2010 - Jefferson Scholars Foundation

the fellows
Justin Lindsay
Neill
Harrison Family Fellow
Department of Chemistry
Davidson College (B.S.)
Hillsborough, North Carolina
Justin is working as a research
assistant in the laboratory of Professor
Brooks H. Pate. His research is focused
on the use of microwave spectroscopy
to study small molecular clusters and unstable species of astrochemical
interest, as well as the dynamics of excited molecules. In the past year a highenergy
conformational isomer of methyl formate, an abundant interstellar
molecule, has been detected in the interstellar medium as a result of
laboratory measurements in the Pate laboratory. This surprising detection
has sparked new theoretical and experimental inquiries into the mechanisms
by which this molecule, and other related organic species, are synthesized in
dense star-forming regions, processes that are currently not well understood.
Hillary Sunshine
Schaefer
Douglas S. Holladay Sr. and
Cary N. Moon Jr. Fellow
Department of Psychology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
(B.S.)
University of Virginia (M.A.)
Wausau, Wisconsin
During the 2009-10 academic year
Hillary completed two community rotations as part of the clinical psychology
training schedule — one at an alternative school providing individual
and group therapy for at-risk adolescents, and a second concentrating on
forensic assessments. She also collected the first wave of her dissertation
data, developing and administering an assessment for empathy and
emotional skill. She hopes to develop this test as a tool that is both useful
for a neuroimaging paradigm and also applicable to an inpatient population.
Currently, there are few validated tests of emotional functioning suitable
for clinical use, and her work hopes to provide such a tool. In the 2010-11
academic year she will return to Western State Hospital for a rotation
providing therapy to long-term psychiatric inpatients, and continue to collect
data and refine the paradigm for the empathy assessment.
Adam Michael
Winck
Elizabeth Arendall Tilney and
Schuyler Merritt Tilney Fellow
Department of Germanic
Languages and Literatures
Wake Forest University (B.A.)
Yale University (M.A.)
University of Virginia (M.A.)
Knoxville, Tennessee
In August 2009, Adam completed his qualifying exams on the late
Enlightenment, tragi-comedy, and Nietzsche before moving to Mannheim,
Germany, to teach literature seminars for two semesters. He presented a
paper on the ethics of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling at a conference in
Essex, England, in May 2010. Currently, he is researching his dissertation on
a tradition of polemics in German literature from the late Enlightenment
through Nietzsche. By the fall of 2010, Adam will be back in Charlottesville.
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