Make a GiftCohort 3
Anneleise Azúa
pgd4yh@virginia.edu
Department of American Studies
Anneleise Azúa received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and her bachelor’s degree in Communication and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California. Her research focuses largely on Texas, Mexico, and the ways humans, plants, and the land create history and culture together. Her work largely investigates the science of plant medicine and healing in Texas and Mexico, and its complex relationship with the environment, colonialism, and transnational understandings of race. She is also working on a food project that investigates the rise of Tex-Mex food popularity in the Nordic countries. From 2021-2023 she held a postdoc in anthropology in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. In 2021, she was a Fulbright EDUFI fellow in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). From 2018-2020, she served as a fellow and researcher in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Currently, Azua is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at UVA.
Sayantani Datta
hec4nf@virginia.edu
Department of Physics
I got my Ph.D. from the Chennai Mathematical Institute in 2023. During my Ph.D., I worked on developing new and efficient ways to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity using gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration. I also investigated the role of the upcoming space-based gravitational wave detector, LISA, for more precise tests of general relativity. Currently, I am focusing on modeling gravitational waves in modified gravity theories and creating more efficient data analysis techniques to test general relativity. When I’m not doing physics, I usually sketch or experiment with food in the kitchen.
Rolando Vargas
ypf6rb@virginia.edu
Department of Art and Global Studies
Rolando Vargas is a media artist and scholar working with installation and digital media. He is currently based at UVA as a Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in the departments of Art and Global Studies. He has a BFA in Fine arts from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, received a Fulbright grant for his MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts at the University of Maryland, and has a Ph.D. in Film and Digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Rolando’s research «Kuna Indigenous Media and Knowledge in the Darién Tropical Rain Forest» focused on the politics of traversal and terrain, mapping and survival, and the geographies of collective labor and will as modes of indigenous resistance. Rolando has presented his work at Transmediale, the Kassel Documentary Film Festival, SESC Videobrasil, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Kunstverein Düsseldof, EMAF, Ficvaldivia, and other international venues. In 2022, he received a Processing Foundation Fellow for promoting the use by Kuna children of P5.js language while reflecting on digital workflows and appropriating digital methods in their terms and world conceptions. You can read more about his latest project in Darién here.