Faculty

Research/Areas of Interest: 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.

Research/Areas of Interest: Cognitive Psychology

Research/Areas of Interest: Flute Ensemble

Research/Areas of Interest: Italian Renaissance art, Mediterranean studies, early modern books, and portraiture

Research/Areas of Interest: Native American, Public History, 19th-20th Centuries US Southeast, Education, Leadership, and Political Engagement

Research/Areas of Interest: Feminism, Existentialism and Phenomenology, Philosophical Method, Philosophy and Film

Research/Areas of Interest: Ethics, Aesthetics, Epistemology, Kant, Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy

Research/Areas of Interest: Linda's research interests include developing effective partnerships between higher education and public schools, training teachers to teach in urban settings, and integrating technology into classroom teaching. Her articles and book reviews have been published in Childhood Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, The Newslink, Helping Young Children Learn, and Massachusetts Department of Education publications.

Research/Areas of Interest: Experimental High Energy Physics My research focuses on the discovery of new fundamental particles of nature, as well as on the understanding of the behavior of the known particles. To do this, I participate in the ATLAS experiment, one of the two general-purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. My work currently consists in analyzing data in order to: Perform precision measurements leading to a better understanding of the strong interaction within the QCD theoretical framework; Search for new physics in events involving large amount of missing energy, typical signature of new particles that interact very weakly with normal matter such as dark matter candidate; Develop and estimate the performance of the ATLAS trigger system. This last aspect of my work also involves software development and a participation in the detector operation. I'm focusing my efforts on the Missing Energy trigger. The Standard Model of particle physics, despite being very successful, cannot be the end of the story. It contains a certain number of theoretical dissatisfactions. Of all the possibilities, I believe that dark matter is one of our best guess. Its existence is based on experimental facts, and the mass scale of dark matter particles, in the case where it is the right explanation, should be accessible at the LHC. Its existence would be inferred by the observation of missing energy in subset of all collected events. Looking for excesses of events involving large amount of missing energy over expectations is a promising way to look for dark matter at the LHC. My approach is to carry such search by performing precision measurements of Standard Model quantities, to optimize the sensitivity of the analysis to such new particles. Predictions using quantum chromodynamics (QCD) implies many approximations, assumptions or simplifications at various levels. These could lead to large systematic uncertainties on various Standard Model predictions, possibly leading to significant limits in our sensitivity to new phenomena. My research try to determine which of the simplifications and approximations are acceptable at the level of precision needed for a new physics discovery. To this end, I investigate events that contain a vector boson and jets, as they are sensitive to such physics and yet provide a clean enough environment to allow for high precision measurements. These are also the most important background to a wide range of new physics signature. As a side, I am also interested in the philosophy of physics, focusing on epistemological aspects of experiments and simulations as used in High Energy Physics.

Research/Areas of Interest: Greek religion, Greek epigraphy, Medieval Latin, Digital Humanities

Research/Areas of Interest: International Relations

Research/Areas of Interest: Occupational Therapy, Rehabilitation Science; Activity Performance and Participation of Children, Youth and Young Adults with Disabilities; Measurement and Intervention Development and Testing The ultimate aim of my research is to promote activity performance and participation of children, youth, and young adults with disabilities across the lifespan. I am particularly interested in assessment and intervention approaches that identify and build upon what individuals already know and do to manage their daily life routines and participate in meaningful activities. I have developed a number of measures as primary author such as the Child and Adolescent Scale of Participation (CASP) and as co-author such as the Participation and Environment Measure for Children and Youth (PEM-CY). My most recent project (Social participation And Navigation or SPAN) involves the development and testing of an app-based coaching intervention to promote social participation of teenagers and transition-age young adults with acquired brain injuries and other conditions. (See personal website for current and past work and resources).

Research/Areas of Interest: Organic Synthesis, Carbohydrate Chemistry, Synthetic Methodology, Bioorganic Chemistry. Complex carbohydrates play critical roles in a number of biological processes including, protein folding, cellular adhesion and signaling. Despite their importance, very little is understood about the molecular basis of their activity. This is largely due to the fact that the only source of pure oligosaccharides is tedious multi-step synthesis, which can take months or even years to compete. Our research is focused on developing methodologies, based on asymmetric catalysis, to streamline complex oligosaccharide synthesis. Ultimately such methods will aid in the rapid and routine preparation of oligosaccharides for biophysical studies and drug discovery.

Research/Areas of Interest: New Music Ensemble

Research/Areas of Interest: Musicologist

Research/Areas of Interest: American Politics, Political Behavior

Research/Areas of Interest: Hispanic Linguistics, Language change, Heritage Language Teaching

Research/Areas of Interest: Corporate, quantitative, and international finance, econometrics

Research/Areas of Interest: Applied and Theoretical Economic Models and Empirics

Research/Areas of Interest: Hilary's current research aims to support the development of educational equity and access as a form of racial and economic justice. In addition to a formative research study on the impact and efficacy of higher education in prison programming, Hilary's recent research includes a longitudinal study of reentry and the impact of specific types of programming offered in MyTERN on a person's health and well-being. Along with her research partner Professor of Sociology Jill Weinberg, she has facilitated several student publications of their own work based on their involvement with TUPIT.

Research/Areas of Interest: Media, journalism, the Middle East, expressivity, human rights, knowledge production, democracy, ethnography of place My research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism. I am currently working on two book projects. The first, tentatively entitled "Permission to Converse: Laws, Bullets, and other Roadblocks to a Palestinian Exchange," addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. Through ethnographies of protest as well as of more everyday forms of expression, I analyze the barriers to these two groups speaking to and with each other. I argues that speech is always an embodied and emplaced act. My second ongoing project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp. It examines how Palestinians in this refugee camp strive to resist three authorities, the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority administration, and the United Nations Relief Works Agency through struggles over land, water, bodies, and expression. My first book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) is an ethnography of production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. It asks what we can learn about journalism and popular political action when we place Palestinian journalists at the center of an inquiry about U.S. journalism. In addition to academic writing, I also regularly write for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. I have produced the documentary "Degrees of Incarceration" (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment. Finally, I have been involved with the production of bilingual Arabic and English children's books about refugee lives, including The Boy and the Wall.

Research/Areas of Interest: Developmental Biology Animal Behavior Engineered Living Systems Biorobotics The overarching goal of my research program is to understand how developmental events coordinate organism-level behaviors, and how these interactions can inform both biomedical and ecological contexts. To this end, my group studies many aspects of developmental biology to learn about the molecular, genetic, and environmental signaling mechanisms driving behavioral phenotypes/disease, and then use these mechanisms to exert control over form and function, sensory-motor integration, and regenerative outcomes.

Research/Areas of Interest: Capitalism; Labor; Environment; Animals; Agriculture; Ethnography; Ordinary life My research revolves around conditions of industrial labor and life in the post-industrial United States. My first book, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Duke University Press 2020), is an ethnography of work within some of the world's largest meat corporations, one that follows the making of the modern pig across every facet of its existence from genetics to 1,100 post-death commodities. It examines the transformations to human existence — in terms of living arrangements, the value of labor, biological embodiment, and senses of identity — necessary to sustain contemporary qualities and quantities of industrial animal life in the rural United States. In collaboration with others, I have also published an edited book called How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press 2019) that surveys how transformed, unstable, and ruined environments are altering the value of human work and livelihood. I am currently working on a series of connected projects. The first deals with the politics of quitting meatpacking. While American slaughterhouses have long had notoriously high turnover rates, there is little focused research on why or how diverse people manage to refuse work in these sites. Rooted in ethnographic interviews with ex-workers from across the country, this book project asks whether and how quitters might emerge as a force for social transformation. The second project, developed with colleagues at Tufts, looks both critically and constructively at how university knowledge has helped create inequitable ecologies and agricultures. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, this three-year project brings together humanists, artists, and workers to explore other ecological visions and values that our campuses could nurture. It is particularly concerned with the question of what kinds of research and collaboration could better advance workers' interests and goals. The third long-term project begins with the closing of Chicago's Union Stock Yards in 1971. This book will explore how a wide range of people struggle to redeem, remake, and overcome the social legacies and ecological remains of those infamous meatpacking yards that generated facets of industrial capitalism as it still exists it today. At Tufts University, I teach a wide range of classes on environment, capitalism, labor politics, value beyond work, interspecies relations, food production, ethnography, and the rural United States.

Research/Areas of Interest: Ethics, the History of Ethics, Moral Psychology, and Political Philosophy