Faculty

Research/Areas of Interest: A significant part of my work focuses on designing and co-designing learning environments. I study how specific design features of these learning environments facilitate learning about what it means to do science. I am interested in investigating students' epistemic engagement and participation in connection with science—how students know what they know in science classrooms and how they think about knowledge construction as a central part of the endeavor of science. Another essential part of my research is making and using agent-based computational models of complex systems to support students in thinking and learning about emergent phenomena such as natural selection. I have designed and co-designed several curricular units that have been used in high schools in the US and India.

Research/Areas of Interest: My research interest in epidemiology is the etiology of perinatal retina and brain disease. I am particularly interested in a scenario that postulates a major role for intrauterine infection as an initiator of maternal and fetal inflammatory responses that, in turn, contribute to the development of brain white matter damage and retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) among preterm newborns. I have been R21 and R01-funded by the National Eye Institute to study inflammatory biomarkers and ROP. In philosophy, my area of interest is causal inference and etiological explanation. My two books in this field are "Causation in Population Health Informatics and Data Science" (Springer, 2019), co-authored with philosopher Ben Smart, and "Etiological Explanations" (CRC Press, 2020).

Research/Areas of Interest: Pep Band

Research/Areas of Interest: Biopharma strategy, regulation, & policy

Research/Areas of Interest: Coupled Human-Natural Systems, Computational Social Science, Human Mobility and Interaction, Climate Change Adaptation, Fire Ecology, Technological Organization, Serious Games

Research/Areas of Interest: Human dimensions of environmental change; socio-ecological system governance; equitable sustainability transformations; community resilience; coastal and marine systems

Research/Areas of Interest: I am interested in synthesis and characterization in inorganic and materials chemistry. I am especially interested in fundamental chemistry that has important societal implications. My research laboratory currently works in several areas: Earth-abundant molecular light absorbers and emitters. Molecular light absorbers and emitters are used in photoredox catalysis, dye-sensitized solar cells, and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). We are exploring high-spin complexes of iron and manganese to prepare new molecules that absorb and emit light. Volatile molecules carrying metal-atom equivalents for superconducting wires. Cryogenic superconducting wires enable quantum bits based on Josephson junctions. We are developing new molecules and methods to deposit the electropositive metals that make up these wires from chemical vapors. Thin-film photovoltaics with earth-abundant, sulfide-based absorber layers. Thin-film photovoltaics (solar cells) provide electricity from sunlight with just a few hundred nm of light-absorbing material. We are exploring binary and ternary sulfides as new sources of earth-abundant photovoltaics. I am developing new research programs in several areas: Zero-emissions ironmaking. The synthesis of iron metal from iron ore contributes ca. 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions. I am interested in alternative thermochemical methods of making iron from iron oxides. New superconducting materials. Near-room-temperature superconductors have recently been realized in compressed hydrides. I am interested in new hydride compounds that are stable at ambient pressure and might serve as ambient-pressure, ambient-temperature superconductors.

Research/Areas of Interest: Latin American and Spanish Cinema, Second Language Pedagogy

Research/Areas of Interest: Labor economics, public health, nursing

Research/Areas of Interest: Stress Physiology, Animal Behavior, Wildlife Endocrinology, Conservation Physiology, Active Learning Strategies, Evidence-Based Pedagogy & Best Practices

Research/Areas of Interest: Languages for specific purposes

Research/Areas of Interest: Cognition and Psycholinguistics

Research/Areas of Interest: Moral philosophy; philosophy of mind; philosophy of film; the perspectives of philosophical naturalism; the free-will controversy; theory of action; metaphysics; philosophy and cognitive science; history of Renaissance and early modern philosophy

Research/Areas of Interest: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Ethics

Research/Areas of Interest: Political Theory

Research/Areas of Interest: Race and Gender Stratification; Labor Markets; Immigrant Incorporation; Quantitative Methods; Field Experiments; Comparative Sociology; Latin America

Research/Areas of Interest: The Ding Group develops and uses computational approaches to solve problems in chemistry and biophysics. We currently focus on the following two areas. 1. Computational drug design. We aim to accelerate drug design by developing fast and accurate methods for computing protein-ligand binding free energy. To do that, we combine ideas and methods from molecular simulations, statistical mechanics and machine learning. 2. Force field development. We aim to develop a transferable and accurate coarse-grained force field for simulating large biophysical systems.

Research/Areas of Interest: causal cognition, philosophy of science, metascience, methods

Research/Areas of Interest: Physics Education Research: Scientists are professional learners who employ a range of skills and qualities to learn new things. Why should it be any different for students in how they advance in their understanding of scientific concepts? My current research focuses on how learners come to engage in the practices of science in their efforts to learn new things. To make progress on the question, I have studied how learners' views of knowledge (personal epistemologies) impact their scientific engagement in the contexts of introductory physics, quantum mechanics, and science teacher education. I have also studied the interaction of personal epistemology with emotions that come up in the doing of science (epistemic affect). Most recently, I have looked at how personal epistemology interconnects with social caring and epistemic empathy. These studies help outline some paths to progress in equity and inclusion in STEM fields, and inform my approaches to teaching.

Research/Areas of Interest: Italian Language and Culture, AP Italian Course and Exam, Foreign Language Methodology

Research/Areas of Interest: Children and media; ethnicity/gender and media; adolescents and media use; women's history and biography I am currently working on a three-tiered interdisciplinary research project along with Chip Gidney, Mary Casey, and Cynthia Smith at Eliot-Pearson, as well as faculty in several other departments at Tufts. The first piece of this project is a long-running content analysis of children's animated programming. We are updating prior work we've done that investigates images of race, ethnicity and gender in children's animated programming using both content and sociolinguistic analysis. The second part of this research is an exploration of why stereotyping persists in children's media. We are examining this through intensive interviews with content creators, writers, directors, vocal casting directors, and actors. The third part of the project is empirical research we're conducting with children, to see how children make sense of gender, race, and ethnicity in the animated programs they see. My applied work includes doing many media literacy workshops for parents and for children and for children in a variety of settings, and consulting work with colleagues at GBH, one of the leading creators of children's educational media. I have written about children and media issues in a variety of academic and popular venues. My other research is historical in nature. I serve as co-PI, along with Jennifer Burton, of the Half the History Project at Tufts, which utilizes short-form biography, film, and podcast to tell the untold and under-told stories of women's lives. I've written one biography of the relatively unknown mother/daughter team who made Emily Dickinson into one of the most-known women anywhere in the world. After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet was published by WW Norton in 2018. My next dual biography, Crossing Indian Country: From the Wounded Knee Massacre to the Unlikely Marriage of Ohíye'Sa, Charles Alexander Eastman, will be published by NYU Press in Fall 2025.

Research/Areas of Interest: I work primarily in harmonic analysis, matrix analysis, and frame theory, with applications to signal processing, compressed sensing, machine learning, and the measurement of quantum systems.

Research/Areas of Interest: Improving performance and reliability of networked systems, specifically cloud-based systems, mobile and wireless systems, and the Internet. Also, interested in designing technologies for developing regions.

Research/Areas of Interest: Evolution and Genetics of Natural Populations

Research/Areas of Interest: Mathematical models of material behavior; Nonlinear magneto- and electromechanical interactions; Biomechanics of soft materials; Rubber elasticity and inelasticity

Research/Areas of Interest: Development Economics, Agricultural Economics, Asset Ownership

Research/Areas of Interest: Public Educational Finance and School Choice

Research/Areas of Interest: Women in the Professions in America; GIrlhood in Post World War II America; Love and War in World War II; Medicine and Society in Amrica