PHD Achievement Awards
As part of an ongoing effort to support and recognize the academic professional development of current PhD students, the Graduate School provides a PhD Achievement Award for students with exceptional academic profiles. Up to six awards are made annually to students from across the university. Each recipient’s primary faculty advisor also receives a Graduate School PhD mentoring award. Current students from every PhD program at USC are eligible. Each USC PhD program may nominate one candidate.
To view previous recipients click here »
Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award - 2015 & 2016
2016 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Renee Bolinger, USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Philosophy
Faculty Advisor: Jonathan Quong
I just finished my fourth year (of six) in the philosophy PhD program, specializing in political philosophy and philosophy of language. Broadly linguistic or conventional facts—facts about what we would communicate to others by acting in a certain way—often make a difference to what we ought to do, and can generate new social and legal obligations. My research analyzes two areas where this is especially vivid: offensive or harmful speech, and self-defense.
My dissertation aims to articulate moral conditions on the criteria for counting mistaken self-defense 'reasonable' (and thus justified). A society's choice of criteria affects what inferences we rely on, and hence the pattern of mistakes. The best criterion is a type of signaling convention: permitting agents to assume that someone who acts in a way that conventionally communicates aggression is in fact an aggressor. I argue that to be morally acceptable, this convention must ensure that agents can easily avoid signaling, and not place any group of agents in a position of signaling aggression by default; I then demonstrate that the ‘reasonability’ standard as currently applied in US law fails the constraints by implicitly appealing to racial markers as signals of threateningness. Predictably, this results in a racialized pattern of false-positive defensive mistakes. We are consequently morally obligated to alter the convention. I have so far focused on civilian self-defense, but the problem readily generalizes to police use-of-force and the killing of possible non-combatants in war, which I hope to address in future work.
2016 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Mary Gutierrez, Viterbi School of Engineering, Materials Science
Faculty Advisor: Noah Malmstadt
I spent five years working in biotech before starting my PhD at USC. I entered a PhD program because I wanted to get deeper into science and make more of a contribution; I wanted to be able to explore the fundamental “why” questions with the freedom of an academic environment. Three years later and now at the end of my PhD, I could not have imagined everything that I’ve learned, how I’d develop as an independent scientist, and how much I would have contributed to my scientific field.
During my PhD I developed a novel platform for engineering artificial cells. This system allows us to study how changes in the lipid composition of cell plasma membranes, which can be altered by diet and drugs, alter biomedically important properties of cells. Using this platform I’ve incorporated G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), the targets of over half of medical therapeutics on the market, into artificial cells and discovered how changes in the lipid composition in the plasma can alter the performance of the human serotonin receptor. I’ve shown that changes in cholesterol levels affect the function of the receptor. Over activity of this receptor has been implicated in diseases such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; suicide victims who suffer from such psychiatric diseases have been reported to have increased membrane cholesterol levels. Thus, my research provides fundamental evidence for the correlation between psychiatric diseases and membrane composition. This fundamental work highlights that lipid-targeted therapies are practical means to fight disease. I also developed a (patent pending) polymer-based artificial cellular system with incorporated GPCRs that allows for long-term storage stability and offers a novel and flexible platform for drug discovery efforts.2016 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Derek Harmon, Marshall School of Business, Management and Organization
Faculty Advisor: Peer Fiss
Derek Harmon studies how people in organizations use communication strategically to influence and persuade others. In particular, his dissertation advances a novel theory and way to measure how strategic communication works. This new measurement—the argument structure ratio (ASR)—captures the degree to which a speaker makes explicit their assumptions when communicating. Using all public speeches made by the Chairperson of the United States Federal Reserve from 1998 to 2014, he shows that the more they expose their assumptions underlying the Federal Reserve System, the more their speeches produce market uncertainty. This is because strategic messages that expose people’s collective assumptions point to the contingencies and therefore potential instability of those very assumptions, thereby creating anxiety and uncertainty about the future. This work changes what we know about how strategic communication works in financial markets. Specifically, it challenges the dominant belief held by the Federal Reserve and others that more communication should actually decrease market uncertainty because it presumably conveys new information to market participants. His research has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. After graduating, he will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in their Strategy group.
2016 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Zachary Ross, USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Earth Sciences
Faculty Advisor: Yehuda Ben-Zion
My research is focused on the development and application of tools for efficient extraction of seismological information from large waveform data sets. I employ techniques from statistics and machine learning to automatically process months to years of continuous seismic records and construct databases of relevant seismological measurements. These databases are then used to perform systematic analyses of fault zone structures, detect weakly-recorded microearthquakes, classify seismic phases and identify their onset times, and derive earthquake source properties.
2016 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Arian Saffari, Viterbi School of Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Faculty Advisor: Constantinos Sioutas
Arian Saffari is performing research on urban airborne particulate matter, under supervision of Prof. Sioutas. He joined the Sonny Astani department as a Viterbi fellow on August 2012, after completing his undergraduate studies in Chemical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology (Tehran, Iran). Given the complexity of airborne particles (especially nano-sized ones), Arian’s research employs a combination of field studies, experiments and statistical modeling techniques to identify the major sources/chemical components that drive their toxicity in urban environments in hopes of developing scientific baselines for more targeted and cost-effective air quality regulations in future. He completed his MSc in Environmental Engineering at USC on August 2014 and is currently working on completion of his PhD thesis by exploring the toxicity of airborne particles that is specifically derived from different primary and secondary organic sources. During the last 3 years at USC, Arian has performed studies on multiple urban locations around the world and his research has resulted in 10 peer reviewed journal publications in addition to multiple presentations at conferences. Besides his focused research activities, as a member of USC’s aerosol lab, Arian enjoys collaborating with several health scientists and research groups on multi-disciplinary projects that aim to establish epidemiological and clinical data regarding the multiple pathways through which airborne particles can affect the human health and the environment. Born in Ahvaz, a heavily polluted city in Southwest of Iran, Arian developed his passion of exploring environmental science and engineering in his future career as a researcher from very early years of his life.
2016 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Lin Yang, USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Faculty Advisor: Remo Rohs
Graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China, Lin Yang received the Viterbi Fellowship and joined the program of Molecular and Computational Biology at USC in the fall of 2010. He later joined Professor Remo Rohs’ lab in the summer of 2011. In the Rohs lab, Lin’s research focuses on the study of transcription factor (TF)-DNA binding specificity, i.e., the DNA binding preference of TFs. Specifically, he applied machine learning methods to build quantitative models of TF-DNA binding specificity. In his work, he showed that incorporating DNA “shape” features that characterize the structure of DNA to a model that is purely based on mononucleotide features can significantly boost the model performance, quantitatively demonstrating the importance of “DNA shape readout” by TFs. As a novel computational component in the Abe et al. 2015 Cell paper, Lin used machine learning in combination with feature selection techniques to reveal the DNA shape readout mechanism in Drosophila Hox TFs at base-pair resolution. In 2015, Lin received the international Dan David Prize Scholarship in support of his research project. In the same year, Lin also received the Harrison M. Kurtz Award from the Department of Biological Sciences at USC. In 2014, Lin’s first-author paper, published on the peer-reviewed journal Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), received a RECOMB/ISCB Top-10 Paper Award and was selected as an NAR Breakthrough Article for its originality, significance and scientific impact. Lin defended his dissertation on June 6 th , 2016, with ten published papers listing him as a co-author.
2015 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Avik Halder, USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Physics
Faculty Advisor: Vitaly Kresin
Avik’s research focuses on metal nanocluster particles, also known as “superatoms”, and how to use the clusters to address long-standing challenges in the field of superconductivity (a phenomenon in which current can flow perpetually inside materials without losing energy). The discoveries made during this research were recently published by one of the highest impact-factor journals in nanoscience, Nano Letters. Avik’s work has received wide recognition and he has been recently offered a postdoctoral position in nanocluster research at Argonne National Laboratory. As a long term goal, Avik envisions large-scale use of nanoclusters for mass benefit.
2015 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Constance Iloh, Rossier School of Education, Urban Education Policy
Faculty Advisor: William Tierney
Constance has developed a program of research devoted to two areas: 1) college access for underrepresented students, and 2) the privatization in higher education in general, and for-profit institutions in particular. The research projects she has worked on have resulted in five peer-reviewed journal articles, in addition to book chapters and other scholarly works. Her publications for the past two years have remained in the top 1% of downloaded research on Academia.Edu. Her research has also appeared in popular education outlets such as The Chronicle of Higher Education, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. Constance’s expertise has been requested at nationally recognized invited lectures, panels, webinars and radio broadcasts. In July of this year, Constance will begin the Chancellor’s Advance Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine.
2015 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Farrokh Karimi, Viterbi School of Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Faculty Advisor: Burcin Becerik-Gerber
Farrokh’s academic vision is to move towards the realization of sustainable infrastructure in smart cities, where there is a bi-directional flow of information among facilities, users, and regional infrastructure to achieve cyber-physical systems to enhance urban resiliency. To make this vision a reality, Farrokh’s research has included optimal sensing and actuation techniques, formalizing infrastructures’ operational data management and performance evaluations, quantifying the dynamics of the built environment, and devising effective mechanisms that improve the operations from both energy conservation and operational constraints perspectives at different scales from building/facilities to regional/urban levels. His research has resulted in the publication of eleven peer reviewed journal articles in high impact journals, and thirteen peer reviewed conference publications. Starting in fall 2015, Farrokh will join the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech as an assistant professor.
2015 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Christopher Santiago, USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, English
Faculty Advisor: David St. John
Christopher studies the literature of Asian diasporas and Asian diasporic writers’ responses to the experience of displacement and dispersion. His research and teaching seek to advance diversity in higher education by not only developing new readings of diasporic texts, but by increasing scholarly understanding of the experiences of immigrants, refugees, and other displaced peoples, and by arguing for the indispensability of diasporic literature within a larger literary and social discourse. Christopher has received a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from The Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, fellowships from Kundiman and ACE-Nikaido, multiple Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominations, honorable mentions from the Ford Foundation and Stony brook Short Fiction Contest, and the Manuel G. Flores Award from PAWA, Inc. Christopher’s poems, short stories, and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications including FIELD, Pleiades, Postcolonial Text, The Asian American Literary Review, the Offending Adam, Canteen, Revolver, Kartika Review, and Anamesa. Christopher has accepted an appointment at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English with a specialty in New Media & Digital Arts, beginning in September 2015.
2015 Recipients of the PhD Achievement Award
Amanda Tasse, School of Cinematic Arts, Media Arts & Practices
Faculty Advisor: Steve Anderson
Amanda studies aspects of science and data through the lens of cinematic arts practices to research and develop a new interdisciplinary mode for approaching science communication. She uses arts based research methodologies to evoke multi-layered knowing through embodied, audio-visual, instinctive, and emotional means that mirror a wider range of human experience beyond the purely intellectual. Amanda won the highly competitive USC CS Games Advanced Project grant, which offered her the rare opportunity to oversee a team of 40 designers and engineers to complete work on a large-scale game project titled Miralab and won the Sloan Science Foundation fund, which allowed her to produce a short film, Mira. Amanda is creating a Poetic Science Research Lab to continue researching and developing better methods for communicating insights from science in ways that emphasize and assert the value of cinematic arts based research within scientific communication contexts.
