2023-2025 Fellows

Faculty Fellows 2023-2025

Cheryl L. Dickter is a Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and a faculty affiliate of the Neuroscience Program. Dr. Dickter earned her B.A. in Psychology from Randolph-Macon College and her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research uses a social cognitive approach to examine how individuals perceive members of different social groups (e.g., people of color, sexual minorities, individuals from neurodiverse backgrounds), and how these perceptions differ based on contextual information such as stereotypes. She and her students also design and test trainings to reduce implicit and explicit bias and to increase cultural competence. Dr. Dickter has published over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals; W&M students are co-authors on more than 30 of those papers. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Over the next two years, Dr. Dickter and her English-Stonehouse Student Fellows will conduct research that focuses on understanding and reducing the biases that individuals have in identifying pain on the faces of individuals who do not share their racial identity. As previous neuroscience studies have demonstrated that people tend to show less activity in brain regions related to empathy to people in pain who do not share their racial identity compared to those who do share their racial identity, this research will measure brain activity as assessed with electroencephalography (EEG) during face processing. This research will also examine ways to increase empathy for and improve emotion identification of pain in people whose racial identity is different from one’s own. Student fellows will engage in all aspects of the research process, including study conception, programming, data processing, and data analysis. Students will also have opportunities to present the results of this work at conferences and potentially in published manuscripts.

Diane Shakes is a Professor in the Biology Department. She earned her BA from Pomona College in 1983 and her PhD from The Johns Hopkins University in 1989. After postdoctoral work at Cornell, she started as a faculty member at the University of Houston before moving to William & Mary in 1995. Her lab is broadly interested in the cellular processes that govern how uncommitted germline stem cells develop in functional sperm. Over the years, her group has studied all aspects of this process from the transcription factors that regulate which genes turn on or off to the roll-out of the developmental program involved in building a functional sperm cell and the molecular mechanisms required from sperm to move, find, and fertilize oocytes. She explores the underlying molecular mechanisms of these fundamental processes in the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode worm whose many experimental assets are well suited for such studies. To date, her research has been supported by grants from both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Over the next two years, Dr. Shakes and her English-Stonehouse students will explore questions related to her current NIH grant – how enzymes that reversibly modify target proteins with the addition or removal of a phosphate group (kinases and phosphatases) regulate sperm development and function. In particular, the student fellows will be involved in the analysis of the kinase SPE-6 and its three most closely related counterparts. One overarching question is how molecular similar kinases function together to regulate sperm development. To address this question, Dr. Shakes’ lab recently acquired multiple experimental tools such as genetically engineered gene knock-out worms and antibodies that can be used to track the location of the specific kinases within cells.