Fifteen Jerome A. Schiff Fellowship recipients announced

Established through the Jerome A. Schiff Charitable Trust, the Schiff Fellowships are annually awarded to 10 to 15 students, giving each a minimum of $2,000 dollars to support their senior thesis work. The 15 seniors who received fellowships this year plan to use their awards for a variety of purposes, from reducing work obligations to covering travel expenses for fieldwork.  Their honors projects span a variety of academic discourses, from neuroscience to studio art.

Yaffa Fredrick '11, a political science major, will use her fellowship award toward fieldwork.  Her project, "The AIDS Challenge: Explaining Health Policy Choice in Africa," was inspired by a final paper she wrote while studying abroad at Oxford, that addressed HIV and public health policies in Africa. Finding the paper too short to encompass the full complexity of the issue, Fredrick returned to Wellesley and made it her senior thesis topic.

"I was able to start exploring what was actually going on at the government level and why there were so many difficulties. It wasn't necessarily that people in Africa have more sex than people in the United States, but it was rather…the type of policies that the politicians were choosing or not choosing to address it with," Fredrick said.

Approaching the subject from a political science perspective, Fredrick is highly interested in the motivation behind African leaders' health policy choices. "I'm choosing to focus on the issue of AIDS in which African leaders are usually presented with a few options,"she said. "Either they can pursue prevention campaigns to discourage sex in general or unsafe sexual habits (through condoms or abstinence) or they'll do the costly alternative which is treatment whereby they provide annual screenings for all individuals and anti-viral should they test positive for the disease."

Fredrick's funding will pay for her travels to Geneva, where the offices for the World Health Organization, the Global Fund for AIDS and other public health organizations are based. There she will interview experts and policy makers.

"It adds a degree of fieldwork to my thesis, so it's not just based on secondary services, but primary sources," Fredrick said.

Lucia Nhamo '11, a studio art major, will also use the fellowship funding toward traveling.

"I've become increasingly interested in just how the [Zimbabwean] government sought to justify its actions by enforcing a narrow historical narrative of the liberation struggle…capitalizing on the previously unresolved legacies of land distribution inequity and waging one of the most sustained propaganda campaigns in post-colonial Africa," Nhamo wrote in an e-mail. Her project, "Portrait of a Crisis: Zimbabwe 1999-2009," is a three panel video installation, and she plans to travel to Zimbabwe to film over winter session.

Not all fellowship recipients have plans that will tackle them abroad. Rosalind Lai '11 and Christina H. Sun '11, both neuroscience majors, will use their awards for on-campus research.

Lai, whose project is titled "Estrogenic Effects of an Androgen Metabolite in Prostate Cancer," started her honors project last September when she studied how hormones affect prostate cancer.

"It has been well established that androgens, such as testosterone, stimulate prostate cancer growth through binding to androgen receptors," Lai said. However, recent findings in the field have revealed that a breakdown product or metabolite of androgens, called 3beta-Adiol, can slow down the growth of prostate cancer cells.

Lai's research project focuses on these receptors, 3beta-Adiol, and how these components elicit this effect.

For Lai, the Schiff Fellowship provides supplemental funding for her experiences in the laboratory. "The award will also alleviate my work obligations during this year so that I can concentrate on my current project," she said. "I'm also planning to put this support into financing my tuition for medical school next year."

Sun plans to use a portion of her award to pay for research equipment and reagents for experiments, as well as travelling to attend academic conferences. Her project, "Expression of Steroid Receptors in Membrane Only Estrogen Receptor-α (MOER) Mouse Brain," also investigates the role of membrane estrogen receptors in transgenic mice, specifically the effects of the hormone estradiol on the brain's estrogen receptors.

Sun's motivation for her research lies in its potentially wide-reaching effects.

"By understanding this relatively newer mechanism…has profound clinical applications," she wrote in an email. "For example, estrogens have neuroprotective effects in Alzheimer's disease, and are involved in hormone-dependent cancers, such as breast cancer. Knowledge of these mechanisms of steroid hormone action may advance the understanding of these diseases and inform the development of newer therapies."

This year's Schiff Fellowships were awarded to Farah Z. Ahmed '11 (English, Farah Z. Ahmed '11 English, Narrative Complexities and Queer Desires: A Study of Death in Venice and Pale Fire), Adina Badea '11 (Chemistry, Progress toward the Synthesis of the Isoquinoline Azide Analog of T-0632: Investigation into a Potential Diabetes Treatment), Siwen Chen '11 (Economics, Battle Against Internet Piracy in France – Does "Hadopi" Affect Sales in the Media Industry?), Kara Feilich '11 (Biological Sciences, A Three-Dimensional Approach to Quantifying Morphological Variation in Bluegill Sunfish), Yaffa S. Fredrick '11 (Political Science, The AIDS Challenge: Explaining Health Policy Choice in Africa), Weiye Kou '11 (History, Care for Money: A Comparative Study of Early Modern Reforms in Fiscal Administration in Song China and Western Europe), Rosalind Lai '11 (Neuroscience, Estrogenic Effects of an Androgen Metabolite in Prostate Cancer), Lucia Nhamo '11 (Studio Art, Portrait of a Crisis: Zimbabwe 1999-2009), Ellyn Schmidt '11 (Psychology, Children's Understanding of the Knowledge Gained Through Seeing and Through Hearing), Claire Shea '11 (Anthropology, Through Adolescent Eyes: A Qualitative Study on the Chronic Illness Experience of Adolescents), Yomay Shyur '11 (Physics, Studying Molecular Photoabsorption in the UV: Measurement and Models), Christina H. Sun '11 (Neuroscience, Expression of Steroid Receptors in Membrane Only Estrogen Receptor-α (MOER) Mouse Brain), Jami-Lin Williams '11 (Spanish, "Barcelona y la formación de la identidad en la literatura española del siglo XX"), Hatice Gizem Yayla '11 (Chemistry, Developing an All-in-One Nanovehicle for Cancer Therapy), and Lily Zhou '11 (Economics, The Panic of 1907).