Faculty

Research Interests:

Modern Arabic Literature, High school Arabic pedagogy and curriculum design, second language acquisition, high school political science and philosophy instruction

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Scientific computing and numerical analysis: Efficient computational methods for complex fluids, plasma physics, electromagnetism and other physical applications.

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data science, statistical signal processing, inverse problems, compressed sensing, information theory, convex optimization, machine learning, algorithms for geophysical signal processing, compressed sensing architectures and evaluation, video and image data acquisition and processing

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Sustainability policy and planning; environmental and food justice; intercultural cities

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Economic development in Africa, with a primary focus on the impact of information and information technology on development outcomes, particularly in the areas of agriculture, agricultural marketing and education; The relationship between shocks and agricultural food market performance; The determinants of agricultural technology adoption; Technology and educational outcomes

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Arab Music Ensemble cello performance, Arab music

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structural racism and racial/ethnic health disparities across the lifespan social support networks of older adults caregiving and dementia social determinants of healthy aging dyadic analysis

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British and Irish Modernism; the Transatlantic Twentieth Century; Mid-twentieth-century American Literature; American Modernism; Visual Culture; Literary Theory; the Intersection of the Arts; Artistic Process & the Archive; the Relationship between Biography, Form, and Historical Moment.

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American Literature Environmental Humanities U.S. Literature and Race Studies

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Intersections between historical/lived experience, music, and social values; music ethnography; compositional conventions and theories in Akan music; Akan heritage of tangible and intangible stool regalia; music and social change, and Popular music.

Research Interests:

Currently, I am an Associate Professor within the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University. Additionally, I am the Principal Investigator of an NIMHD R01 (1R01MD016026-01) study entitled "Reducing Racial Disparities in SMM Post COVID19: Assessing the integration of maternal safety bundles and community based doulas to improve outcomes for Black women" Given my extensive training in community-driven participatory research, health disparities, maternal and child health, and qualitative methods, my participation in the BIRCWH Program as a mentor with a focus on health disparities will be an opportunity to further expand my expertise. For the past 15 years, I have worked successfully in communities of color on issues including advancing the understanding, prevention, and reduction of maternal mortality or morbidity among racial and ethnic minority women and socioeconomically disadvantaged women. I have spent substantial time building community-researcher relationships in urban communities, providing technical assistance, and serving as a member of various community-based organizations. Previously, as a recipient of an NIMH training grant, I served as the PI of a pilot study that focused on mother-daughter communication in HIV+ African American women. The pilot study, Project DASH (DIVAS Against the Study of HIV/AIDS) is a dyadic study that explores HIV risk for daughters with HIV+ mothers. This mixed methods pilot study utilized individual interviews and a quantitative survey to examine the quality and context of the mother/daughter relationship as a predictor of sexual behavior and HIV risk in the daughter.

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Modern Russia and Eastern Europe, the cultural Cold War, global communism, transnational history

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American Sign Language

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Twentieth Century, Women Writers, Russian film, literature, culture and language, Russian and Soviet Jewish cultural history

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Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Europe

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Condensed Matter Physics, Soft materials, Colloids, Liquid Crystals, Computational Physics, Physics Education Soft matter physics is the study of matter that is all around us in everyday life: soaps, oil, foods, sand, foams, and biological matter. All of these are readily deformable at room temperature and combine properties of both fluids and solids. Despite their ubiquity, these materials are extremely complicated. Unlike simple fluids like water, they have rich internal structure; unlike crystalline solids they are typically not periodically ordered. Moreover, they exist in long-lived metastable states far from equilibrium and respond to stimuli such as applied electric and magnetic fields, temperature and pressure. My work seeks to understand how these materials respond to shape: how they self-organize on curved surfaces or in complex geometries and how this knowledge can be used both to sculpt desirable shapes at the microscopic scale and create shape changing systems like soft robots. We use high performance computing to simulate and predict these behaviors and work closely with experimentalists at Tufts and beyond.

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Music and technology, sound studies, Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, turn of the century Paris and Vienna, and Weimar Berlin

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Engineering/applied psychology, consumer product design, usability metrics, information visualization, and research field methods.

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Race and ethnic relations; family; religion; immigration

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Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Science

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Perception

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Macroeconomics, Macro-labor, Macroeconometrics

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20th-Century Italian Poetry; Italian Women Writers; Italian Literature of the Holocaust; Political Ideology in Italian Literature

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Armenia and Cross-Cultural World Early Modern Europe

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Biological and nutritional anthropology; growth and body composition; methodology; Latin America, China, Southwest US

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Chronic Pain, Virtual Reality, Musculoskeletal Health, Ergonomics Nancy Baker's research focuses on ways to mitigate musculoskeletal pain, so people with chronic pain can increase their participation in everyday life. She focuses on three pain mitigation pathways: 1) workstation ergonomics to address work environment properties that propagate pain; 2) improving care delivery in CTS; and 3) virtual reality (VR) as a therapeutic medium for pain. Baker's research is eclectic and uses a variety of tools and techniques to answer her research questions. A new area for her, her current research examines how to implement VR into clinical practice. Here pilot work has looked at what types and dosages of VR are most effective, how different diagnoses, such as chronic back pain or osteoarthritis, respond to VR, and she has partnered with rehabilitation centers to trial different implementation practices. So far, her research consistently demonstrates that VR has a significant effect on pain and that it can be feasibly done by practicing therapists. Some results found a carryover of effect past the immediate VR session. Baker is also working with colleagues to examine new paradigms in carpal tunnel treatment and is completing a trial looking at dosage for standing desk use.