With Ph.D.s and Master's in Hand, These 11 Grads Are Going Places

From research on Black stories of liberation in the Caribbean to the “wonder material” of graphene, the Class of 2021 graduates have overcome incredible odds to complete their dissertations and push scholarship in their fields forward. Their rewards include exciting work as tenure-track faculty, senior positions at startups, and researchers at some of the world’s biggest companies. Join us in celebrating these scholars and their accomplishments: 

Allison Guess (Earth and Environmental Sciences) focuses on Black-led responses to attempts of European conquest in the Caribbean and will continue that work in a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Williams College.

For her dissertation, Sandra Castro (Social Welfare) studied immigrant mothers on Long Island who came to the U.S. from Central America without their children, parented them from afar, and then finally reunited with them.  She was recently named assistant dean of undergraduate programs in Adelphi’s College of Professional Continuing Studies.  

Raj Korpan (Ph.D. '21, Computer Science) studied artificial intelligence systems for robots to navigate indoors and will start a new role as a tenure-track assistant professor at Iona College. 
 

Siqi Tu (Sociology) focused her research on Chinese “parachute students”: teenagers who leave their parental homes to attend U.S. high schools. She is continuing her timely work as a postdoctoral research fellow at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and will start as a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai this fall.
 

Conner Martinez completed his master's in Political Science and plans to study anti-immigration policies and their impact on U.S. politics and on Latinx political involvement in his doctoral research at Notre Dame.

Roxana Piotrowska (Chemistry) focused her research on how peptides could harness the power of evaporation. She will continue focusing on  peptides to create new components for cosmetics for Estée Lauder.

Andrew Levine (Chemistry) developed an expertise in organic nanomaterials, such as the “wonder material” graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of carbon atom that’s stronger than steel, harder than diamond, and more elastic than rubber. He landed a position as the new research development director at the startup Green Graphene Inc.

Katherine Entigar (Urban Education) starts a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Toronto where they will continue their work on immigrant justice and multilingualism and multiculturalism in adult education.
 

Vianny Lugo, who earned a master’s in Data Analysis and Visualization, has already joined the analytics team at Teachers Pay Teachers, an edtech company.
 

Seth Schimmel, also in the master’s in Data Analysis and Visualization program, has already been working at Open Society Foundations as a data support specialist. 
 

With her Ph.D. completed, Eileen Gonzales (Physics) will continue her research on brown dwarfs at Cornell funded by a prestigious 51 Pegasi b Fellowship, which provides up to $375,000.