von der Heyden Fellows Alumni
2025-2026 Fellows
Isabella Bouklas
Sociology
Isabella Bouklas is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at Duke. Her primary research interests involve using quantitative methods and longitudinal data to investigate the pathways by which structural racism impacts health across the life course. Some of these pathways include racial residential segregation, pollution exposure, nutrition access, and incarceration. Her dissertation research examines the joint impacts of racial residential segregation and air pollution exposure on cognitive aging. Prior to arriving at Duke, she earned her BA in sociology and psychology with minors in philosophy and gender studies from Stony Brook University.
Alex Brandli
History
Alex Brandli is a 6th year PhD candidate in the History Department. He holds an MA in History from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. He works on 20th Century Mexican history with an emphasis on LGBTTTQI+ health activism and transnational networks of care. His work has been generously supported by the Fulbright Foundation and Duke’s Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Department. He spent two years conducting research in Mexico City and volunteering for a queer, activist-run archive.
Joe Hiller
Cultural Anthropology
Joseph Hiller is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Anthropology with a Certificate in Feminist Studies. During dissertation fieldwork, he collaborated with the Grupo de Prisiones, a legal clinic at the Facultad de Derecho of La Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. His background is in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (BA, Grinnell College, 2012) and Latin American Studies (MA, Tulane University, 2018). Joseph’s dissertation explores how gender, sexuality, and intimacy structure prison worlds in Colombia. Other interests include weird fiction, the páramo, and trans studies.
Theresa Sambruno Spannhoff
German Studies
Theresa Sambruno Spannhoff is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies, a joint doctoral program between Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently in the fourth year of the program, Theresa is writing the first chapter of her dissertation, tentatively titled “Refuge and its Literary Imagination in the Anthropocene.” Her research focuses on contemporary German-language science fiction and ecocriticism, engaging with posthumanist discourse and its intersections with ecology, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, and refugee studies.
Marcelo Silva
Public Policy
Marcelo Silva is a rising fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the Sanford School of Public Policy. His research focuses on the political and economic drivers of policy solutions to critical 21st-century challenges, including climate change adaptation, poverty alleviation, and the sustainable use of natural resources. With nearly 15 years of professional experience, his work is informed by a multidisciplinary academic background that integrates insights from political science and economics. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in political science from the University of Brasília, as well as a master’s in international affairs with a focus on development economics from the University of California, San Diego.
Danny Tobin
Nicholas School of the Environment
Danny Tobin is a 4th-year PhD student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. His research focuses on Sustainable Development, Evidence-Based Policymaking, Supply Chain Sustainability, Afforestation and Reforestation, Payment for Ecosystem Services, and Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining (ASGM).
His work is driven by a central question: How can improved research-implementation systems catalyze the shift to more prosperous, sustainable landscapes in the Global South? Many global supply chains—whether providing private goods like food and electronics or public goods like biodiversity and carbon—originate in rural regions of the Global South. Yet, rather than leapfrogging the environmental and social harms of past industrialization, production in these areas often replicates patterns of pollution and injustice.
Global cooperation aims to address these challenges, but how often do international interventions cost-effectively generate sustainable development outcomes? Can they be improved? Are there alternative pathways—through NGOs or private enterprises—that foster prosperity and sustainability while preserving local cultures?
To explore these questions, Danny collaborates with multidisciplinary teams across various countries, applying quantitative methods (such as discrete choice modeling, econometric impact evaluations, and simulations) to assess the effects of interventions both prospectively and retrospectively. He also employs qualitative approaches to understand why interventions succeed or fail and how improved systems can lead to better outcomes.
Yaming You
History
Yaming You is a 5th-year PhD candidate from Duke History Department. Her work focuses on the history of medicine, pharmaceuticals, and public health; environmental history; and the Communist Revolution in twentieth-century China. She is currently working on her dissertation titled “The Syringe Body: A Biography of Injection in Modern China.”
You’s focus on history of medicine and pharmacy rethinks historical attempts to provide equitable healthcare and pharmaceutical access to impoverished regions in Communist China from 1940s to 1970s.
2024-2025 Fellows
Karly Alderfer
Literature
Karly Alderfer is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Literature program. Her dissertation is focused on imaginaries of urban futures in literature, as well as state-sponsored and alternative urban planning. Her research brings together the fields of media theory and Global South urban studies.
Dana Grieco
Marine Science and Conservation
Dana I. Grieco is a doctoral candidate in Marine Science and Conservation at the Duke University Marine Lab, where she studies how climate change impacts small-scale, data-poor coral reef fisheries, and identifies how conservation can be leveraged as a tool to mitigate these impacts. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Dana investigates reef fisheries by looking holistically at both the reef fish and dependent communities. The aims of this work are to 1) generate evidence-based insights on how conservation interventions can lead to sustainable outcomes for tropical fishery systems in the face of climate change, 2) advance research methods in coral-reef fishery assessments, and 3) inform fisheries practice.
Ankita Gupta
Nicholas School of the Environment
Ankita Gupta is a 4th year PhD candidate at the Nicholas School of the Environment. Her dissertation aims to understand the role of water availability from irrigation canals in shaping the hydrology and ecological value of small wetlands in a rural agricultural setting. Centered on the wetlands of Gujarat, India, her research employs a mix of field surveys, remote sensing, GIS, and spatial modeling to understand waterbird distribution in relation to land use, water management, and agriculture. This work will highlight the biodiversity value of human-dominated ecosystems and promote conservation efforts that balance biodiversity preservation with natural resource access.
Justin Rasmussen
Clinical Psychology
Justin Rasmussen is a sixth-year clinical psychology PhD candidate working with Dr. Eve. Puffer. His primary interests center on improving access to mental health care in East Africa through professional training and existing community structures. Justin is especially interested in understanding the influence of cultural and social context on mental health promotion and intervention. His dissertation explores the integration of lay counselors into family support networks in a community-delivered family counseling intervention in Eldoret, Kenya.
Wan Ning Seah
Political Science
Wan Ning Seah is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University, specializing in political theory. Her research interests are in religious pluralism and toleration, democratic theory, ancient and early modern political thought, as well as French political thought.
Her dissertation examines the relationship between religious pluralism and regime type, with a focus on how and under what conditions some regimes that do not fit neatly into the category of liberal democracy have managed to sustain religious pluralism.
Drawing from the history of political thought and a comparative analysis of the Roman Empire and Singapore, she explores the various forms that religious pluralism can take and the normative implications of this account of pluralism for our understanding of toleration. Her other work examines the concept of civil religion in Rousseau’s Social Contract. Prior to graduate school, Wan Ning worked as a Foreign Service Officer at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore. She received her B.A. from Middlebury College.
Renzo Severino
Public Policy
Renzo Severino is a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy at Duke University. His research focuses on student minorities within the school system in Peru and their interaction with their peers and other actors in and outside school. Renzo’s dissertation examines the effect of increased immigrant presence in Peruvian high schools on the performance of native students. Additionally, Renzo is a Co-PI in a Randomized Controlled Trial that provides native-language sexual education to communities in rural Peru. Before coming to Duke, Renzo majored in Economics at Universidad del Pacifico.
2023-2024 Fellows
Elizabeth Brown
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Elizabeth Brown is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. Her dissertation, titled The Voracious Appetite of Theaster Gates: Land, Books, Images, and Memorabilia, explores North American artist Theaster Gates and his non-profit ReBuild Foundation, established in 2010. Her dissertation examines the participatory, community-based work of Theaster Gates, whose urban planning and physical transformations of the built environment critically integrate the history of Chicago and its impact on Black cultural life. She also investigates the extension of Gates’s Chicago-based studio practice in all media.
Robin Fail
Marine Science and Conservation
Robin Fail is a PhD candidate in Duke’s Marine Science and Conservation program. Her research is guided by an interest in how social systems and marine ecosystems interact, the governance structures used to moderate those interactions, and the processes for integrating diverse values, knowledge systems, and priorities into policymaking. Her doctoral research focuses on the role of discourse in constituting the politics and policies related to aquaculture development and the equity implications of policy tradeoffs in this sector.
Adrienne Jones
Public Policy and Sociology
Adrienne Jones is a 5th year PhD candidate pursuing degrees in Public Policy and Sociology at Duke University. Her research interests include stratification and inequality which she examines through the lens of employment, training, and public policy. Of particular interest to her research agenda are the employment and training experiences of Black workers in the U.S. South. As an extension of these interests, Adrienne’s dissertation examines how driver’s license suspensions structure opportunities for economic mobility among participants of the Durham Expunction and Restoration Project’s (DEAR) Second Chance Driving program.
Miguel Martinez
Political Science
Miguel Martinez is currently a PhD candidate in the Duke Political Science Department. His research focuses on how Latinx/a/os understand race, their standing in the U.S. racial hierarchy system, and how their conceptualization of race influences their political attitudes and behavior broadly. More specifically, he focuses on experiences of Mexican immigrants. His research question is the following, what role do racial ideologies play in forming the foundation of racial attitudes and behaviors among Mexican immigrants?
Through a comparative lens, Miguel seeks to trace how Mexicans in their home country first become socialized into the racial ideology of mestizaje and how these pre-conceptions of race are challenged, reinforced, and/or transformed when they get socialized in the U.S. Miguel hopes to provide evidence to show that Mexicans are not only victims of discrimination but that they can also embody racial attitudes and politics that illustrate their anti-black racism. In order to achieve global racial justice, it is imperative to challenge the belief that Mexico and other Latin American countries exemplify racial democracies. It is this institutional and social belief that has led to racial inequities within the Mexican community and Latinos at large which results in the marginalization of those who do not fit into this national and social narrative.
Reshma Nargund
Nicholas School of the Environment
Reshma Nargund is a 5th year PhD candidate at the Nicholas School of the Environment. Coming from India where air pollution is a big problem, she is passionate about studying the effects of air pollution on human health. She is also interested in exploring environmental justice issues associated with the disproportionate burden of environmental pollutants in developing countries and low socioeconomic communities.
For her doctoral work, she is focused on understanding the impact of air pollution exposure during pregnancy on the epigenome (gene expression) of the infant and its relationship to birth outcomes and neighborhood disadvantage. She is utilizing data from two independent pregnancy cohorts based in Florida (led by Sara Johnson at Johns Hopkins University) and in North Carolina (led by Cathrine Hoyo at NC State University) that are collectively funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities for the purposes of better understanding the role of maternal stress and her early life adverse events on her child’s epigenome. She is co-advised by Dr. Susan Murphy and Dr. William Pan from Duke University.
SaeHim Park
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
SaeHim Park is a doctoral candidate in Art, Art History & Visual Studies with graduate certificates in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies and East Asian Studies at Duke University. She is writing her dissertation “Imaging ‘Comfort Women’: Girl Statue of Peace in the Expanded Field.”