Recent Theses and Project Topics (IDS Majors)

Isaac Gewirth (2025)
Status Versus Virtue in Wood: How a material signals sustainability, quality, and authenticity today.
Material Culture Studies: Art History, Anthropology, Sociology
In this thesis, I will address the role of wood in contemporary Western culture and the many contradictory meanings that wood articulates as a material found in crafted functional objects. To examine this premise, I spoke with producers (woodworkers, designers, and manufacturers), curators (shopkeepers), and consumers of wooden objects. Alongside my experience as a woodworker and consumer, this ethnographic approach led me to identify several key themes used to justify the consumption and production of wooden objects. In the face of climate crisis and dystopic late capitalism, these themes voice wood’s centrality to challenging a throwaway culture that lacks care for objects, their materials, makers, and disposal. In contrast to plastic and conspicuous consumption, functional wooden objects are elevated to epitomize quality, longevity, and localness in service of an authentic and sustainable relationship to materials. These rationalization scripts highlight the importance of wood in changing an unethical society; however, they neglect to interrogate how this material is gatekept, reinforces systems of hegemonic taste and value, and has come to articulate status. At the core of this project is a discussion of how the supposedly virtuous and transgressive aura of wood is a construction of status. However, my piece will not conclude with “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” It will instead parse out these justifications and critiques of wood to imagine how the material and its practitioners might participate in bringing about a post-capitalist future.

Jiyao (Allison) Guo (2025)
Combining my interests in marketing, media, and technology, I designed my Interdisciplinary Studies major around the theme of Digital Marketing, integrating coursework from Film and Media Studies, Entrepreneurship, and Civic Studies. My thesis explores the intersection of entrepreneurial innovation, immersive digital marketing, and AR/VR gaming environments. It examines how these technologies reshape consumer engagement, support community-building through user-generated content, and raise important ethical questions about data privacy, accessibility, and psychological impact. Through this work, I advocate for a healthier, more responsible relationship between people and the technologies that shape our digital lives.

Kyle Hammond (2025)
Human, Business, and Social Development (Economics, Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Sociology, and Entrepreneurship) is an academic undertaking to understand and address the root causes of community disparities. Through immersion in development initiatives, studying socioeconomic factors that impact communities, and learning sustainable business practices, this degree builds skills to create effective solutions for communities struggling with resource scarcity, low economic mobility, and poor urban planning.

Lia Schwartz (2025)
My thesis title was: The Interconnection between Public Power and Emerging Clean Energy Technologies
Description: This thesis explored the relationship between Massachusetts’ public utilities and emerging solar-related clean energy technologies and sought to understand how they can collaborate to overcome mutual barriers and accelerate the clean energy transition. Through qualitative interviews with representatives from MLPs and ECET companies, this thesis identified key utility priorities and the commercialization challenges faced by technology firms. The research is grounded in Massachusetts’ policy and regulatory context and is complemented by a geospatial analysis of 351 municipalities. The results highlighted both friction and synergy between legacy public infrastructure and innovative energy startups. There is inherent opportunity in this unique intersection between the private and public sectors that represent supply and demand forces in the energy market. 

Ellie Bloom (2024)
My IDS thesis project combined the disciplines of Civic Studies, Biology, Film and Media Studies, and Science, Technology, and Society Studies. This project investigated climate change communication, examining effective strategies to not only reach but mobilize audiences. My research found many important communication strategies to engage audiences and points toward the crucial role of trusted messengers in science communication. This directed me to interview community-based organizers to understand their role as liaisons between scientists and the public. From these interviews I created a podcast, compiling my most important science communication recommendations and the insights of my interviewees. My thesis explored the research in depth while my podcast shared tips broadly applicable to anyone hoping to communicate more effectively on climate issues as well as specific suggestions to improve the relationship between scientists and community-based organizations.

Segovia Lucas (2024)
My IDS major was named Latino Health Studies and it combined Biology, Community Health, and Spanish in hopes to better understand the health barriers Latinos face navigating the US healthcare system. My senior thesis was about how Latino oral storytelling traditions and social media could be used to communicate healthcare information to the Latino community. The community for whom I created content about type 2 diabetes was the Puerto Rican community based in the mainland United States. In combination with standard informational videos, I rewrote a traditional Puerto Rican folk song, wrote two poems centered around diabetes and Puerto Rican culture, and modified a traditional Puerto Rican recipe to make it more “diabetes friendly.” Though this project I was able to explore the minority health education space and experiment with the use art and storytelling to communicate healthcare information to a community that historically has not been reached by traditional health communication methods.

Audrey Njo (2024)
My thesis was completed for my IDS major called Social Impact Design, which combined Urban Studies, Education and Art. My final project was two-fold — written research about the role of narrative pedagogy and object storytelling, and an animated film titled The Objects of Our Home. 

Both parts centered on elucidating the processes through which narratives and objects facilitate the transmission of cultural identity among Chinese diasporic communities in Southeast Asia. It uncovered the dynamics by which storytelling and material culture act not merely as vehicles of communication but as pivotal elements in the evolution of cultural heritage and identity within these communities, one through a personal lens, and the other, academic.

Yenna Chu (2023)
Through my interdisciplinary studies major in biology, public health, and entrepreneurship, I had the opportunity to explore various disciplines and pursue diverse coursework. As a part of my academic journey, I interned at Orbita, a Boston-based startup developing conversational AI technology in the healthcare field. My thesis project aimed to bridge the gap that dental phobia and anxiety creates in the dental field through an AI dental chatbot. Through this year-long project, I attained a multidimensional understanding of complex set of cultural and social factors that affect dental phobia, anxiety, and I explored the role of AI in dentistry. I collaborated with Orbita to develop an AI dental chatbot, which serves as a starting point for addressing psychological barriers in dentistry. Ultimately, the goal of this project was to inspire innovative and interdisciplinary solutions for tackling dental fears and anxiety in the future!

Imaya Jeffries (2023)
Before I even applied to colleges, I emailed the CIS Director about the Interdisciplinary program at Tufts. I didn’t fully know what I wanted to major in, but the idea of being able to self-craft my studies and not being confined by one discipline intrigued me. My major combined environmental studies, child development and anthropology. My Senior Thesis ended up being a children’s book I wrote and illustrated, titled: Cultivating Youth Environmental Stewardship through the Environmental Humanities and investigated how children’s literature could inform, educate, and entertain children about anthropological approaches to environmental issues.

Shayna Wagner (2023)
My interdisciplinary major, Applied Food Sciences, was comprised of Biology, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies. My thesis dives into artisan cheese and more specifically, Harbison, a surface-ripened bloomy rind cheese from Jasper Hill in Vermont. Harbison has a particularly robust composition of aromas and an appreciation for the unique cheese requires an acquired and often refined taste. I studied the microbiology, chemistry, and sensory properties of Harbison and analyzed how these many traits come together in the finished product.

The rind and paste of Harbison are populated by a wide variety of bacteria and fungi that have been added via cultures by the cheesemakers and that have developed naturally from the surrounding environment. These bacteria and fungi act as the functional microorganisms that contribute to the cheese’s complex profile of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and thus the cheese’s flavor and aroma. Harbison rind samples across one year of production were plated to measure colony-forming units (CFUs) of each microbe, and DNA was extracted and processed via metagenomic analyses to further assess the samples’ microbial compositions