CLA Distinguished Graduate Student Awards
2026
Kari A. Guilbault, Dissertation Award
Kari A. Guilbault received a PhD and MS in Anthropology from Purdue University and Anthropology BA from Arizona State University. Guilbault’s bioarchaeological research in Nubia (present-day Sudan) explores the embodiment of life experiences observing stress-based evidence expressed on the skeletal elements. Her interests include intentional pain relating to religious beliefs, identity-making, and activity, at the intersections of human-environment interactions and health. Guilbault is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan teaching biological anthropology.
Bing Han, Dissertation Award
Bing Han earned her dual-title PhD in Sociology and Gerontology from Purdue University in 2025. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University. Her dissertation received the 2026 Best Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Mental Health.
She is the author of more than 10 published or forthcoming peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, including an article based on her dissertation that is forthcoming in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Her research spans medical sociology, social psychology, and aging and the life course, with a focus on stigma, ageism, health behaviors and lifestyles, and gender. She uses experimental, quantitative, computational, and qualitative methods to investigate the social determinants of health and inequality.
Rida Altaf, Master's Thesis Award
Rida Altaf is a Fulbright scholar who has recently finished her master's in Comparative Literature, investigating supernatural representation in Muslim speculative fiction.
Her relationship with speculative fiction is not limited to literary analysis; she was part of the prestigious Clarion West Workshop 2025 as a writer in the genre, and has short fiction published in Uncanny and Tasavvur, as well as a story forthcoming in Tales and Feathers.
She is now back in her home country, Pakistan, and is working on her novel.
Heidi Cooke, Master's Thesis Award
Heidi Cooke graduated with an MS in Anthropology from Purdue University supervised by Dr. Zoe Nyssa. She previously completed a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her master's thesis, "Natural Capital in Context: The Social Dimensions of Biodiversity Conservation," examined how Natural Capital Accounting, a framework for measuring the value of nature's contributions to the economy, is put into practice by the people who build it.
Drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews with expert practitioners, the thesis explored how such accounts are produced, what shapes what is included or left out, and what motivates practitioners to sustain this work. It offers a set of practical recommendations for governance reform, including more inclusive participation in how standards are set and stronger support for under-resourced institutions and regions engaging with this work.
Alongside her thesis, Heidi worked as a Graduate Research Assistant on an NSF-funded project examining the institutional design of multilateral environmental agreements, led by Dr. Nyssa, as well as Dr. Beckett Sterner and Dr. Ute Brady at Arizona State University. She is now beginning a PhD in linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Zoe Nicole Nielsen, Master's Non-Thesis Creative Work Award
Zoe Nicole Nielsen is an artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her MFA in Studio Arts from Purdue University, where she served as Instructor of Record and Printmaking Studio Technician, and her BFA in Studio Arts from Wayne State College.
Nielsen has been an artist-in-residence at Alchemy Art Center in Washington and will soon serve as artist-in-residence at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center. She has presented solo and group exhibitions nationwide and has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants. Nielsen is the author of Tender Remains: Taxidermy, Intimacy, and the Art of Care in Preservation (2026), and her work has been featured in several art and literary publications. Her work is included in public and private collections internationally, including the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art.
Ashley Fitzpatrick, Master's Non-Thesis Project Award
Ashley Fitzpatrick is a PhD student at Purdue University in the Anthropology Department. Her research focuses on third party reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies, particularly egg donation.
She is interested in the complex kinship dynamics that unfold in the long-term as genetic-kin come to find and know each other in the years following gamete donation. Ashley draws from methods and theories of medical, feminist, and applied anthropology; STS; and community-centered practice.
Past Awardees
Dr. Stanislav Pejša, Distinguished Dissertation Award
Stanislav Pejša received a PhD in History from Purdue University in 2025. He also holds MA degrees in history from Charles University in Prague (the Czech Republic) and Central European University in Budapest (Hungary), as well as MLIS from Rutgers, New Brunswick. After a brief career in newspapers, Dr. Pejša worked in archives and libraries in New York City helping to build comprehensive digital collections from archival materials. His interests in research workflows and data preservation brought Dr. Pejša to work with research data at Purdue. Shortly thereafter, the opportunities offered by the digital humanities lured him back to historical research and the doctoral program there.
Stanislav Pejša's dissertation, titled "Determining People, Reordering Places. Visions of Transformations of the Postwar World, 1916-1920," explores the vocabularies and imaginaries of the postwar world order during the First World War. It investigates the role of academic experts and intellectuals mobilized by the Allied governments to bring forth a new and viable organization of international relations. The quantitative methods, primarily those used in the text analysis, were essential for understanding thinking, rhetoric, and vocabularies of those who shaped the new world order at the Paris Peace Conference in Paris in 1919.
Reilly Kincaid, Distinguished Dissertation Award
Reilly Kincaid studies social inequality in the domains of family, work, and mental health. She is particularly interested in how gender, culture, and social psychological processes interlink with inequality in these domains. She uses quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. Reilly is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Arkansas.
Santiago Castillo Revelo, Master's Thesis Award
Santiago is a PhD student in Linguistics at Purdue University. He holds a BA in Modern Languages from Caldas University in Colombia, and an MA in Linguistics from Purdue University. His academic pursuits center around Second Language Acquisition, Heritage Language Learning, Bilingualism, and the Syntax-Semantics interface. Presently, he is engaged in research at Purdue's Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Research Lab, exploring the acquisition of tense/aspect in Spanish among Heritage and Second Language learners.
Subulola Ebunoluwa Jiboye, Master's Thesis Award
Subulola Jiboye is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University, following the completion of her master’s program in the same department. In her thesis, she used a mixed-methods approach to examine whether access to various support ties mitigates the ambiguity of liminality, influences resilience, and fosters the adaptation and well-being of international students.
As an Organizational Communication scholar, Subulola hopes to continue to conduct research that examines factors influencing how policies are interpreted across diverse organizational contexts and how these interpretations affect outcomes such as the resilience of marginalized and underserved populations.
Graylin M. Skates, Master's Thesis Award
Graylin Skates is a health services researcher and medical anthropologist who graduated with an MS in anthropology from Purdue University. Her master’s thesis research evaluated public health programs that navigate patients through disjointed health systems and considered the impact of health policy and insurance systems on the provision of care. Graylin has contributed to interdisciplinary research projects that assess patient experience with family planning services, vascular surgery, and cervical cancer screening.
In her applied work, Graylin has managed the patient care coordination and administrative operations for a non-profit clinic serving under/uninsured people in North Florida, consulted on reproductive health promotion activities for people experiencing homelessness, consulted on health insurance disparities for aging adults in the US, and fostered community partnerships for non-profit pediatric health organizations. Graylin is currently a Patient Experience System Advisor at Inova Health, where she integrates patient voices and feedback into health system design and delivery.
Chen Yang, Distinguished Dissertation Award
Dr. Chen Yang is currently an Assistant Professor at Hunan University in China. He graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University in May, 2024. His research interests are German Idealism and History of Philosophy of Science.
In his dissertation, Dr. Yang interprets Hegel's concept of infinity, reconstructs the corresponding arguments, and then applies it to resolve certain difficulties in contemporary Philosophy of Mathematics. He aims to revise this dissertation for publication.
Lama Elsharif, Distinguished Dissertation Award
Lama Elsharif is a historian of the early modern and modern Middle East and North Africa. She earned her Ph.D. in History from Purdue University and holds an M.A. in Diplomatic Studies and International Relations from the University of Jordan. Her research focuses on the intersections of environmental, economic, and maritime history in the Ottoman regencies of North Africa throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Her dissertation, “Small Wars of Scarcity: North African Corsairs in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century,” investigates the surge in sea raiding activities by the Ottoman regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers between 1776 and 1816. Lama connects this surge to severe local environmental conditions, such as droughts, epidemics, and famines, which triggered widespread economic decline, revolts and administrative turmoil. She argues that these raids were not, as traditional narratives suggest, merely opportunistic actions taken during Europe’s distraction with the Napoleonic Wars, but rather a strategic effort by the North African rulers to address environmental and economic challenges and maintain control.