Congratulations to the PSTC Class of 2021!

To our 2021 PhD Graduates,

Congratulations! It has been our pleasure and privilege to have you as predoctoral trainees these past few years. We are inspired by your excellent scholarship and your resilience – in particular, completing your dissertations during a pandemic – and how you and your fellow trainees maintained a sense of community during these unprecedented times. Wherever life takes you, please know that you are always welcome back to Mencoff Hall. We hope you will stay in touch.

With respect and best wishes,
All of us at PSTC

These new PhDs are: 

Whitney Arey, Anthropology, “Abortion as Care: Affective and Biosocial Experiences of Abortion Access and Decision-making.” Whitney will be joining the University of Texas at Austin as a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP).

Fiori Berhane, Anthropology, “Eritrea, A Diaspora in Two Parts: Memory, Political Organizing and Refugee Experiences in Italy.” After Brown, Fiori will be the Provost’s Post-Doctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity (2021-2022), then Assistant Professor of Anthropology (2022-) in Global Black Studies at the University of Southern California.

Courtney Choy, Epidemiology, “Childhood Obesity and Cardiometabolic Disease Risk in Samoa.” Courtney is grateful to the PSTC for their support over the past four years to live out her dream and continue working with the children and their families in the Ola Tuputupua'e "Growing Up" in Samoa. She will be a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Fogarty Global Health Equity Scholar Program at Yale University and the Samoa Ministry of Health.

Teresa DeAtley, Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, “Mechanisms Underlying High Rates of Tobacco-Related Disease in Smokers with Psychiatric Disorders.” Of her time as a PSTC trainee, Tess commented, “The opportunity to be a PSTC trainee over the last several years has been invaluable. As a result of the training program, I have established connections and research collaborations with students and faculty in different departments across Brown. In haddition, I have learned a lot through PSTC colloquia, workshops and additional coursework in the Sociology department. The training program has broadened my scope of learning beyond resources I would have accessed through the School of Public Health.”

In September, Tess will begin a postdoc position at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. 

Kira DiClemente, Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, “Mental Health of Women Exposed to War and Violence in Africa: A Community-Based Approach.” Following her dissertation defense, Kira will be a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Public Health at Brown, working with PSTC associate Caroline Kuo on the NIH project Advancing Integrated Alcohol-HIV Training of Frontline Providers in a Global Priority Setting, a partnership with the University of Cape Town. Kira noted, “PSTC was an integral part of my experience as a PhD student at Brown. They provided me with the resources necessary to carry out original data collection for my dissertation, and my time as an NICHD Fellow was indispensable in putting together my original body of work that would become my dissertation! PSTC was the tipping point in my choosing Brown over other PhD programs, and I am so glad that I did.”

Francesco Maria Esposito, Economics, “Essays in Labor Economics and Political Economy.” He comments, “Working at PSTC opened my mind in terms of research-oriented thinking in a multicultural setting. Moreover, I had the opportunity to interact with fantastic people and respected researchers.” 

Amanda Loyola, Economics, “Essays on Health Economics”

Rebecca Wang, Sociology, “Situating Migration in the Family: Migration and Family Instability in South Africa and Kenya.” Becca is working as an experience researcher at Adobe. She commented, “Being a part of the PSTC community was a vital part of my graduate school experience. Swapping fieldwork notes with fellow trainees and collaborating with my many faculty mentors are among my fondest memories at Brown. I'm so grateful for the way the PSTC taught me how to think creatively about population studies.”