2017-2018 Seed Grant Winners

Alexis is a senior majoring in African American Studies. Outside of academics, Alexis is involved as a Student Assistant at the Afro-American Cultural Center and a Project Coordinator with the Communication and Consent Educators. Her WFF Seed Grant supports her senior essay, titled “Black Women, Reproductive Labor, and the Meaning of Freedom,” which explores popular discourses around the Women’s Liberation Movement across racial groups, with particular focus on the way ideas about labor and freedom recreate racialized gender categories.

Grant Title and Presentation: Black Women, Reproductive Labor, and the Meaning of Freedom

Emily Auerbach is a first-year MBA and MEM student at the Yale School of Management and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Prior to Yale, Emily worked with over 100 chocolate and cocoa companies to develop and refine their sustainable sourcing strategies at the World Cocoa Foundation. A longtime advocate of sustainable business models, Emily has also worked as an urban farm and edible landscape designer and community-based food system advocate.

Anna Kamerow is a second-year MBA at the Yale School of Management. Before business school, Anna taught for two years at a traditional public middle school in Richmond, California. Later, she joined a charter organization as a founding teacher of a new school. Her work focused on both improving pedagogical practice within the classroom and creating broader, sustainable school systems for a rapidly scaling model. In the short term, Anna is interested in gaining private sector expertise through strategy consulting work. Her long term goal is to return to the education sector and implement sustainable interventions at scale.

Their WFF Seed Grant supports  a project called “The Present and Future of Spaces for Queer Women, Non-Binary, and Transgender Individuals,” which leverages market research techniques to analyze the landscape of spaces that serve the female-identified LGBTQ+ community. Through business owner interviews, customer focus groups, and a customer survey, their project seeks to understand the strategies of existing spaces; clarify community expectations around profit, community obligation, and inclusion; and outline the ideal characteristics of future spaces.  

Grant Title and Presentation: The Present and Future of Spaces for Queer Women, Non-Binary, and Transgender Individuals

Casey Odesser is a sophomore double-majoring in American Studies with a visual arts concentration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her WFF Seed Grant supports an undergraduate art exhibition entitled “SAP: Cynicism and Sincerity in Sync” staged in the fraternity house Sig Ep. SAP is a multifaceted exploration of how power dynamics invisibly shape our comportment in social spaces. It specifically hinges on an exploitation of sincerity to counteract culturally dominant modes of cynicism, using emotion as a political tool against social inertia. She hopes that this project, which primarily features voices excluded from the space, will be a moment of collective transformation and solidarity with the goal of promoting representation and visibility on the artists’ terms.

Grant Title and Presentation: “SAP:” Cynicism and Sincerity in Sync

Isabel Martinez is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology and has degrees in Latin American Studies, Sociology, and Chicana/o Studies. Her research focuses on Latinx sexual and reproductive health, integrating immigration, culture, and identity as factors that impact risk and resiliency in adolescents and emerging adults. With her WFF Seed Grant, she plans to examine immigrant Latina experiences with sexual risk behaviors and reproductive health access in the United States.

Grant Title: Giving Voice to Latina Immigrants: Role of “Status” and other Cultural Factors on Risk and Health

Albert Fang is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for the Study of American Politics and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale. He received a Ph.D in political science from Columbia University in 2015. His primary research interests are in political behavior, political psychology, and identity politics. With his WFF Seed Grant, he will conduct a study to investigate the partisan gap among women in their stated likelihood of pursuing legal mobilization in response to experiencing sex-based employment discrimination.

Tanya Murtha, MD, MPH is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Pediatric Critical Care. She received her B.A., MD, and MPH from Boston University. With her WFF Seed Grant, she plans to implement and evaluate a curriculum to teach pediatric trainees on delivering difficult news in order to improve their skills and perceived knowledge, competence, and comfort with delivering difficult news.

Grant Title and Presentation: Delivering Difficult News in Pediatrics

Ashley Andreou is Yale School of Public Health student and a Global Justice Fellow at Yale Law School. Her research focuses on how gender and science interact in the realm of policy. With her WFF Seed Grant, Ashley attended the Op-Ed’s Project workshop, a program which amplifies the voice of women and other underrepresented groups in the media, and wrote a series of op-eds that discuss gender, health, and policy. From using her writing to dispel the misperception that HPV is a female-specific to writing about why females face higher private health insurance premiums, Ashley hopes to use the media as a vehicle for policy change and health care reform.

Grant Title and Presentation: Women’s Health, Gender Equity, and the Media

Devyani is a History and French major in her senior year at Yale College. She will be heading to Cambridge next year for a MPhil degree, after which she plans to pursue a career in international law and diplomacy. Through her senior project in history, Devyani explored the lives of British India’s forgotten princesses, the Maharanis. Her work attempted to reverse the “imperial” gaze: instead of emphasizing the well-known fascination of the Western man with exotic Asian aesthetics, she chose to reveal the contrary power dynamic by studying the Indian woman’s connoisseurship of Western objects and ideas. She plans to use the WFF seed grant to present and develop her findings on colonial politics and is currently conceptualizing a book based on her thesis.

Lisa Kereszi is a Critic and the DUS in the Photography department at the School of Art, where she received her MFA in 2000. Her WFF Seed Grant will help support the dissemination of a recent photographic series she made as a new mother while rediscovering the world outside with her young daughter in tow. Made on daily walks, the work explores the big themes of conception, birth, and death, alongside manifestations of personal anxiety and also hope for the future. 

Grant Title and Presentation: Walking with Ottilie

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