Academic Dissertations in the News

It turns out that Jill Biden, the presumptive First Lady, has thought deeply about community colleges. In fact, she wrote her dissertation at the University of Delaware about how to improve retention at two-year colleges.

So what did she conclude? And what does it say about her thinking on higher education, as she prepares to move into the White House? Read more at edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young, Nov 20, 2020

Emojis, grandmas logging in, and kudos from strangers: How MIT students have finished their PhDs during the pandemic. by Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office, May 22, 2020

For generations, dissertation defenses have been crowning moments for PhD candidates. Now, with the pandemic limiting activity on the MIT campus from mid-March onward, moving dissertation defenses to Zoom has been a necessary adjustment.

Read the full story at news.mit.edu

Many doctoral students feel a crisis of purpose amid Covid-19: Should they bother to keep writing? By Leonard Cassuto

There’s not much good to find in a destructive pandemic, but here’s one potentially positive outcome: Covid-19 may bring graduate schools to a long-needed reckoning with the dissertation requirement. The coronavirus has effectively blown up the ....

Continue reading at  Chronicle.com

An Archaeology and Anthropology graduate has been recognised by Prehistoric Society for her dissertation research into the relationships between Mesolithic humans and wild boar.

Kate's dissertation research was inspired by her pet pigs which led her to develop an interest in their Mesolithic relative, the wild boar. She noticed that there was a lack of information on Mesolithic wild boar and how humans would have interacted with this intelligent and often dangerous species.

Continue reading at < href="https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/dissertation-on-mesolithic-man-and-boar-interaction-wins-prehistoric-society-acclaim" target="blank">University of Manchester

Kristin Watkins, 1915 University of Nebraska Medical Center disseration titled, It Came Across the Plains: the 1918 InfluenzaPandemic in Rural Nebraska was cited today in The New York Times.

Dr. Watkins writes in the abstract, "Amidst all the horror there was some humor, as Santa got arrested forbreaking the quarantine and well-meaning children raised the money to pay his fine." But the "most over-arching conclusion based on the evidence from this study is that nothing can completely protect you from influenza, and some rural communities may have a false sense of security if they think influenza cannot reach them. This study shows that influenza can and will spread anywhere geographically, even to the most remote locations.Few things can stop pathogens in pursuit of infection. Read the entire dissertation at digitalcommons.unmc.edu.

Watch the winner of this year’s ‘Dance Your Ph.D.' contest by John Travis

Groneberg’s doctoral thesis explored how the motions of groups of zebrafish larvae affected each individual animal’s brain development and behavior, teasing out the impact by raising some larvae in isolation and documenting any differences. “We used to joke that my Ph.D. was easily danceable as it’s about movement,” Groneberg says. “Some colleagues accused me of picking my thesis topic because of that.

Read entire article at sciencemag.org

Literature Quiz / Harry Potter Character by Dissertation Title

Take the quiz at sporcle.com

A doctoral student at the University of Iceland has recreated his dissertation in a novel way – by making it into a comic.

It examines this Icelandic saga, most likely written in the thirteenth century, and how multiple versions of this text exist. While previous scholarship has often focused on which version is the earliest, Tirosh is more interested in how the reception of Ljósvetninga saga influenced its construction. Read more at medievalists.net

His doctoral dissertation in pharmacology from Vanderbilt University was one of the first studies to discover endocannabinoids acting as “retrograde messengers” that regulate synaptic plasticity in the brain, findings that are now foundational to understanding the function of the ECS and the neuroprotective actions of cannabis.

Read more at GlobeWireNews.com

The yield curve model was originally developed by Canadian economist Campbell Harvey while he was completing his dissertation. In the three recessions since his dissertation was published, including the 2008 financial crisis, the curve was inverted before each one.

Harvey is “very confident” the current inverted curve could be indicative of another recession on the horizon.

Read more at GlobalNews.ca