Faculty Highlights

Professor of Economics Cheryl Doss was honored with a 2025 Outstanding Alumni Award from the University of Minnesota Program in Applied Economics.

Professor of the Practice in Drama and Film Khary Jones's film "Night Fight" won Best Feature Film at the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival.

Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences Athena Eyster was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the oxygenation of the atmosphere in the early earth through drilling in Gabon. 

Professor and Chair of the Romance Studies Department Pedro Palou has been inducted into the National Sistem of Artistic Creators in Mexico (SNCA).

Professor of the Practice Neda Moridpour is a 2025–2026 Royal Shakespeare Company Interdisciplinary Fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Interdisciplinary Fellowship Program (RSC IF). Building on MIT’s legacy of media innovation and its commitment to openness, the fellowship supports visionary creators advancing collaborative, immersive, and justice-driven storytelling. Moridpour has also been selected as a year-two recipient of Boston’s Un-monument | Re-monument | De-monument: Transforming Boston initiative, a public art effort re-imagining the city’s commemorative landscape with inclusive, temporary monuments and community-led storytelling. 

In addition, Neda Moridpour, Leslie Rogers, Diane O’Donoghue, and Saint Francis House in Downtown Boston have collectively been awarded the 2025–2026 Tisch College Community Research Center (TCRC) SEED Grant for their community co-created research project, Inventive Futures. The project, situated within the Tisch Program for Public Humanities, advances health equity, skill empowerment, and community building through collaborative engagements between artists at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the unhoused community members at Saint Francis House.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Rebecca Scheck received an Outstanding Investigator Award (R35) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of General Medical Sciences. This award supports her lab’s research on glycation and ubiquitination, which are protein post-translational modifications that are associated with many diseases, including cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, and age-related disorders.

Sol Gittleman Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture Malcolm Turvey delivered a keynote address at the Art and Humanities conference in Rijeka, Croatia.

Professor of Physics and Astronomy Gary Goldstein’s Department of Energy Division of Nuclear Physics (DOE-DNP) grant for "applying AI and machine learning to probe the structure of nucleons and nuclei" has been renewed for an additional two years.

Professor of Physics and Astronomy Peter Love, along with collaborators at the University of Chicago, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University, are moving into the second stage of their National  Quantum Virtual Laboratory (NQVL) program. The National Science Foundation NQVL initiative is an effort to accelerate the development of quantum technologies. The Quantum Advantage Class Trapped Ion System (QACTI) will develop trapped ion quantum computers targeting applications in scientific computing including quantum chemistry, and nuclear and high energy physics. Tufts leads the Applications activities of QACTI.

Professor of Chemistry Joshua Kritzer was awarded two National Science Foundation grants. The first grant is for  a project entitled "Mapping the Collagenome with Stapled Collagen-Mimetic Peptides." This project develops new biological materials that will help us understand genetic diseases, cancer, and wound healing. The second grant is for a project entitled "Tools4Cells: Real-Time Measurement of Endogenous Biomolecules." This project develops new sensors that can monitor changes in biological events in living cells in real-time.

Lecturer of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies Ian Berg was featured in the July/August issue of Dance Magazine in a piece entitled "Tap Dancer Ian Berg Explores the Musical Potential of Tap Sounds in a New Jazz Album."

Associate Professor & Chair of the Philosophy Department Dilip Ninan's article “An Expressivist Theory of Taste Predicates” (Philosophers’ Imprint, 2024) was selected by the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best articles published in philosophy in 2024. This news was shared on two prominent philosophy blogs, including Leiter Reports and Daily Nous.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Xinqiang Ding received an Early State Investigators (ESI) Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The grant will support developments of theoretical and computational methods for drug design.

Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Department Kasso Okoudjou will deliver the 2026 Claytor-Woodard Address at the 2026 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM), January 4-7, 2026, in Washington, DC. The National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) established the Claytor-Woodard Lecture as an invited address to take place during the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings. The Claytor-Woodard Lecture was first held in 1980 in honor of Dudley Weldon Woodard (1881–1965) and William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor (1908–1967), who were the second and third African Americans to earn doctoral degrees in mathematics.