Category Archives: Current Students

Xiao Wang, PhD candidate in Physics, is lead author of new article in Applied Physics Letters

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Xiao Wang is the first author of a new study published in the online journal, Applied Physics Letters, “Time-resolved photoemission electron microscopy imaging of mode coupling between three interacting magnetic vortices” (Vol. 105, Issue 10). Xuemei May Cheng, Professor of Physics at Bryn Mawr College, served as the correspondence author.

The experimental part of this work was done at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

Summer Internship Spotlight: Charlie Kuper

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Photo caption: A rare depiction of a Byzantine school (from the Madrid Skylitzes).

This past summer Charlie Kuper (PhD Candidate, MA 2013) participated in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Greek Summer School in Washington, DC. The focus of this school was its daily translation sessions from a wide variety of both prose and poetic texts from the 4th through the 15th centuries, including orations of Gregory of Nazianzus, Athonite legal documents, and excerpts from the epic poem Digenes Akrites. The program also included a mini-course on Greek paleography, in which participants studied the most important majuscule and minuscule Greek scripts and were able to view some of the facsimiles in the Dumbarton Oaks collection.  During his time in Washington, Charlie was also able to finish one of his current side projects, the first modern language translation of the Life of St. Martha (early 7th century) under the guidance of the faculty there.

Summer Internship Spotlight: Kathryn Bryant and Hannah Schwartz

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Pictured: Kathryn Bryant at CTY with her class, flashing the “theorem proved” sign!

Mathematics graduate students Hannah Schwartz and Kathryn Bryant served as teaching assistants for the Center for Talented Youth (CTY). CTY brings exceptionally bright middle- and high-schoolers together for three-week intensive academic programs. Graduate students, professors, teachers, and other professionals then teach undergraduate-level courses to these students, who are between 12 and 16 years of age. It is an internationally renowned program, and there are sites located at colleges and universities all around the U.S.. Hannah worked nearby at Haverford College for a program that explored the relevance of Math in Art; Kathryn participated in the program at Johns Hopkins University focusing on Mathematical Logic.

Hannah and Kathryn also attended a week-long workshop at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University. The topic was Combinatorial Link Homology Theories, Braids, and Contact Geometry, which relates both to Hannah’s masters’ research and Kathryn’s doctoral research.

Summer Internship Spotlight: Zachary Silvia

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This past summer, Zachary Silvia served as the trench supervisor at the Tarsus – Gözlükule site under the direction of Aslı Özyar, Boğaziçi University. The archaeological excavation at Tarsus – Gözlükule, located in the Mersin province of Southern Turkey, is a mound site of the well-known ancient city of Tarsus located in the Cilician Plain. The site features material from the Neolithic to early Islamic periods without any major break in habitation.

The site was first excavated in the 1930’s and 1940’s by Bryn Mawr College under the direction of Hetty Goldman. The site is now excavated as a collaborative effort between Boğaziçi University and Bryn Mawr College under the direction of Bryn Mawr alum Aslı Özyar.

Each dig season students from Bryn Mawr, such as Zachary, are asked to join an international team of students and researchers for six weeks in the field to contribute to our ongoing understanding of this extremely significant ancient city. The 2014 excavation season specifically focused on Late Bronze Age, Early Roman, Late Roman, and Abbasid period material culture.

The excavation integrates members of the Tarsus community into the project, which according to Zachary, is of equal importance to the excavated material itself. He sees it not just as an effort to encourage a localized sense of cultural heritage and place, but also as an opportunity to bring students from entirely different cultural and social backgrounds together to build a sense of shared world heritage and camaraderie with individuals local to Tarsus.

For more information about the Tarsus site, visit: http://www.tarsus.boun.edu.tr

Summer Internship Spotlight: Michelle Smiley

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This summer, Michelle Smiley served as a graduate student intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she worked in the department of photography under curator Diane Waggoner. Michelle spent much of her time doing research for an upcoming exhibit of nineteenth-century photography on the east coast of the United States, titled “East of the Mississippi” (forthcoming, fall 2016). In particular, she researched individual photographers like William Herman Rau, a photographer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Henry Peter Bosse, a German-American photographer who served in the United States Corps of Engineers out of Rock Island, Illinois. Bosse photographed the development of the Mississppi in the 1880s and 1890s.

Above, Michelle can be seen cataloguing one of the twenty Bosse cyanotypes given to the National Gallery of Art. These are all part of the series “Views on the Mississippi River” which were displayed as an album at the 1893-94 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

The prestigious internship program at the National Gallery of Art also includes bi-weekly seminars that introduce the interns to all aspects of museum work, from library image collections, to curatorial, to the director’s office.