Orelia Jonathan is a sixth-year doctoral candidate concentrating on Culture, Institutions, and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is also currently a National Academy of Education Spencer Dissertation Fellow. Her research interests focus on whether education contributes to or alleviates conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on history education and teachers in South Sudan.

Her dissertation project explores how teachers navigate teaching history in conflict settings with a specific focus on teacher’s lived experiences and how they draw on their personal experiences of the conflict to enact the history curriculum in their classrooms. In this work, she examines whether the new South Sudanese history curriculum and the teaching of this curriculum contributes to peacebuilding in South Sudan. To do this work, she is conducting a comparative case study across schools in South Sudan. 

For her research on teachers and history education in South Sudan, she has funding from the International Peace Research Association Foundation, the Harvard Center for African Studies, the Harvard Graduate School of Education Programs Office and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Caitlin Nichols received her BS in molecular biology with a minor in editing from Brigham Young University. While at BYU, she worked in the lab of Laura Bridgewater, PhD, where she studied the function of a novel nuclear variant of BMP2 (nBMP2) in skeletal muscle, as well as the role of the unfolded protein response (UPR) in mouse models of osteoarthritis. She also worked in the lab of Steven Graves, PhD, studying the ability of a novel proteomic approach to identify differences between complex biological tissues, including normal and preeclamptic human placenta.

Caitlin’s work in the Beroukhim Lab focused on identifying and validating a novel class of cancer vulnerabilities caused by loss of heterozygosity (LOH) of cell-essential genes. She also studied the role of TERC amplification in cellular immortalization/transformation. She received numerous awards for scientific communication in presenting her project, and after completing her PhD she joined 23&Me.

Bhargav Gopal is an economist at Queen's University, Smith School of Business doing research at the intersection of labor, finance, law, and economics. He recently received a PhD from Columbia University. 

Prior to Columbia, he received a B.A. in Economics from UC Berkeley and was a Research Fellow at Stanford Law School.