Ahmed Alaa,
Computational Precision Health
Understanding the Cardioprotective Role of GLP-1 Therapies using Causal Deep Learning
Professor Alaa’s research focuses on developing and applying machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to advance health care. This includes developing new model architectures and algorithms that can distinguish between spurious correlations in real-world data and true causal mechanisms underlying human disease His Hellman award will go towards uncovering how GLP-1-based therapies can affect outcomes of heart failure patients by understanding their underlying mechanisms using large-scale proteomics.
Rosemarie de la Rosa,
Public Health
Examining Associations Between Blood Lead Levels and Asthma Among Children in Oakland, California
Professor de la Rosa’s primary research goal is to understand how the social environment and context during childhood “gets under the skin” and influences susceptibility to the toxic effects of environmental pollutants over the life course. With the support of the Hellman Fellowship, de la Rosa will be focusing on how improving our understanding of the specific environmental hazards present in Oakland that influence asthma risk will enable us to pinpoint targets for mitigation interventions, thereby improving respiratory health outcomes in this community.
Georgios Eftaxiopoulos,
Architecture
Building Certainty
Professor Eftaxiopoulos research and teaching investigates historical and contemporary spaces, processes and networks of extraction and accumulation. His Hellman project studies the architectural innovations, skills and craftsmanship of a group of paradigmatic bottom-up architectures of storage that may act not only as local mechanisms of risk management but as instruments of autonomy and empowerment.
Rachel Gershon,
Business
The Paradox of Plenty: How Unlimited Access Can Reduce Consumer Usage
Professor Gershon’s research develops insights into consumer judgments and choice with an emphasis on social and prosocial behavior. Funding from the Hellman Award for her project will go towards understanding the psychological and behavioral effects of access limits on consumer behavior.
Micah Khater, 
African American and African Diaspora Studies
Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins, and Genealogies of Escape
Professor Khater’s research focuses on how Black women experienced, theorized, and resisted biopolitical and carceral regimes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Her Hellman project and first book, Vanishing Points, excavates the significance of fugitivity after Emancipation and the end of slavery as a window into the evolving carceral state and its geographic capacities. Through the fugitive acts and embodiments of incarcerated black women, the project maps how the new southern prison, after the end of convict leasing, repurposed and invoked specific surveillance practices from slavery as a response to the endurance of black fugitivity in contravention of borders, walls, and police.
Michael Lindsey, 
Mathematics
Constructing and Leveraging Fast Adaptive Discretizations for Electronic Structure
Professor Lindsey works on computational methods driven by numerical linear algebra, optimization, and randomization, with a special focus on high-dimensional scientific computing problems. His Hellman award will go towards research to construct single-electron discretizations that yield highly structured quantum chemistry Hamiltonians. The project also hopes to leverage the structure within the paradigms of several of the most promising many-body methods for solving strongly correlated systems.
Wenblin Lu, 
Astronomy
Surprising Outcomes of Neutron Stars Born in Binary Systems
Professor Lu research interests are in high-energy transient phenomena — the sources that suddenly show up luminously on the sky and then quickly fade away — including fast radio bursts, tidal disruption events, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, compact object mergers. His Hellman project focuses on leading to a transformative understanding of the interactions between a newborn neutron star and its companion star immediately following a supernova explosion.
Cassondra Marshall, 
Public Health
Evaluating an Interprofessional Collaboration Between a Community Doula Organization and Clinical Partners
Professor Marshall works through her Hellman project on advancing maternal health equity by examining barriers and facilitators to the implementation of a novel initiative aimed at promoting doula-clinician collaboration across community-based and clinical settings with a focus on accountability and quality improvement. Additionally, her research interests are in quality family planning care, community-based doula care, person-centered care, inequities in patient experiences and outcomes, and partnered and engaged research.
Ahmad Omar,
Materials Science & Engineering
Bringing Thermodynamics to Life
Professor Omar’s research aims to advance our theoretical understanding of both natural and synthetic soft condensed matter systems. His group leverages the tools of statistical mechanics, continuum mechanics and computer simulation to bridge microscopic details with the emergent properties and phenomena displayed by these systems. The Hellman award will go towards the Omar group’s efforts to extend the concepts of thermodynamics to living systems that are far from equilibrium.
Rahul Parson,
South and Southeast Asian Studies
Calcutta’s Raking Lights: Marwaris and Hindi Literature in New India
Professor Parson’s area of specialization is Hindi literature and literary history, with a particular emphasis on Hindi movements in Bengal. His Hellman project will be focused on the development of his book Calcutta’s Raking Lights: Marwaris and Hindi Literature in New India.
Carolyn Stein,
Business
Discrimination in Innovation and Job Design
Professor Stein’s research focuses on the economics of science and innovation. Her Hellman project is interested in whether the design of tools and jobs favors certain groups over others, and how this concept should fit into the economic framework of discrimination. Specifically, this project will focus on the development of surgical tools, studying whether their design favors men, who have historically dominated the field (and make up 80% of surgeons today in the US).
Jingshen Wang 
Biostatistics
Synthetic Biomarker Creation with Generative AI for Diagnosing and Treating Neurodegenerative Diseases
Professor Wang’s Hellman project focuses on using generative AI models to create synthetic biomarkers when the ground truth biomarkers are challenging to obtain due to the invasive nature of the radioligand injection needed for the imaging, the high costs associated with the procedure, and the requirement for significant infrastructure that is not readily available in resource-constrained healthcare settings.
Omar Wasow,
Political Science
American Ethnic Violence Lab
Professor Wasow research focuses on race, politics and statistical methods. His Hellman research project aims to conduct analyses to better understand the origins and effects of inter-ethnic antipathy and violence as observed and researched in other countries of having long-term effects.
Francis Annan, 
Agriculture and Resource Economics
Using Monitoring Technologies to Improve Public Distribution Programs
Professor Annan's research centers on development economics and microeconomic issues, with a focus on digital financial markets, public distribution programs, insurance, and firms in sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. For his Hellman project, Professor Annan seeks to investigate firm misconduct and how monitoring technologies strengthen government capacity to directly redistribute transport costs in a very large public program for petroleum products in Ghana.
Patrice Douglass,
Gender and Women's Studies
Race and Abortion Ethics: Antiblackness and the Opacity of Liberty
Professor Douglass' Hellman project focuses on shifting reproductive politics away from stratified debates by interrogating abortion as a politically and socially mediated decision concretized by racial histories that situate ongoing material imperatives relating to bodily autonomy and reproductive health necessities.
Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi,
Civil and Environmental Engineering
Enhancing Climate Change Insights through Advanced Understanding of Greenhouse Gas Dynamics in Ecosystems
Professor Gerlein-Safdi’s research spans a broad range of ecosystems and methods to provide new insight into natural environments and the mechanisms driving their water and carbon fluxes. With the Hellman award, her project will bridge the information gap on water and carbon cycles in remote areas using new products developed from new or underused satellite missions.
Kosa Goucher-Lambert,
Mechanical Engineering
What Does It Mean To Be “Creative” in an Era Of Engineering Design Fueled By Generative AI? Method Development and User Study
Professor Goucher-Lambert’s research in design theory, methodology, and automation combines techniques from cognitive science, AI, and engineering design to enhance creativity and innovation in design. His Hellman project will investigate designer agency during co-creation with generative AI. This research aims to deepen our understanding of how designers interact with AI systems, with the goal of developing methods that preserve human creativity while leveraging the power of AI in design processes.
Dorothy Kronick, 
Public Policy
Is there a Tradeoff Between Suspects' Rights and Crime Control? Empirical Evidence from Latin America
Professor Kronick studies contemporary Latin American politics, focusing on Venezuelan politics and the politics of crime and policing. Her Hellman award will support her project studying Latin America’s revolution in criminal procedure, generating new, quasi-experimental evidence about the region’s sweeping criminal justice reform.
Kristina Lovato, 
Social Welfare
Building the Capacity of Child Welfare Systems to Serve Unaccompanied Immigrant Transitional Age Youth (TAY) during the Precarious Transition to Adulthood
Professor Lovato’s work focuses on enhancing Latine child and family well-being particularly among immigrant families at risk of immigration enforcement and/or public child welfare involvement. Her Hellman project examines the social service and mental health needs of unaccompanied immigrant TAY and ways in which social service systems can better respond to their needs to prevent entry into the foster care system.
Eric Y. Ma, 
Physics
Fluorescence of Optical Phonons
Professor Ma’s research focuses on studying wave-matter interaction in uncommon regimes using unique home-built instruments and advanced computation techniques. These include at length scales much smaller than the electromagnetic wavelengths, in systems where radiative decay dominates, and at unconventional frequencies like THz, mid-infrared and deep ultraviolet. The Hellman award will allow Ma and his team to produce crucial preliminary results and publications to attract future funding as his research project progresses.
Luther Obrock, 
South and Southeast Asian Studies
Islamic Poetry in Sanskrit Verse: A Bilingual Edition and Study of Śrīvara's Kathākautuka
Professor Obrock's research interest is in the literary and cultural history of second millennium South Asia, particularly the production of Sanskrit literature during the Sultanate period. With his Hellman award, he will be able to complete the publication of a bilingual edition, translation, and study of the Kathākautuka (The Marvel of Story), a unique translation of a mystical Islamic romance into a Hindu-oriented poem. Obrock believes a careful study of Śrīvara’s Kathākautuka allows insight into the early phase of Hindu-Muslim encounter in Kashmir.
Jorge Otero-Millan,
Optometry
Virtual Prisms to Quantify and Manage Strabismus Using Mixed Reality
Professor Otero-Millian areas of research focus on looking at ocular motor control, role of eye movements in visual perception, and improving technology to measure eye movements. His Hellman’s project proposes a novel approach for the management of strabismus that will explore the use of video pass-through and eye tracking in augmented reality technology to compensate for eye misalignment and provide normal binocular vision to these patients.
Onja Razafindratsima,
Integrative Biology
Living in the Dark: Exploring How Moon Phases and Luminosity Influence Lemur Activity at Night
Professor Razafindratsima is an ecologist, broadly interested in tropical ecology, plant-animal interactions and community ecology. The Hellman project aims to investigate the mechanisms driving nocturnal activities in predominantly day-active lemurs.
Denis Titov, 
Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology
Targeting cancer by hyperactivating the Warburg Effect
Professor Titov’s lab uses computational and experimental approaches to work on the long-term research directions in quantitative understanding of human metabolic pathway regulation and deciphering the molecular basis of aging. Additionally, his Hellman project aims to investigate whether activation of HK and PFK can selectively kill cancer cells addicted to the Warburg Effect.
Ziqi Wang,
Civil and Enviornmental Engineering
From the Direct Physical Impact of Hazards to the Emotional Well-being of Individuals
Professor Wang’s research focuses on analyzing and understanding the reliability, risk, and resilience of structures and critical infrastructures under hazards. His Hellman project aims to develop a quantitative framework for analyzing the propagation from the direct physical impact of hazards to individuals’ emotional reactions and interactions.
Ashley Wolf
Public Health
The Role of the Gut Microbiome in Protection Against Shigella Infection
Professor Wolf’s research focuses on the variation of gut microbiome composition across individuals and the roles of these complex microbial communities in mammalian health and disease. The Hellman award will go towards examining the role of human gut bacterial strains in protection against Shigella infection.