Faculty

Research/Areas of Interest: Occupational therapy, social psychology, culture and health care stigma, health quality of life, social participation, Parkinson's disease and conditions across lifespan that affect nonverbal and verbal communication, evidence-based practice. I study health quality of life and define it as participation in daily life tasks, activities, and roles in a manner that contributes to individual, familial, societal, and global health and well-being. A bio-psycho-social approach is taken with respect to processes and outcomes of health quality of life. I work with researchers and students from different disciplines and countries to conduct research in a creative and collaborative interdisciplinary environment.

Research/Areas of Interest: I am a developmental scientist and Research Associate Professor at Tufts University in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. With the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development (IARYD), I study positive youth development (PYD), seeking to understand what goes "right" in the lives of youth, by engaging in researcher-practitioner partnerships with youth-serving organizations around the world (currently Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, and El Salvador). My research is broadly focused on character development--I am interested in how people become good people. With a focus on person-context relations across development, I also explore how good people shape, and are shaped by, communities and cultures. Specifically, my work has focused on the potential role of forgiveness as a character strength and civic virtue. This interest has steered me toward working with individuals and organizations interested in peacebuilding and restorative justice, for instance, in Rwanda as well as the Boston area. Lessons learned from this work are timely and important for civil society and human flourishing, perhaps especially in an era of increasingly polarized social and political climates. Forgiveness, restorative justice, and peacebuilding seem to be linked by common threads of empathy, curiosity, generosity, listening, and dialogue, as well as critical thinking, personal responsibility, community action, and civic engagement. Please find my CV in LinkedIn for more information on my professional experiences, research grants, editorial and consulting activities, teaching experience, and publications.

Research/Areas of Interest: Experimental condensed matter physics; physics education For most of my career, my primary physics research area has been experimental surface science. In my lab at 574 Boston Ave., my students and I have studied what happens when foreign atoms and molecules form chemical bonds with metal surfaces. Our research has had implications for a range of potential applications including catalysis, chemical sensing, and the growth of thin films and nanoparticles on surfaces. In recent years my focus has shifted towards physics education, at both the college and, especially, at the elementary school level. Together with collaborators at a local nonprofit organization and at other universities, I have helped to develop and study curriculum materials and professional development strategies for the study of matter and energy in grades 3-5. In my own classes at Tufts, I have implemented and studied a range of instructional approaches aimed at more effective and equitable learning.

Research/Areas of Interest: Currently we are pursuing the following major projects: Current Projects 1) Modulation of Nociception. — The ability to sense and respond to harmful events (nociception) is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom and in many animals results in a longer lasting sensation called pain. Nociception is a distinct sensory modality that promotes the avoidance of damaging interactions using molecular mechanisms that are well-conserved from single cell organisms to humans. Nociception typically elicits strong responses, such as aggressive or avoidance movements, but these must be chosen appropriately and enhanced (hyperalgesia) or suppressed (hypoalgesia), depending on the circumstances. Our laboratory uses an insect, the tobacco hornworm Manduca sexta, as a model system to study the neurobiology of nociception and its modulation. 2) Neuromechanics of Locomotion — Animal locomotion is an intricate interplay between neural processes and biomechanics. These components have co-evolved to form "neuromechanical" control systems in which neural commands organize actions and the structures and materials of the body translate these commands into movements. In some cases structures are able to accomplish movements with relatively little or no command input, but most behaviors in natural environments require intricate neural patterning. In animals that have stiff skeletons (such as vertebrates and adult stage arthropods), these motor programs rely on the constraints imposed by joints to reduce the degrees of freedom and simplify control. In contrast to animals with skeletons, soft animals do not have the same limits on movements; they can deform in complex ways and have virtually unlimited degrees of freedom. One of our major research goals is to identify how soft animals control their movements in a computationally efficient manner using the principles of embodiment and morphological computation. 3) SoftWorm Robots — a soft machine development platform — Based on extensive neuromechanical studies of soft bodied locomotion in animals, we have developed a family of actuated modules that are being used as development platforms for soft robots. These robots are about 10-15 cm long and weigh between 4g and 30g. Earlier designs were fabricated by vacuum casting silicone elastomers into 3D-printed molds, our current methods include printing the devices in a soft rubbery polymer using a multi-material 3D printer. These devices are actuated with shape-memory alloy (SMA) microcoils that can be controlled with current pulses. We have also constructed similar robots with back-drivable Maxon motors coupled to the body using flexible "tendons". The body shapes can be changed to any desired form, but most of our current prototypes resemble caterpillars or worms. They can crawl, inch or roll and even climb steep inclines. 4) Tissue Engineering of Novel Devices — One of our long-term goals is to "grow" robotic devices using a combination of biosynthetic materials, cellular modulation, and tissue engineering. In collaboration with Professors Kaplan and Levin we are exploring both invertebrate and vertebrate cell culture and regeneration systems to structure muscles and supporting tissues on scaffolds of biomaterials. These scaffolds could be degradable or allowed to remain as part of an operational biorobot. Such biological devices will be controlled using the simulation tools developed for synthetic soft robots and will exploit recent advances in soft material electronics. For these cell-based systems, we are generating bundles of contractile skeletal muscle tissue using insect muscle cells. These constructs will be engineered to contract in a controlled, coordinated fashion for eventual use as motors in soft robots. Insect cells offer novel features, such as high force, low oxygen demand, and low sterility requirements that are particularly advantageous. This work is also being applied in the field of Cellular Agriculture to develop sustainable ethical food production.

Research/Areas of Interest: Algebraic geometry, topology, and differential geometry

Research/Areas of Interest: Microeconomics

Research/Areas of Interest: film theory, philosophy and aesthetics of film, avant-garde film, film and modernism

Research/Areas of Interest: Biomechanics and Neural Control of Locomotion

Research/Areas of Interest: Industrial and Urban U.S., Immigration

Research/Areas of Interest: Moral Philosophy, Political Philosophy

Research/Areas of Interest: Population genetics, evolution, ecology, computational biology

Research/Areas of Interest: Emotion and Emotion Regulation

Research/Areas of Interest: Physical and Surface Chemistry. The Utz group studies how molecules react on surfaces. Reactions at the gas-surface interface are highly dynamical events. Large-scale atomic and vibrational motions transform reactants into products on sub-ps and Å scales. The experiments probe ultrafast nuclear motion and energy flow dynamics that underlie heterogeneous catalysis and chemical vapor deposition. The goal is to to better model existing processes and direct the rational design of new catalytic materials and deposition techniques. The experiments use vibrational- and rotational-state selective laser excitation of molecules in a supersonic molecular beam to provide precise control over the energetics and orientation of the gas-phase reagent as it approaches the surface. Reaction probability and product identity is then quantified as a function of the reagent's energetic configuration. These experiments have shown that the vibrational state of the incident molecule can have a profound effect on reaction probability, and suggest that energy redisribution within the reaction complex is not complete prior to reaction and that the competing kinetics of energy redistribution and reaction might be manipulated to control the outcome of a reaction. This has been subsequently confirmed by exerting bond-elective control over a heterogeneously catalyzed reaction.

Research/Areas of Interest: Literature (fiction, drama, nonfiction) on the American Queer and BIPOC experience. Active inclusion. Latine theater and performance.

Research/Areas of Interest: Interaction of light with matter, physics of nanostructures and interfaces, metamaterials, material science, plasmonics, and surfactants, semiconductor photonics and electronics, epitaxial crystal growth, materials and devices for energy and infrared applications.

Research/Areas of Interest: Psychopathology Research Methods

Research/Areas of Interest: Petrology and Mineralogy

Research/Areas of Interest: Tectonics and Structural Geology

Research/Areas of Interest: Theoretical cosmology I do research on cosmic inflation, dark energy, cosmic strings and monopoles, quantum cosmology, and the multiverse.

Research/Areas of Interest: Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, religion in early South Asia, Chinese Religions, Anthropology of Religion, Philosophy of Religion, Sociology of Religious Philosophy

Research/Areas of Interest: Hyperbolic manifolds and orbifolds, low-dimensional topology, group actions

Research/Areas of Interest: Chinese Language Pedagogy, Second Language Acquisition, Social linguistics, Curriculum design

Research/Areas of Interest: Chinese Language, Chinese characters, second language acquisition and pedagogy, and application of technology in language learning and instruction

Research/Areas of Interest: Chinese orthography and the Chinese reading process, utilizing approaches applied within a transactional socio-psycholinguistic framework that includes eye movement research and miscue analysis.

Research/Areas of Interest: Applied Cognition

Research/Areas of Interest: Education, race, ethnicity, immigration, Asian Americans, culture, inequality, qualitative methods

Research/Areas of Interest: Cinema and Moving Image Studies, Cinema History and Aesthetics, Visual Culture Studies