Current Scholars

Traveling across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Dubai, Fatima Artan '28 (she/her) has logged hundreds of hours serving communities through health clinics and has published an article in a scientific journal on the disproportionate rates of breast cancer in African American women. Over winterim, she interned at a healthcare nonprofit in Rhode Island, funded through the Center for Social Impact. Fatima is interested in neuroscience and linguistics and has a passion for studying East African languages.

Angel Avila '28 (he/him) is a Thrive Scholar, originally from southern California, who learned jiu-jitsu and excelled in STEM in high school. At Dartmouth, he has joined the Machine Shop at Thayer, where he's learned to fix 3D printers and serves as a Teaching Assistant. He plans to major in Biology and Engineering and looks forward to learning research techniques on biofuels.

Mark Ghiu '28 (he/him) is a Dartmouth Book Award Winner who has pursued research opportunities in math and physics through high school, including on quantum loop gravity. Since starting at Dartmouth, he has worked with the Formula One team and joined Club Soccer. Mark hopes to study abroad in Germany on the Engineering FSP and aims to become an Aerospace Engineer or pursue graduate school in Physics.

Coming from Groton School, where he headed the sustainability team and founded a social justice organization, Evan Khym '28 (he/him) has co-authored research on socioeconomic mapping layers and climate considerations in developing countries. He has also testified before the Massachusetts Senate on a zero-carbon bill and worked to organize the first student-led Hawaiian youth climate conference. Evan's academic interests are in economics and environmental studies.

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Lamine Sao '28 (he/him) comes from The American School in London, where he conducted research on applying machine learning to drone imagery and remote sensing to assess forest health. He is a jazz musician and joined the Jazz Band on campus. Lamine has been assisting a professor with a 3D printing project and is excited to pursue Engineering at Dartmouth.

Summer Williams '28 (she/her) is an outdoors leader and political advocate for children with autoimmune challenges, which led her to testify before the California State Senate. She is eager to participate in research at Geisel and has wide-ranging academic interests in cognitive science, economics, literature, and philosophy. At Dartmouth, Summer has joined the club ice hockey team and has been selected to participate in the Women in Science Project.

A history major with a minor in Middle Eastern studies, Tessa Augsberger '26 (she/her) has based her Hanlon Scholars research on her study-abroad experience in Morocco and family experience in Germany, asking how Western countries can support refugee women from the MENA region. Tessa is a host for WebDCR (Dartmouth's online campus radio station) and the founder of Global Youth Climate Database, a non-profit news organization based in LA. 

Faculty mentor: Golnar Nikpour, HIST

JJ Dega '26 (he/him) has spent the past year interviewing New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice MacDonald '83 and Senior Associate Justice Bassett '78, along with other stakeholders, to evaluate the Circuit Court Navigator Program and its assistance for self-represented litigants. As a Hanlon Scholar, he is now turning his research attention to pilot diversion programs as alternatives to incarceration. JJ is a history major modified with economics, with a minor in public policy.

Faculty mentors: Elizabeth Pfeffer, GOVT and Julie Kalish, WRIT

Gideon Gruel '26 (he/him) is a recipient of the prestigious John Robert Lewis Scholarship and the author of a forthcoming publication in Discentes: The Classical Studies Publication of the University of Pennsylvania. A double major in classics and philosophy, Gideon is pursuing Hanlon Scholars research on religious (in)tolerance in the late Antique Roman empire and its philosophical influence on U.S. political ideology.

Faculty mentors: Roberta Stewart, CLST and Christopher MacEvitt, REL

A student from Turkey, Idil Sahin '26 (she/they) is a double major in cognitive science and math with a passion for researching artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). She has previously conducted research in the Brain Imaging Center and with the DALI Lab. Her Hanlon Scholars research aims to explore how we can effectively teach LLMs to encourage abstraction and the inference of intentionality, beyond user preferences, similar to how human brains develop theory of mind. 

Faculty mentor: Steve Frankland, COGS

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Sarah Watson (she/her) is a Biology and French Studies double major from Sudbury, Massachusetts. She has been involved in Alzheimer's disease (AD) research since high school and is fascinated by the dynamic role played by immune cells in the brain called microglia during the course of AD progression. As a first year Women in Science Project intern, she conducted research with Geisel Assistant Professor of Neurology, Dr. Arti Gaur demonstrating how both peripheral inflammation and accumulation of pathogenic proteins differs in male and female mouse models of AD. Her Hanlon project, also advised by Dr. Gaur, utilizes mouse models of AD and publicly available human AD data sets to identify the potential age-, sex-, and brain region-specific mediatory role of microglia in AD. She has been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship and a Presidential Scholarship for her work and intends to pursue a research career developing AD immunotherapies. She is also passionate about the intersection between science and the humanities, and her French Studies major plan nuances her research in the sex specificity of AD by exploring historical constructions of gender and sexuality in Francophone literature. Outside of research and academics, she also enjoys interfaith engagement, trail running, and writing.

Faculty mentor: Arti Gaur, MED

Tracy Weener '26 (she/her) is the winner of the 2024 North American Taiwan Studies Association Undergraduate Research Paper Competition. A computer science major and quantitative social science minor, Tracy undertook a comparative analysis of the 2024 presidential elections in the U.S. and Taiwan and worked to understand how young voters in both countries diverged from other age groups.

Faculty mentors: Herbert Chang, QSS and Yusaku Horiuchi, GOVT