The S. Laurie Sanderson Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Mentoring recognizes the graduate students in Arts & Sciences who mentor undergraduate students.
Graduate News
William & Mary’s graduate program in U.S. colonial history is the best in the country, according to rankings released today by U.S. News & World Report.
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have named Ike Irby as Policy Advisor in the Office of the Vice President. Irby earned joint graduate degrees from William & Mary and its Virginia Institute of Marine Science in 2017.
In its first public instruction opportunity, the university’s history writing center will guide middle school and high school teachers and students on the elements of effective historical writing.
Shantá D. Hinton was a pioneer in the study of a group of enzymes known as pseudophosphatases, particularly one known as MK-STYX. Pseudophosphatases were long considered a research dead-end, but Hinton and a handful of other labs discovered that there was nothing pseudo about these proteins.
The human brain is hardwired for resilience, to adapt and make sense of the incomprehensible. For members of the military who have served in combat zones, that cognitive plasticity is tested to the limit – and sometimes beyond.
The following books by William & Mary faculty members were published in 2020.
The American Physical Society has named William & Mary physicist Patricia Vahle as a 2020 APS Fellow. Vahle, a professor in the university’s Department of Physics, was nominated by the APS Division of Particles and Fields.
John Swaddle, faculty director at William & Mary’s Institute for Integrative Conservation, and a group of graduate students have published a paper evaluating a new window-film product designed to reduce bird-window collisions.
Dan Cristol is the co-editor of a special issue of the journal Ecotoxicology, along with David Evers of the Biodiversity Research Institute.
Ryan Chaban was one of six graduate students and postdoc fellows selected for the inaugural Commonwealth of Virginia Engineering and Science (COVES) Fellowship.
Daniel Borrus began his Ph.D. research at William & Mary with what he thought was going to be an easy experiment, just to get his feet wet in neurophysiology research.
As COVID-19 and stay-at-home orders upended life as we know it, W&M chemist Rachel O’Brien turned her kitchen into a makeshift laboratory. She and her lab students literally cooked up experiments in their homes by measuring aerosols released during cooking.
This is a tale of two yeasts. Well, actually, three yeasts.
A team of W&M researchers is conducting an online survey on how families are coping during the COVID-19 pandemic, and offering resources on what parents can do to support their children’s mental health.
Former Va. chief deputy A.G. succeeds Warren Buck, who transitions to advisory role
The Social Justice & Diversity Research Fellowship Program, now in its third year at William & Mary, aims to equip students to address issues of inequity in academia, in their professions and in their everyday lives.
Caylin Carbonell, a Ph.D. candidate in history at William & Mary, is completing a dissertation on New England households that challenges longstanding historiographic trends and reconsiders how to document the past.
A team at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility led by a William & Mary physicist has made a significant advancement in physics understanding that represents a key step toward practical fusion energy.
Heather Kenny, a biology master’s student at William & Mary, has spent the past two years studying the parenting behavior of bluebirds. Specifically, she is working to understand how human-made noise influences nesting and productivity.
Technological advances are allowing archaeologists to take a wider, yet closer, look at ancient sites, opening up long-hidden evidence about the societies of the people who lived there.
The beam is off, but high energy physics research is very much on at one of the world’s premier particle physics labs —and William & Mary physicists are among those monitoring the still-active NOvA neutrino detectors.
Two decades or so before the great California gold rush, there was a smaller, but still considerable, excitement surrounding the precious metal in Georgia.
For her research into the underlying neurobiology of attentional processing in the context of schizophrenia drug discovery, Eden Maness is the recipient of the William & Mary Graduate Studies Advisory Board Award for Excellence in Scholarship in the Natural and Computational Sciences.
Adwait Jog, an assistant professor in William & Mary’s Department of Computer Science, is working to make computers more efficient by improving the architecture of the machines, necessary for computational handling of projects ranging from machine learning to genomics.
William & Mary’s move to modified academic operations is prompting departments to look into alternative ways of conducting dissertation defenses of Ph.D. candidates.
If Leah Shaw gets any time to herself during this period of social distancing, she plans to run a simulation — on social distancing.
Maria Donoghue Velleca, an accomplished scholar and award-winning educator who served as senior associate dean for faculty affairs and strategic planning at Georgetown University’s College of Arts & Sciences, has been selected as William & Mary’s dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, President Katherine A. Rowe announced today.
William & Mary's 2020 Raft Debate will be held in the Sadler Center's Commonwealth Auditorium March 19 at 6:30 p.m.
The 19th annual Graduate Research Symposium will be held in the Sadler Center at William & Mary March 20-21.
In the first direct probes of the core of the nuclear interaction, researchers find that leading theories on interactions between protons and neutrons describe them well, even in conditions where the protons and neutrons strongly overlap, such as in neutron stars.
Undergraduates working in a lab inside the Integrated Science Center are currently studying ways to foster constructive dialogue in an era of increased partisan divide.
William & Mary computer scientist Evgenia Smirni has been elected to the 2020 class of fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
The Japanese swordsmiths didn’t discuss the secrets of their craft and neither does the brown recluse spider.
Timothy Boycott, a graduate student in the Department of Biology at William & Mary, was recently awarded the Christine Stevens Wildlife Award from the Animal Welfare Institute.
It’s a region that has a reputation of being the Wild West of Hawaii and it offers lessons for future generations about how to subsist in a changing climate.
A new paper by faculty and students looks at the relationship among deer, a single species of tick and a single tick-borne disease.
More than three dozen women and men donning bonnets and top hats visited Swem Library last week in search of new insights into their favorite author, Jane Austen.
The key to developing secure technology for the future may hinge on making life a little easier for software engineers today.
Seth Aubin, associate professor of physics at William & Mary, recently received a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop a new type of instrument capable of detecting hidden infrastructure for weapons of mass destruction.
In his William & Mary doctoral dissertation, Travis Harris Ph.D. '19 details how residents of the predominantly African American neighborhood of Magruder were displaced when the Navy took over their property to build Camp Peary in the early 1940s.
A William & Mary physicist has been awarded computing time on a U.S. Department of Energy machine that holds current bragging rights of world’s fastest supercomputer.
Large-scale environmental change began when our ancestors started agriculture, according to a recent paper in the journal "Science."
The new graduate students come to W&M from locations across the globe and with a wealth of experience.
Kurtis Bartlett was awarded the 2018 Jefferson Science Associates Thesis Prize, recognizing his Ph.D. dissertation in the William & Mary physics department.
Lizabeth Allison, Chancellor Professor of Biology at William & Mary, has been awarded the Ruth Kirschstein Diversity in Science Award by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Gail is currently a full-time graduate student in anthropology and archaeology at William & Mary, returning to her alma mater after an almost 50-year career in biomedical research.
Justin Stevens, a William & Mary physicist, is among the young U.S. scientists recognized as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Jefferson Sciences Associates (JSA) has announced the award of nine graduate fellowships to doctoral students for the 2019-2020 academic year. Three of the fellowships went to students at William & Mary.
W&M History Professor Christopher Grasso's upcoming book Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso uses autobiographical manuscripts thought long lost to tell the full story of a Union guerrilla fighter in Missouri.
On Friday, May 3, the university honored the 2019 recipients for their outstanding achievements in teaching, research and service to the William & Mary community.
Ronald Schechter, professor of history at William & Mary, has been awarded the 2019 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Intellectual and Cultural History.
Kasey Sease, a Ph.D. candidate in the Lyon G. Tyler Department of History at William & Mary, was awarded a five-month predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the National Museum of American History.
Amanda Gibson is compiling evidence that traces today’s predatory financial practices to economic victimization of free and enslaved African Americans in the pre-emancipation South.
Students, faculty and staff, and members of the community flooded the Chesapeake rooms in the Sadler Center on March 14 to watch the annual Raft Debate in which three professors, deserted on an imaginary island, represented their disciplines in an battle for a single spot on an imaginary raft.
Sofya Zaytseva, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Applied Science at William & Mary, is working to engineer a better oyster reef.
David Marquis, a Ph.D. candidate, received the William & Mary Interdisciplinary Award for Excellence in Research for his paper “Tick, Tick, Boom: Dynamite, Cattle Ticks, and the Closing of the Southern Range.”
Alexandra Macdonald has been looking into the 18th-century “theatre of consumption” that was Samuel Abbot’s shop and the retail culture of colonial America, where even the residents of Puritan Boston were interested in consumption.
An interdisciplinary team of researchers based at William & Mary has been drilling down on the workings of the pre-Bötzinger complex for more than a decade.
The old-fashioned strawberry is having a renaissance, thanks to new genetic research.
The 2019 Raft Debate, a much beloved William & Mary tradition, will be held at the Sadler Center in Chesapeake ABC, on March 14 at 6:30 p.m.
Jennifer Kahn is part of a worldwide group of scientists who are using archaeological data and ecological modeling to examine how different cultures use animal and plant taxa in diverse ways.
Patricia Vahle, Mansfield Professor of Physics at William & Mary, will talk on “The Quest to Understand Neutrino Masses” at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.
Jack Boyle, a post-doctorate Mellon Fellow at W&M, is lead author on a paper that shows GMOs are not the main culprit for the decline of the monarch butterfly, a finding that goes against claims made by scientists and activists for decades.
Jonathan Allen, an associate professor of biology at W&M, is part of a team that discovered that the crown-of-thorns seastar can reproduce by larval cloning.
Internet-connected computing objects collectively known as smart home products have become increasingly popular with consumers. The systems provide a bridge between the digital and physical worlds, which is convenient for automation, but risky for security, a team of W&M researchers has found.
As any parent will tell you, there is an art to getting kids to eat vegetables. For Catherine Forestell, it is also a science.
Troy Wiipongwii MPP ’18 and Professor Mike Tierney ’87, co-director of W&M’s Global Research Institute. joined forces on a project that uses a new technology to make foreign aid programs more efficient and effective.
David Armstrong studies a phenomenon that is ubiquitous in nature, yet only a few non-scientists know what it is.
On Nov. 3, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at William & Mary organized a Wikistorm, a massive Wikipedia editing effort, to increase the number of pages about women.
A strand of spider silk is five times stronger than a steel cable of the same weight, said Hannes Schniepp of the Department of Applied Science at William & Mary. His lab has been unraveling the secrets behind the strength of the brown recluse spider.
A team of scientists at William & Mary led by Myriam Cotten is investigating a virtue of the striped bass: The fish contain biomolecules that have shown promise for therapeutic use in human medicine.
A marketing person might call it “rebranding,” but the name change to the graduate program in the university’s Department of Psychological Sciences is better understood as recognition of a change in emphasis that was complete years ago.
Saskia Mordijck, assistant professor of applied science, will serve as the global leader of the Joint Research Target for the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, working with labs throughout the world to solve the complicated problem of refueling fusion reactions.
The largest liquid-argon neutrino detector in the world has just recorded its first particle tracks, signaling the start of a new chapter in the story of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
A recent discovery by William & Mary and University of Michigan researchers transforms our understanding of one of the most important laws of modern physics. The discovery has broad implications for science, impacting everything from nanotechnology to our understanding of the solar system.
While undergraduate classes start Aug. 29, some of the graduate schools have already begun.
It’s a case of acting differently when outmanned — or rather out-neutroned. Protons appear to get extra pep in their step when they’re outnumbered by neutrons in the atom’s nucleus.
Made possible by a collaboration between William & Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, students in the 2018 Summer Archaeological Field School are turning trash into treasure.
It’s a question that has vexed fusion scientists for decades: What would it take to refuel the sun? Now, thanks to a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy and a team of William & Mary researchers, we will be closer than ever to figuring it out.
It’s a common comedy trope: the industrial production line that speeds up beyond the limits of the humans who must work on it.
William & Mary adds yet another Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar to its ranks as Kristin Wustholz, associate professor of chemistry, was selected as one of eight professors in the nation to receive the coveted award.
Josh Puzey, assistant professor of biology, is the co-author of a study that links natural selection and genetic variation using wildflowers.
These days Travis Harris is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies at William & Mary, researching in Africana studies at the intersection of religion and hip-hop.
Research sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture at William & Mary has uncovered the first documented purchase of Jane Austen’s debut novel, "Sense and Sensibility."
To the uninitiated, the back corner of ISC 1233 might be mistaken for a moonshiner’s still.
To explain the complexities of nearly every society in human history, Joanna Schug points to an unlikely place: the American middle school.
William & Mary biologist John Swaddle will receive nearly $100,000 in matching funds from the state of Virginia to develop technology to reduce the toll that wind turbines take on birds.
Tricia Vahle, professor of physics at William & Mary and longtime NOvA participant, became a NOvA co-spokesperson on March 21.
