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2013 Fellows

Erin Butler

Mentors:  Sol Diamond, Engineering; James Haxby, Psychological and Brain Sciences

Erin is interested in the neural reorganization related to sensory and motor impairments among children with cerebral palsy. In collaboration with researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, Erin uses various neuroimaging techniques, including magnetoencephalography, diffusion tensor imaging, and resting-state functional MRI, to investigate the reorganization of the somatosensory and motor systems among children with cerebral palsy. The ultimate goal of this work is to inform the development of new treatments for children with cerebral palsy. Erin holds an appointment as a Visiting Scientist in Newborn Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and is a Fellow of the American Academy for Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine.

Teaching

  • Informal only - Scientific Communication w/Eng 86 and 88: Independent Project and Senior Thesis

Publications

Michael Evans

Mentors: Mark Williams, Film and Media Studies; Denise Anthony, Sociology; Lucas Swaine, Government

To understand how culture and democracy fit together, Michael studies the public intersections of science, religion, media and politics. His forthcoming book from University of California Press uses qualitative and computational methods to connect apparent conflicts between religion and science to deeper conflicts in American democracy. His current main project examines the recent and sharp rise of "anti-science" accusations in public life. He also collaborates on projects involving large-scale knowledge systems (such as Wikipedia). Recent articles have appeared in PLOS ONE, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and SAGE Open.

In addition to research, Michael is committed to excellence in teaching and learning. His courses on Science and Religion in American Media pioneered digital badging at Dartmouth College, and he was recently an invited speaker at the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching's national forum on digital badging. Michael presents regularly at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, and continues to collaborate with Dartmouth colleagues on the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Teaching

Publications

Mark Laidre

Mentors: Ryan Calsbeek, Biology; Michael Herron, Government

Mark is broadly interested in the intersection of behavior, ecology, and evolution. His research combines field and laboratory experiments with theoretical modeling and computational simulations to understand the evolutionary and ecological forces that shape animal behavior, especially social behavior, in taxa ranging from invertebrates to humans.

Teaching:

  • Fall 2014 – 'Organisms that Change their World'

Allen Riddell

Mentors: Colleen Boggs, English; Klaus Mladek, German Studies; Dan Rockmore, Math and Computer Science

Allen is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University. His research explores how historians might use statistics and machine learning to study collections of tens of thousands of text documents – including books, academic journal articles, and newspapers. Allen's recent work uses Bayesian models of text corpora to investigate trends in the nineteenth-century British novel and to study the development of German Studies in the United States between 1920 and 2000. He will graduate in May 2013 with degrees in literature and statistics.

Allen states, "While at Dartmouth I would continue research for my next project on the contribution of quantitative analysis of bibliographic data to the history of copyright in the nineteenth century. Some part of my time at Dartmouth would be devoted to revising my dissertation into a book manuscript, destined for an audience in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. I would also spend time expanding portions of my dissertation for an audience in statistics, comparative biology, and quantitative anthropology."

Teaching

  • ENGL 55.5 / Math 5: Machine Readings: Text Analysis in the Information Age
  • Text and Data Mining: Projects, tools and student engagement

Seminars  

  • Modeling the History of the American Judiciary

Papers & Publications

Talks

  • The History of the Novel in the Age of Library Digitization, Indiana University, Feb 1, 2016
  • Beyond Micro and Macro: Reassembling the Novel,'' Lehrstuhl für Computerphilologie, University of Würzburg, (December 9, 2015)
  • Distant Reading the English Novel,'' Keynote, Digital Humanities Day 2015, University of Groningen (30 October, 2015).
  • Reassembling the Novel, 1789-1914'' New Trends in e-Humanities Seminar, e-Humanities Group, KNAW (October 15, 2015).

Kes Schroer

Mentors: Laura Ogden, Anthropology; Mark McPeek, Biology

Kes Schroer investigates the impact of competition on human evolution. Her work focuses on interspecific competition and the ecological pressures that can occur between species sharing the same habitat and resources. Her research spans human and hominin communities from 3 million years ago to the present and uses a combination of field and computational approaches. In 2014 and 2015, she published the results of character displacement analyses that suggest early humans and the extinct hominin group Paranthropus directly competed for food in East Africa and that this competition likely contributed to the particularly small teeth of humans today. Currently, Schroer is building an ecological niche model that combines both dietary and climatic information in order to pinpoint where ancient humans and Paranthropus lived in East Africa and estimate the geographic extent of overlap between these two groups. Her approach has implications for understanding how humans diverged from their close relatives, where and how hybridization may have occurred between different hominin groups, and how humans and nonhuman primates continue to compete for resources today.

Schroer’s work has been featured in the Journal of Anatomy, the journal Evolution, and the International Journal of Primatology. Her popular course “Your Inner Chimpanzee”, which investigates the tenuous biological line between humans and apes, was featured in Dartmouth Now. She is a research mentor in the Women in Science Project, Sophomore Scholars, and Neukom Scholars programs at Dartmouth and serves as a guest lecturer in the Anthropology in Action series. Schroer is a featured speaker and panelist at Dartmouth’s Center for the Advanced of Learning (DCAL) on the topics of science communication and open science/open access. Her commitment to open science resulted in an invitation to participate in the National Science Foundation’s Data and Software Citation Workshop in 2015, which worked toward new standards for federally-funded scientific research.

Publications

  • Schroer K and Patterson D.. Isotopic and morphological signals of dietary competition among fossil hominins and Theropithecus in East Africa, c. 2.5-1.4 million years ago. Journal of Human Evolution.
  • Schroer K, Gordon A, and Richmond B.. How long were australopith toes? Journal of Humn Evolution. 
  • Dartmouth NOW  Students Go Climbing in the Footsteps of Chimpanzees