School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 51-100 of 1,319 Results
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David Timothy Bates
Ph.D. Student in Education, admitted Autumn 2022
Master of Arts Student in Sociology, admitted Autumn 2025
Research Assistant, Artiles ProgramBioDavid T. Bates is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Education program at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the institutional change of universities owing to the emergence of the human sciences from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. As part of this research agenda, his dissertation explores how computer science became an undergraduate major. Previously, he worked in civic education and taught in elementary schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Boston, Massachusetts. He has degrees from the University of Rochester, the University of Chicago, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Farah Bazzi
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
BioFarah Bazzi was born in Lebanon and raised in The Netherlands. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in early modern global history at Stanford University. Farah’s work attempts to bridge both Mediterranean and Atlantic history by focusing on how objects, people, and imaginations moved between the Ottoman world, Morocco, Iberia, and the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Furthermore, Farah’s research interests include environmental thought, race, indigeneity, cosmology, cartography, and technologies of conquest. In her dissertation, Farah looks at the expulsion of the moriscos and their presence in the Americas, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire from a socio-environmental perspective. In addition to this, Farah is interested the construction of Al-Andalus as an aesthetically appealing, pursuable, and transplantable natural and racialized landscape in Spanish, Arabic, and Ottoman sources.
Currently, Farah is one of the project founders and managers of the ‘Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic’ project sponsored by CESTA, the History Department, and the Division of Languages and Cultures. She is also the graduate coordinator for the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) at Stanford and the Graduate Student Counselor (director) on the board of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA). -
Rodrigo Bello Carvalho
Ph.D. Student in Biology, admitted Autumn 2023
BioI am a field biologist deeply passionate about wildlife ecology and conservation. My academic and professional journey bridges research, fieldwork, and environmental stewardship across some of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems.
My work focuses on understanding the functional role of megafauna (large-bodied vertebrates) in shaping tropical ecosystems through processes such as frugivory, herbivory, and seed dispersal. I am particularly interested in how savanna biodiversity, structure, and functioning respond to the loss of megafauna (defaunation), and how ecological insights can inform restoration and conservation strategies in a rapidly changing world.
I hold a Master’s degree in Biodiversity Conservation and Management from the University of Oxford (2021), and graduated with honors in Biological Sciences (B.Sc., 2017) and Biology Teaching (B.Ed., 2018) from the University of Brasília (UnB). My ecological journey began at UnB’s Ecosystem Ecology Lab (2014–2018) under Prof. Mercedes Bustamante, where I first engaged with Cerrado ecology and savanna dynamics.
Driven by a commitment to applied conservation, I worked at the Brasília Zoological Garden Foundation (2018) and taught Science and Biology in Brasília’s private schools (2019), experiences that deepened my belief in connecting ecological science and conservation with communities.
At Oxford’s Ecosystems Lab (2020–2021), I studied defaunation and seed dispersal in the Cerrado, working under Dr. Imma Oliveras and Prof. Yadvinder Malhi. I later joined Brazil’s national environmental agency (ICMBio) as an Environmental Analyst and Park Ranger (2022–2023), where I was based in the Western Brazilian Amazon, engaging in biodiversity monitoring, sustainable management of natural resources, and frontline conservation enforcement of three Conservation Units within the Purus River Basin.
Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in Biology at Stanford University in the Dirzo Lab, where my research explores megafauna-ecosystem interactions across Brazilian and African savannas, with a focus on how defaunation reshapes ecosystems. I also collaborate with UNESP’s Bird Ecology Lab on frugivory, seed dispersal, and ecological restoration in the Atlantic Forest. -
Aaron Breidenbach
Ph.D. Student in Physics, admitted Autumn 2019
BioHello!
In my physics PhD at Stanford, I grew crystals of Zn-Barlowite. These crystals are strong candidates to be a new state of magnetic matter called a “quantum spin liquid”. Much of my thesis work was dedicated to proving that these materials have novel quantum magnetic properties through neutron scattering. This work resulted in a nature physics paper that is currently generating a lot of buzz within my subfield of condensed matter physics (https://arxiv.org/html/2504.06491v1).
This novel state of matter is interesting to us because it is a strong candidate to store memory in future large-scale quantum computers. I did some calculations, and I think that it takes roughly 10^19 bits of information to faithfully represent the intricate internal quantum magnetic state. For comparison, the human brain encodes about 10^16 bits of information.
What’s most fascinating to me about these quantum spin liquid crystals is that they also grow in nature. I will emphasize that this is absolutely anomalous for a material with such unique quantum properties. The vast majority of materials grown by my colleagues at Stanford are specifically engineered by any means necessary to have exotic quantum properties like high temperature superconductivity. My materials are arguably among the most exotic grown at Stanford, and yet they grow naturally all over the world.
Unfortunately, these crystals are currently found in waste tailings of copper mines in the Atacama desert, a cruel irony of over-extraction. My main project now is to study natural specimen and to help improve desert conditions from both an anthropological and geological perspective. Water rights remain a key issue in the Atacama, and unfortunately, mining practices have greatly elevated local arsenic levels, among other concerns. My dream is that in helping to clean up the desert that I can learn something about the future of quantum computing.
I don't update this profile very much. Please see my linked website to follow my work! -
Sinead Brennan-McMahon
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2019
BioSinead is an ABD PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and is expecting to complete her dissertation in 2024. Her research investigates ancient Roman sexual culture and where it shows up in the landscape. It focuses on displays of sexuality that do not match up to any social or political identities, including statues of Priapus, emperors portrayed as sexual aggressors and agricultural language adopted as sexual slang.
Sinead comes from Auckland, New Zealand, where she received her M.A. with First Class Honours. Her M.A. thesis examined the reception of Martial’s sexually obscene homosexual epigrams in school texts and commentaries. Using a comprehensive statistical analysis, she argued that Victorian editors of Martial’s Epigrams expurgated the text to remove references to material they found offensive and to curate a culturally appropriate view of the ancient world for their schoolboy readers.
Sinead is also interested in the Digital Humanities, Data Science and programming. As a CESTA DH Graduate Fellow, she is developing an ngram viewer tool for the Latin literary canon.
