Cross-Disciplinary GSRs

Placement: Sarah Hoenicke Flores (Comparative Literature, 5^th year) with Adriana Briscoe (Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)

Proposed Outline of Projects and Timeline 

1. Fall Quarter 2024: The GSR will focus on a public-facing project by developing a pitch for Scientific American on butterfly color vision and/or aspects of behavior, ideally highlighting our lab’s discoveries on sexually dimorphic color vision and potentially other butterfly science stories. Responsibilities will include a literature review and drafting an outline for a possible article, including figures. Based on conversations with Scientific American editors, the magazine evaluates new pitches starting around January (please confirm). If a pitch to Scientific American does not work, we can also submit a pitch to The Conversation or other suitable media outlet based on the GSR’s interests. 

2. Winter Quarter 2025: A second project is to read through [Briscoe’s] book in progress, Light, Heat and Butterflies: Adaptations of Insects to a Warming Planet and provide feedback on the writing. The GSR would also research literary references related to butterflies from philosophers, poets, novelists, memoirists, scientists, the Bible that I might eventually incorporate into the book. A related goal that would emerge from this would be to develop a pitch for a TED talk based on my book project. 

3. A third project would be to assist on a biographical piece requested by the National Academies of Sciences as part of [Briscoe’s] recent election to the academy. This would involve reading through her unpublished autobiography as well as published profiles of [Briscoe] as a scientist, and identifying a set of questions, events, pivotal moments, lessons learned to highlight that will engage and draw a reader into the life of a scientist, with the goal of increasing public interest in careers in STEM. The idea would be to work as a developmental editor so that [Briscoe] can write this piece expected of the academy and that will be published in their flagship journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Placement: Russell Ming (Philosophy, 5^th year) and Mark Lazenby (Dean and Professor, School of Nursing)

“Exploring the Spiritual Healing of Nurses through Their Work,” Lazenby (PI)

Ming has been working 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. The GSR’s responsibilities may include the following:

1. Literature Review and Theoretical Contextualization:

• Conduct an integrative review of existing literature (using the Whittemore and Knafl (2005) method) on spiritual healing in nursing, particularly how spiritual practices within the nursing profession contribute to nurses' healing and empowerment.
• Integrate concepts of moral injury within this context, examining how spiritual healing can serve as a foundation for nurses to recognize, address, and mitigate moral injury in the profession.

2. Participant Recruitment and Ethical Coordination:

• Assist in recruiting nurses from diverse global healthcare settings, ensuring that participants reflect a broad spectrum of experiences related to spiritual healing and moral injury.
• Coordinate with local partners and institutional review boards in the U.S., Mexico, India, Jordan, Botswana, Australia, and New Zealand to uphold ethical standards and culturally sensitive practices.

3. Data Collection and In-depth Interviews:

• Conduct qualitative interviews with nurses, focusing on how their work contributes to their spiritual healing, how this healing impacts their ability to cope with and address moral injury, and the practices that sustain their well-being.
• Employ and adapt the interview guide to explore key themes such as awe, gratitude, and reflection while also being responsive to the participants' specific cultural and contextual nuances.

4. Data Analysis and Thematic Synthesis:

• Analyze interview data to identify codes and, from these codes, synthesize themes related to spiritual healing, well-being, and the empowerment of nurses in addressing moral injury.
• Collaborate with the PI to ensure that the analysis highlights the transformative power of spiritual healing in nursing and its role in enabling nurses to advocate for change in their work environments.

5. Collaboration and Scholarly Dissemination:

• Engage regularly with the PI to discuss insights, challenges, and emerging themes related to the spiritual healing of nurses.
• Contribute to the preparation of reports, academic publications, and presentations that articulate how spiritual healing practices within nursing can empower nurses to address moral injury and improve their professional fulfillment.

6. Ethical Sensitivity and Cultural Responsiveness:

• Uphold the highest standards of ethical research, with a strong focus on respecting the spiritual and personal experiences of the nurses participating in the study.
• Ensure that the voices of the nurses are represented with cultural sensitivity and integrity, particularly in how their spiritual healing experiences are narrated and analyzed.

Placement: Ashley Call (Comparative Literature, 7^th year) and SueJeanne Koh (Humanities Center)

Call was a student expressly interested in non-academic career pathways, and wanted to gain professional experience that would strengthen her job applications after graduating with her PhD. Given the current context and status of DEI programs across higher education, we were interested in collecting information at a local level whether certain trends or shared sense of hoped for outcomes would emerge. Over the course of one academic quarter, Ashley drafted a report that analyzed and described the range of DEI initiatives across the UCI campus. She conducted research and interviews to inform her analysis, and concluded that there were diverse perspectives on what determined successful outcomes. We plan to share the results of the report with interviewees and discuss possible outcomes or collaborations that might emerge.

Placement: Roy Cherian (Culture & Theory, 5^th year) with Juliet McMullin, PhD; School of Medicine

Roy's cross-disciplinary placement with Dr. Juliet McMullin in the Department of Family Medicine had three primary areas of focus within the practice of integrating humanities in medical education: course building, lecture building, and research. Regarding course building, Roy and Juliet worked together reading and assessing 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. In terms of lecture building, Roy and Juliet collaborated to incorporate underutilized teaching tools into the medical ethics curriculum, from the traditional, more narrative-driven approaches to more novel methodologies such as podcasts, graphic novels, and gamification. Lastly, regarding research, Juliet mentored Roy in the collection of data regarding student experiences with medical school and the new medical ethics curriculum through focus groups with students. Rather than occur in sequence, these activities were undertaken simultaneously, in an iterative fashion, and creating a sort of feedback loop. Top-level course building informed lecture building which was assessed through research and then fed back into efforts at curriculum development. 

Due to the success of these efforts, Roy has been hired as GSR on a UCOP-funded project to continue this work during the 2024-2025 AY. Overall, it was a generative placement that has helped lay the foundation to not only enhance medical pedagogy through abolition medicine and disability justice frameworks but also the long-term collaboration between the School of Humanities and the School of Medicine. 

Placement: Akane Okoshi (Culture and Theory, 4^th year) and Katie Salen Tekinbas (Professor, Department of Informatics, School of Informatics and Computer Science)

This placement was a continuation of one from last year, given that the student needed to take medical leave to address some health challenges. Akane Okoshi’s background includes developing museum education content for museums, and Katie Salen’s research focuses on creating flourishing affinity-based online communities for youth with marginalized interests and identities, as well as prosocial community design. Their project together explored intersections between AI, visual culture, and race. Okoshi wrote a paper investigating the way in which transdisciplinary artists Rashaad Newsome and Stephanie Dinkins explore race and technology in their artistic practice. It included text from an in-person interview with Dinkins. During the year, Okoshi researched various visual artists who were engaged in work related to AI and race and developed a plan to conduct interviews with Rashaad Newsome and Stephanie Dinkins, which would inform the development of a conference paper. 

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 and enriched the dialogue within the Made With Play lab around race and AI. There was also an exchange of expertise around IRBs, developing interview protocols, and thematic analysis.

Placement: Ashley Call (Comparative Literature, 7^th year) and SueJeanne Koh (Humanities Center)

Call was a student expressly interested in non-academic career pathways, and wanted to gain professional experience that would strengthen her job applications after graduating with her PhD. Given the current context and status of DEI programs across higher education, we were interested in collecting information at a local level whether certain trends or shared sense of hoped for outcomes would emerge. Over the course of one academic quarter, Ashley drafted a report that analyzed and described the range of DEI initiatives across the UCI campus. She conducted research and interviews to inform her analysis, and concluded that there were diverse perspectives on what determined successful outcomes. We plan to share the results of the report with interviewees and discuss possible outcomes or collaborations that might emerge.

Placement: Tanuj Raut (Philosophy, 4^th year) 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. 

Placement: Cienna Benn (Culture and Theory, 2^nd year) and Alana LeBron (Assistant Professor, 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 

The purpose of the 3 questions curriculum is to build consciousness about and capacity to apply an antiracism framework to understanding and intervening upon the structural drivers of health inequities that affect African, Black, Caribbean and other communities of color in Southern California through embodied examination of the three questions of people, power, and place. This popular education curriculum 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.

Placement: Samantha Carter (Visual Studies, 6^th year) and Roderic Crooks (Assistant Professor, Department of Informatics, School of Informatics and Computer Science)

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” (DOI:10.1007/s11625-023-01358-5).

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

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. 

Dalton’s research examines how virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies function rhetorically and phenomenologically to induce cooperation in users.

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.”

Placement: Solutions that Scale; 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)

Cole’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, ecocriticism, energy humanities, and environmental humanities. 

This past spring, 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.” 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.”

Placement: School of Physical Sciences; Dr. Mu-Chun Chen, Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Associate Dean

Rena Beatrice Goldstein is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy. Her research focuses in the field of social and applied epistemology, with an emphasis on 20th century analytic philosophy, virtue epistemology and the philosophy of education. In 2019, Goldstein was the recipient of the Kavka Endowed Prize for excellent scholarship, and she was recently awarded the 2020-2021 Svetlana Bershadsky Graduate Student Community Award for her commitment to improving graduate student life at UCI.

Goldstein was the Inequality in STEM Graduate Student Researcher working in the School of Physical Sciences and Humanities Center 2020-2021. Her research examines background assumptions to better understand how bias plays a role in the evaluation of other people or when interpreting scientific evidence.

In her work, 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 will assess how students’ racial or gender identity can impact treatment in the School of Physical Sciences. The aim is to evaluate interpersonal relationships between students and faculty to better understand how racial and gender identity may impact such relationships in the departments and to compile data on the current structural patterns within the School as well. The project is ongoing, and will include a written report detailing where barriers occur and recommendations for how to shift them.