Cross-Disciplinary GSRs

Sarah Hoenicke Flores, Comparative Literature with Adriana Briscoe, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Russell Ming, Philosophy, and Mark Lazenby, Dean and Professor, School of Nursing

Ming worked with Dean Mark Lazenby on the project, “Exploring the Spiritual Healing of Nurses through Their Work,” which examines how the spiritual practices inherent in nursing—such as cultivating awe, expressing gratitude, and reflecting on patients’ lives—foster the well-being of nurses and empower them to confront and address the systemic injustices contributing to moral injury. His research included an integrative literature review (using the Whittemore and Knafl (2005) method) on spiritual healing on nursing, as well as coding interviews with nurses from diverse global healthcare settings.

Roy Cherian, Culture & Theory, with Juliet McMullin, School of Medicine (Department of Family Medicine)

Cherian's cross-disciplinary placement with Juliet McMullin focused on integrating humanities in medical education through course design, lecture writing, and research. McMullin and Cherian researched the current literature on medical education, incorporating learnings from the emergent fields of abolition medicine and disability justice into the new medical ethics curriculum for first and second-year medical students. They also incorporated underutilized teaching tools into the medical ethics curriculum, ranging from traditional, more narrative-driven approaches to more novel methodologies such as podcasts, graphic novels, and gamification. Cherian also conducted qualitative research on student experiences with medical school and the new medical ethics curriculum by organizing focus groups.

This quarter-long project focused on identifying broader trends across DEI initiatives in higher education by identifying and survey inclusive excellence initiatives across the UC Irvine campus. These initiatives included mentoring support, K-12 pipeline programs, and professional development opportunities for local teachers. Through a selective literature review and interviews with various program directors, Call drafted a report that described a range of diverse goals and perspectives on how to measure impact.

Placement: Tanuj Raut (Philosophy) and Shahrdad Loftipour, PhD (Assistant Professor, School of Medicine, Dept. of Emergency Medicine and Pharmaceutical Sciences)

Tanuj Raut’s philosophical research focuses on the epistemology of genealogical beliefs and moral responsibility. Shahrdad Lotfipour is a translational addiction biologist whose research focuses on the mechanisms contributing to drug use, and therapeutic interventions for cessation. Tanuj was able to build a substantial background in addiction science and understand the relevant research methods to support his interest in medical epistemology. He participated in regular lab meetings, Over the course of AY 2022-23, he co-authored a review article with Shahrdad on the learning mechanisms underlying nicotine addiction and how it impacts adolescents. That paper has been sent to Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, and is being reviewed by the editor. The project not only allowed him to study neuropharmacology, adolescent brain development, and its vulnerability to drugs to a greater extent, but also to develop research ideas at the intersection of moral philosophy, medical ethics, and addiction science. 

Cienna Benn, Culture and Theory, and Alana LeBron, Public Health and Chicano/Latino Studies

Center for Environmental Health Disparities Research 3 Questions Curriculum: People Power and Place in Southern Californian African, Black, and Caribbean Communities 

Benn worked on a popular education curriculum that brought together academic and community members to develop an increased understanding of the critical histories of African, Black, and Caribbean communities in Southern California. and develop a critical understanding of the power dynamics that affect community-academic partnerships. The graduate student was responsible for participating in curriculum development, developing and archiving asynchronous components of the curriculum for future iterations, collecting and archiving oral histories of African, Black, and Caribbean communities in Southern California, and supporting curriculum evaluation.

Samantha Carter, Visual Studies and Roderic Crooks, Department of Informatics

sam carter joined Roderic Crooks’ research group, the Evoke Lab (https://evoke.ics.uci.edu/). sam's research, which concerns digital media, higher education, and race, complemented Crooks’ lab's work on the political economy of social justice tech. This intersection of research interests helped the lab speculate differently on some of the ways actors might be related. Graduate students from Crooks’ lab were able to dialogue about other ways of ordering, evaluating, and circulating doctoral work, information that they could not get easily within the limits of their program. sam primarily helped in analyzing qualitative research data, participated in biweekly lab meetings, shared her own writing, and workshopped other lab members' papers. This cross-departmental peer learning was also useful for student organizing and for getting a more holistic understanding of how the university operated beyond one’s home department. The cross-disciplinary placement pushed lab members to articulate taken-for-granted objects of study and research methods and provided new ways to contextualize these ideas alongside other modes of knowledge production. 

Placement: Akane Okoshi (Culture and Theory, 3^rd year) and Katie Salen Tekinbas (Professor, Department of Informatics, School of Informatics and Computer Science)

Akane Okoshi’s work includes background includes developing content for museums, and Katie Salen’s focuses on youth and creating flourishing gaming cultures. Their project together explored intersections between AI, visual culture and race. Akane had an interest in developing a resource that could be used at a library or other cultural institution, and ultimately established a working relationship with LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). During the year Akane researched various visual artists that were engaged in work related to AI and race, and developed a plan to conduct interviews with 2-3 artists, including Rashaad Newsome and Stephanie Dinkins, which would inform the development of a Teacher Resource on AI and Black futures. Akane was also working toward a conference paper on an app developed by Newsome featuring the humanoid AI, Being. 

The cross-disciplinary collaboration allowed for an exchange of ideas and perspectives between visual culture studies, human centered design, and digital media studies which broadened the range of references available to Akane as well as enriched the dialogue within the Made With Play lab around race and AI.

Placement: Solutions that Scale; with Dr. Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts, Professor of Chemistry (School of Physical Sciences), and Dr. Steven J. Davis, Professor of Earth System Science (School of Physical Sciences)

Megan Cole worked as a Graduate Student Researcher with UCI’s Solutions that Scale, a cross-disciplinary initiative to discover and implement scalable, sustainable solutions to the ever-present problem of climate change. Alongside UCI faculty, Barbara Finlayson-Pitts (Chemistry) and Steven J. Davis (Earth Systems Science), Cole drafted a white paper about ways that humanists can work with STEM scholars to center social justice and equity within all future “solutions that scale.” Megan’s research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, ecocriticism, energy humanities, and environmental humanities. She published her white paper as a journal article in Sustainability Science, “The case for the “climate humanities”: toward a transdisciplinary, equity-focused paradigm shift within climate scholarship.” 

Placement: Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing; with Dr. Miriam Bender, Associate Professor & Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs

Josh worked with Dr. Miriam Bender to operationalize the Center for Nursing Philosophy’s virtual, pilot critical writing seminar, a workshop that will help nursing PhD students develop critical thinking and writing skills at the intersection of ethics and nursing science. Josh’s research interests focus on virtue epistemology and ethics, and worked with Prof. Duncan Pritchard on developing the Anteaters Virtues project. 

Placement: School of Public Health; with Dr. Jun Wu, Professor of Public Health w/Dr. Juan Rubio, History PhD ’21 and Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow

Marcello’s research focuses on the histories of gender and sexuality in the mid-to-late 20th century United States.

Marcello worked on an ongoing project to produce valuable data for assessing the sources of environmental lead in Santa Ana, CA. She worked with archival material, such as historical maps of Orange County, to produce geo-referenced maps and data points, as well as gathered documents related to potential sources of lead contamination, such as newspaper clippings about local refineries, lists of manufacturing firms, traffic reports, and lead-paint advertisements. These documents and GIS data were then examined in conjunction with the soil-lead data collected through the OCEJ-UCI collaboration as well as lead-in-blood reports. Ultimately, the project will run a series of geospatial analyses incorporating thrhistorical data as well as socio-economic indicators and other data produced within the field of Public Health. 

Placement: Henry Samueli School of Engineering; with Dr. Christine E. King, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Biomedical Engineering

Dalton’s research examines how virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies function rhetorically and phenomenologically to induce cooperation in users. Salvo worked with Dr. King on a virtual reality unmet clinical needs finds course. This course is a senior capstone course that prepares students to enter graduate school and industry settings through a team-based learning format. In his work, he edited virtual reality scenarios, developed a survey and interviewed students for feedback on virtual reality modules, and worked with faculty and students to improve learning outcomes, especially for underrepresented students. 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43683-024-00139-5

"My doctoral work, specializing in rhetoric, has led me down an unexpected but highly productive interdisciplinary path. Thanks to the Cross-Disciplinary GSR program and in collaboration with Professor Christine King from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, I applied rhetorical theory—particularly its insights into psychological engagement and audience attunement—to design and implement an inclusive, online multiplayer virtual learning environment with proximity-based voice chat. Deployed in a remote biomedical engineering course, this platform translated humanistic principles of communication into a technical pedagogical setting. Building on this work, I conducted an experimental study integrating eye-tracking and neural activity analysis to detect boredom, engagement, and attention span, with the goal of creating adaptive learning systems that respond dynamically to each student’s cognitive state. This convergence of rhetoric, engineering, and cognitive science has expanded my methodological range and deepened my interest in designing immersive environments that optimize learning through real-time human physiological feedback."  

Placement: Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science; with Dr. Aaron Trammell, Assistant Professor of Informatics (now Associate)

Isabelle Catherine Williams is a student in Culture and Theory. Her research highlights the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in animation and how video games are a potential site of resisting this legacy. In her work with Dr. Trammell, Isabelle was the assistant editor of a peer-reviewed gaming journal, as well as contributed toward the development of a podcast focused on gaming and critical theories.

Placement: Humanities Center; Dr. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Professor of Asian American Studies and Faculty Director of the Humanities Center)

Katzeman’s research looks at the intersection of global contemporary art and political ecology, particularly the forms of visual culture that arise from anti-colonial and anti-capitalist land struggles. As a GSR, Katzeman worked at the Humanities Center for the center’s programmatic theme, “Oceans.” His work included building institutional community among various stakeholders who work on the environmental humanities at UCI, including reading groups and events hosted by the center. His organization of an environmental humanities reading group helped lead to the formation of an environmental humanities research cluster at UCI, which will begin this fall. As well, Katzeman helped to organized the multi-institutional symposium Pacific Worlds: Indigeneity, Blackness, and Resistance, an event that was able to maximize virtual platforms to nurture new collaborations.

Through these networks of experiences, Katzeman observes not only the benefit that the experiences had for his own research, but also importantly, proved to him “the invaluable nature of humanities centers and institutes at both large R1 schools and smaller liberal arts universities for students” as well as shows how such collaborations facilitated by humanities centers “extend beyond [their] own intentions.”

Placement: Humanities Center, with Dr. Amanda Jeanne Swain, Executive Director, and Dr. SueJeanne Koh, Graduate Futures Program Director 

Cherian’s research interrogates the relation between anti-blackness and the secular through a critique of the biomedical. During the 2020-2021 academic year, he facilitated the establishment of the pilot of the embedded humanities GSR program and helped to place three medical humanities students in embedded research positions for the 2021-2022 academic year. He also established connections with various departments in the health sciences for future collaboration years (i.e. 2022-2023, 2023-2024). Cherian was able to leverage his prior training and experience in public health research and communication to help bridge the gap between the humanities and the health sciences. Overall, Cherian writes, “I found this GSR placement rewarding as it allowed me to engage in dynamic, interdisciplinary conversations that both informs my own research as well as cultivates and hones my capacity for cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration.”

With Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts, Department of Chemistry and Steven J. Davis, Earth Systems Science

Cole worked with UCI’s Solutions that Scale, a cross-disciplinary center to discover and implement scalable, sustainable solutions to the ever-present problem of climate change. Alongside Finlayson-Pitts  and Davis, Cole drafted a white paper about ways that humanists can work with STEM scholars to center social justice and equity within future “solutions that scale.” As an environmental humanist, Cole writes, “It was my privilege throughout this GSRship to have cross-disciplinary conversations with senior faculty in the sciences, to enrich my own knowledge of environmental literary and cultural studies with the “hard sciences” behind it all, and to bring a fresh perspective to discussions about the future of climate change activism and scholarship.”

With Mu-Chun Chen, Department of Physics and Astronomy and Associate Dean of the School of Physical Sciences

Goldstein's research focuses on the field of social and applied epistemology, with an emphasis on 20th century analytic philosophy, virtue epistemology and the philosophy of education. Her research with Professor Chen looked at background assumptions to better understand how bias played a role in the evaluation of other people or when interpreting scientific evidence. Goldstein examined structural and institutional barriers at UCI and more broadly that have resulted in the underrepresentation of women, Hispanic/Latinx, American Indian, and Black/African American populations in the STEM fields.

Building on theories of change, Goldstein designed a mixed quantitative and qualitative study that assessed how students’ racial or gender identity influenced faculty and student interactions in the School of Physical Sciences.