Awards and Fellowships
Excellence in Discovery and Creative Endeavors (EIDCE)
2025
Michael Bergmann
Michael Bergmann is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, where he began his career in 1997, the same year he received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. In addition to numerous grants and fellowships as well as dozens of articles in epistemology and philosophy of religion, he has published six books with Oxford University Press—he is the author of Justification without Awareness (2006) and Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition (2021); and he’s a co-editor of Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (2011), Challenges to Moral and Religious Belief (2014), Reason and Faith (2016), and Intellectual Assurance: Essays on Traditional Epistemic Internalism (2016).
Bryce Dietrich
Dr. Dietrich ("DEE-trik") joined Purdue's Department of Political Science in 2022 after spending five years at the University of Iowa. His research uses novel quantitative, automated, and machine learning methods to analyze non-traditional data sources such as audio (or speech) data and video data. These methods are used to understand the causes and consequences of non-verbal political behavior, such as vocal inflections and walking trajectories.
His work has appeared in the Nature, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Political Psychology. This work has also received over a million dollars in grant support from major organizations such as NIH and NSF, and has been covered by popular outlets like NPR, BBC, The Economist, and The Washington Post.
Javier Gomes-Lavin
Javier Gomez-Lavin is an assistant professor with the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University whose research lies at the intersection of cognitive science, moral psychology, and philosophy of mind and serves as the director of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) and the College of Liberal Arts’ Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) Labs.
Javier’s interdisciplinary work blends methods from experimental social psychology and analytical philosophy of science to help detail the multifaceted ways that cognition both shapes and is shaped by our social, aesthetic, and moral worlds.
Prior to coming to Purdue, Javier was a sessional assistant professor with the Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Program at York University in Toronto. From 2018 to 2021, Javier held a Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.
Shan Zhou
Shan Zhou is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Purdue. Zhou’s research focuses on the design, evaluation, and equity implications of clean energy policy. She employs a mixed-methods approach to analyze diverse data sources, including renewable energy deployment data, energy policy texts, environmental quality indicators, and demographic information. Her work has been generously supported by both internal and external sponsors, including NOAA, NASA and Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and has been published in leading public policy and sustainability journals, such as PNAS, Policy Studies Journal, Energy Policy, and Journal of Cleaner Production. Zhou holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Beijing Normal University and both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
2024
Christie Sennott
Dr. Christie Sennott is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her research addresses two key questions: 1) How do social, cultural, and institutional factors shape sexual and reproductive health and family formation processes? 2) How are these experiences gendered?
She has conducted research in a variety of international contexts in sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa, Malawi), Asia (South Korea, India), and the United States. Her multi-method research combines statistical analyses of large-scale longitudinal databases following thousands of individuals over time with in-depth interview data on the lived experiences of individuals.
Jennifer Scheuer
Jennifer Scheuer is an assistant professor in the Patti & Rusty Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance.Scheuer is a visual artist who creates artwork utilizing printmaking and book arts. Her artistic research includes themes of the human body, history, gender, spirituality, and medicine. Recent artwork and lectures focus on the Doctrine of Signatures, a theory that the interconnections of the world are reflected visually and reflect different forms of knowledge.
She is a 2022 recipient of the DeHaan Artist of Distinction award from the Indianapolis Arts Council. Scheuer exhibits her work nationally and internationally, and has attended artist residencies in Germany, Poland, Canada, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Scheuer holds a graduate degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (MFA in Studio Arts: Printmaking), an undergraduate degree from Minnesota State University Moorhead (BFA in Studio Art: Printmaking), and attended the Tamarind Institute Professional Printmaking Program in Albuquerque, NM.
Jonathan Lande
Jonathan Lande’s research focuses on the US Civil War, especially the experiences of Black soldiers and the role of military law in disciplining the US Army during the war. He has held fellowships at institutions including the New-York Historical Society, Harvard University, and most recently, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
His work has appeared in, among other publications, The Journal of American History, The Journal of African American History, and The Washington Post. His forthcoming book, Freedom Soldiers (Oxford University Press), explores the lives of formerly enslaved soldiers who fought for liberation in military camps, courts, and prisons.
Li Zhang
Li Zhang is a professor of Visual Communication Design at Purdue University, a director at the China Europe International Design Culture Association, and an internationally recognized designer, speaker, and
Juror. Professor Zhang has been designated as a Fellow Expert of the China Foreign Experts Bureau, an Honorary Professor at five universities, an Olympic research fellow and consultant at the Art Research
Centre for the Olympic Games in Beijing, China, and an A’Design Grand Jury Panel member. Prof. Zhang’s work transcends cultural and geographical boundaries through its compelling visual language. Her designs, often centered on global issues such as terrorism, cultural connections across continents,
unique perspectives, and discussions about peace and freedom, offer profound insights and provoke
thoughtful discourse worldwide.
Dean's Faculty Research Fellowship
2025-2026
Kathryn Maxson Jones
Kathryn Maxson Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History. Her research and teaching span the histories of science, technology, and medicine and related policy issues.
Dr. Maxson Jones plans to use her fellowship to bring to fruition two books and catapult research on forthcoming projects. The first book, Sea Change: The Squid Giant Axon and the Transformation of Neurobiology in the 20th Century, explores the intertwined histories of aquatic organisms, seaside laboratories, and biophysical and biochemical studies of nerves. Her second book examines shifting assumptions regarding the medical value of experiments with non-human, regenerating nerves, looking at the 19th through the 21st centuries. Taken together, these books provide fresh perspectives on how biology can impact medicine.
2024-2025
Javier Gomez-Lavin
Javier Gomez-Lavin is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University whose research lies at the intersection of cognitive science, moral psychology, and philosophy of mind.
During the fellowship, Dr. Lavin will be working on several large grant proposals related to his work on AI and VR, and he's finishing a draft of a manuscript that extends work done during his dissertation on working memory. He will also complete a series of journal articles in the new fields of computational philosophy of science and experimental philosophy.
Distinguished Dissertation Award
Chen Yang
Dr. Chen Yang is currently an Assistant Professor at Hunan University in China. He graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University in May, 2024. His research interests are German Idealism and History of Philosophy of Science.
In his dissertation, Dr. Yang interprets Hegel's concept of infinity, reconstructs the corresponding arguments, and then applies it to resolve certain difficulties in contemporary Philosophy of Mathematics. He aims to revise this dissertation for publication.
Lama Elsharif
Lama Elsharif is a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East and North Africa. She earned her Ph.D. in History from Purdue University and holds an M.A. in Diplomatic Studies and International Relations from the University of Jordan. Her research focuses on the intersections of environmental, economic, and maritime history in the Ottoman regencies of North Africa throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Her dissertation, “Small Wars of Scarcity: North African Corsairs in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century,” investigates the surge in sea raiding activities by the Ottoman regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers between 1776 and 1816. Lama connects this surge to severe local environmental conditions, such as droughts, epidemics, and famines, which triggered widespread economic decline, revolts and administrative turmoil. She argues that these raids were not, as traditional narratives suggest, merely opportunistic actions taken during Europe’s distraction with the Napoleonic Wars, but rather a strategic effort by the North African rulers to address environmental and economic challenges and maintain control.
OGSPS Mentoring Award for Graduate Students
2024
Rosaline Adewuyi
Graduate Student Excellence in Research Award (GSEIR)
2024
Rebecca Martinez - Anthropology
"Spaces of Possibilities: An Exploration of Worldmaking"
Blake Boyd - Communication
"Toward an Affective Theory of Inoculation"
Matthew Morgenstern - English
"Climate Solutions and Genre Politics in Contemporary Fiction"
Edier Alzate - Interdisciplinary Studies
"The Acquisition of Adverb Placement in Spanish Heritage Speakers and L2 Learners: Mapping the Path and Rate of Development"
Andrew Kroninger - Languages and Cultures
"Downfall and Xenophobia: Dostoevsky and European Modernism"