Ben ‘s area of scholarship is inorganic chemistry. He researches the characteristics of ruthenium complexes. He irradiates these complexes with UV light in order to cleave DNA. Applications of Ben’s investigation include DNA labeling and anti-cancer research.

According to Ben, Bryn Mawr offers something special: the opportunity to work closely, one-on-one with faculty as colleagues. Together, faculty and students approach a problem, exchange ideas about solutions and value each other’s contributions. For Ben, these relationships help graduate students learn to think more dynamically about their research and build confidence in their work.

Beth’s clinical and research interests lie in the treatment and study of anxiety disorders in both children and adults.  At Bryn Mawr she reports getting excellent training in research and clinical work. Practicums in particular have been invaluable training experiences. For Beth, faculty-mentors at Bryn Mawr offer the support, encouragement and networking opportunities that open doors to exciting practicum placements. This year, Beth holds two placements. At the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, she is working with adults and children with post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and social anxiety, among other anxiety disorders. At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she provides psycho-education to families of children newly diagnosed with cancer.

Steve’s area of scholarship is archaeology of Late Bronze Age Turkey. Steve has spent the summers of 2009 and 2010 with the Tarsus-Gozlüküle Project in Turkey, where he worked as trench supervisor. There, he has been excavating materials dating from the early Islamic period to the second millennium B.C. Steve is passionate about archaeology and the use of material culture – ceramics, in particular – to reconstruct the past.

At Bryn Mawr he has joined a strong academic tradition in prehistoric Mediterranean archaeology. Steve was drawn to Bryn Mawr’s graduate program because of the rich legacy of former faculty and the reputation of current faculty. Indeed, Tarsus-Gozlüküle has a strong link to Bryn Mawr: the late M.J. Mellink, faculty member, was a major contributor to the site, and Asli Ozyar, alumna of the College’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is the current director.

Melanie’s area of scholarship is the physics of dance. She studies the mechanics of balance in the pirouette, a turning technique in ballet. From different angles, Melanie videotapes dancers performing pirouettes on a wooden platform equipped with sensors that measure horizontal forces. She then analyzes the dancers’ movements to determine if balance is best achieved through subtle adjustments of a dancer’s center of mass (torso) or a dancer’s point of support (foot).

For Melanie, Bryn Mawr offers the perfect environment for individualized research and an opportunity to pursue graduate-level research in a nontraditional topic. In fact, faculty support of individualized research is one of the reasons Melanie chose to apply to Bryn Mawr’s graduate program in Physics.

Marie ‘s area of scholarship is the 20^th– century Russian painter Kazimir Malevich and the approximately 40 works included in Malevich’s 1929 Moscow exhibition. Marie is examining the images within the paintings, the political climate of Russia in 1929 and Malevich’s artistic reactions to the emerging totalitarianism in the time of Stalin.

She describes her Bryn Mawr experience as intellectually rewarding. She values the quality of her well-respected graduate program, the student-focused environment, the interdisciplinary faculty support and the opportunity to pursue her own, personally-designed path of scholarship.

Marie is one of four Bryn Mawr graduate students to receive the prestigious Mrs. Giles Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities this year. The Whiting Fellowships support students in the last stages of completing their Ph.D.s and are available only to students at the University of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale…and Bryn Mawr. What good company!