calcium channel physiology at both a basic and translational level by providing new avenues for treatments for various pathologies. Her advocacy for advancing neuroscience has been transformative in a career spanning more than thirty years at Brown. Under her leadership, the Brown Institute for Brain Science became the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science, which she directs; the Institute’s impact grew with new hires across the brain sciences and innovation seed funding; and new Centers were endowed, including the Center for Computation in Brain Science and the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Chi-Wang Shu’s area of expertise is the numerical approximation of conservation laws that are modelled by systems of hyperbolic equations. A professor of applied mathematics, his contributions to numerical analysis and scientific computing enabled engineers and scientists to apply his methods in various application areas, including computational fluid dynamics, magnetohydrodynamics, computational cosmology, semiconductor device simulations, traffic flow models, and computational biology. He has published more than 450 peer-reviewed journal articles and received numerous awards for his work, including SIAM’s premier John von Neumann award in 2021. He is cited for having an enormous impact on the scientific community, and being a valued colleague who has served the University for the greater part of his 36-year career at Brown, including two terms as chair of the Division of Applied Mathematics.

Professor Bublitz researches the pathways linking psychological stress before and during pregnancy to adverse perinatal health, and mind-body interventions to reduce stress and mitigate risk for adverse obstetric outcomes. She has published some of the first investigations of childhood maltreatment history on cortisol trajectories over pregnancy. Her next study on a phone-delivered mindfulness intervention, designed to reduce risk of developing hypertensive disorders during pregnancy, recently received R01 funding from the National Institutes of Health. Professor Bublitz is a practicing clinical psychologist and has been a leader in integrating behavioral health into primary care and OBGYN departments at the Women’s Medicine Collaborative.

Professor Nathan composes instrumental and vocal music. By experimenting with musical structures, visual choreography, and new performance techniques, his compositions manipulate the experience of live performance. His recent compositions include Missing Words and Some Favored Nook. He has been commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress, and the New England Philharmonic, which he is conducting as its composer-in-residence for the 2021-22 academic year. Professor Nathan has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Walter Damrosch Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and a 2022 Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Professor Rubenstein conducts research in theoretical and computational chemistry. For her trailblazing work in quantum theory and alternative computing, Rubenstein has been awarded a Sloan Fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Fellowship, and the Air Force Young Investigator Award, and she was recently named to Scientific American’s 2021 Brilliant 10 list of promising young scientists. She is committed to increasing diversity in STEM and is chair of the Chemistry Department Diversity and Inclusion Action Committee. Professor Rubenstein established the Rhode Island Advocate program to mentor students from disadvantaged high schools, preparing them to participate in science research projects and compete at local and international science fairs.

Professor Zullo conducts research on optimal medication and vaccine use to improve health and minimize adverse effects among older adults. His work has been highly influential in supporting clinical practice and informing pharmaceutical firms’ evidence-based decision making. He has published more than 105 peer-reviewed articles and received millions in grant funding over the past four years. Professor Zullo received the New Investigator Award from the American Geriatrics Society and the Plein Memorial Lecture Award from the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists. He is also the outgoing Chair of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology Geriatrics Special Interest Group.

Professor Badre is a leader in the neuroscience of cognitive control, which impacts how the brain translates goals and plans into concrete behaviors. His research has yielded influential insights into how the prefrontal cortex supports our ability to guide memory retrieval and perform complex tasks involving multiple goals. His work has been recognized by a Sloan Fellowship, James S. McDonnell Fellowship, and a Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award. Professor Badre was a finalist for the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers for his 2020 book, On Task. He chairs the Cognition and Perception study section of the National Institutes of Health.

Professor Choudhary is a physician-scientist conducting basic, clinical, and epidemiological research on pulmonary vascular disease and right ventricular dysfunction. His clinical and epidemiological work on pulmonary hypertension has been influential in redefining the diagnostic criteria for this condition, while his basic science research has identified novel therapeutic targets. He currently serves as director of cardiovascular research at the Warren Alpert Medical School and Lifespan Cardiovascular Institute, and as associate chief of staff for research at the VA Providence Health Care system. He leads a research and clinical program in pulmonary hypertension funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institutes of Health at the VA Providence.

Professor Dong researches partial differential equations, which are mathematical equations that describe the fundamental laws of physics and engineering, among other sciences. He is considered a leading expert in this field and has developed novel tools to analyze elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations with important applications to the study of the theory of composite materials, fluid dynamics, and the kinetic theory. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Early Career award and a prestigious Simons Foundation Fellowship. From 2014-2017, Professor Dong was the director of Undergraduate Studies in the Brown University Division of Applied Mathematics.

Professor Nummedal is a historian of science and gender in early modern Europe. Her 2019 book, Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany, examines the politics of alchemy in the Holy Roman Empire through the story of a young female alchemist. In 2020, she co-edited the first born-digital book under Brown’s Digital Publications initiative, Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s “Atalanta fugiens” (1618) with Scholarly Commentary. Professor Nummedal is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities. 

Silvia Chiang
DEPARTMENT OF PEDIATRICS
EARLY CAREER RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENT AWARD