Project Fellows

Faculty Fellows

Jochen Hellbeck

Phone: (917) 436-8176

Bio: Jochen Hellbeck’s research focuses on individual life stories and the shaping of the self in modern Europe, with a primary focus on the Soviet Union. He particularly seeks to understand the place of individuals in the context of cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s terror regime, and the Second World War. His work research has contributed to a more capacious and humane understanding of the Soviet Union, of World War II, and of how consciousness survived in societies that supposedly eradicated it. Jochen's RCHA project studies notions of life and death in the racist imagination of the Nazi regime and in the universalist Soviet war culture - in comparison as well as in their deadly clash. 

Erica Goldblatt Hyatt

Phone: 848-932-8485

Bio: Dr. Erica Goldblatt Hyatt is a university professor, administrator, and private therapist with nearly 15 years' worth of experience in the field of clinical social work. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Doctorate of Social Work degree program at Rutgers and is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.  Dr. Goldblatt Hyatt is one of the few therapists in the country who specializes in working with women who have ended a wanted pregnancy due to fetal anomaly. Her research on this topic has been published in academic journals, on commercial blogs, and on popular news sites. She has been featured repeatedly in media and press conferences by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, and is known in Pennsylvania as one of the foremost speakers and advocates on the topic of reproductive justice.  Her published "ACCEPT" model of counseling women with fetal anomaly is the only exclusive model for social workers and other mental health clinicians that utilizes modern grief theory, narrative therapy, and cognitive interventions to address the many challenges of loss that this community experiences. The core of Dr. Goldblatt Hyatt's work centers around talking about experiences that are usually stigmatized, closeted, or hidden. As a clinician scholar, she uses both her clinical and research experience to bring awareness to marginalized communities. She can be followed on Twitter @erica_DSW

Omar Dewachi

Phone: 848-932-4102

Bio: Omar Dewachi is Associate Professor of medical anthropology at Rutgers University. Before joining Rutgers in 2018, Dewachi taught social medicine, global health, and anthropology in Lebanon, where he co-founded the Conflict Medicine Program at the American University of Beirut. Trained both as a physician and anthropologist, Dewachi’s research and writings have covered a wide range of themes and topics in the history and anthropology of medicine. He is the author of Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, winner of the New Millennium Book Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2019, is the first study documenting the untold history of the rise and fall of state medicine in Iraq and its unravelling under decades of conflicts and Western interventions in the country. His upcoming book manuscript, When Wounds Travel, chronicles close to a decade of ethnographic research and public health practice work in the Middle East, on war wounds, populations displacement, and the reconfigurations of war and health ecologies.  

Julien Musolino

Phone: (848) 445-4061

Bio: Julien Musolino is a cognitive scientist, public speaker, and author who holds a dual appointment in the Psychology Department and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Julien is also a member of the graduate faculty in the Philosophy Department at Rutgers. Julien was born and raised in France, and studied at the University of Geneva, in neighboring Switzerland, the University of North Wales, Bangor, in the United Kingdom, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. At Rutgers, Julien co-directs the Human Computational Cognition Laboratory (https://sites.rutgers.edu/ccm-lab) in collaboration with Dr. Pernille Hemmer. His research spans a broad range of topics in the sciences of the mind with the overarching goal of shedding light on what makes our intelligence distinctively human. Research topics include questions about language, rationality, agency, memory, and belief formation/updating. Julien’s research has been published in leading international journals and it has been funded by the NIH and the NSF. Julien’s work also takes a public dimension and explores the implications of cognitive science for a range of issues of broader societal importance. Julien has been the recipient of multiple teaching awards for his outreach efforts, he has appeared on national television, participated in public debates, his work has been discussed in popular magazines, and he has been a guest on radio and podcast programs in the United States and abroad. 

Paul Duberstein

Phone: (732) 235-4752

Bio: Dr. Paul Duberstein is a public health psychologist, gerontologist, social justice advocate, and researcher.  He is chair of the Department of Health Behavior, Society, and Policy at the Rutgers School of Public Health. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in November 2018, he held appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Family Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Dr. Duberstein has published more than 250 scientific papers and has received awards in recognition of his contributions to personality psychology, suicidology, medical faculty mentor ship, and community outreach.

Dr. Duberstein left his faculty position in an academic medical center for a leadership position in a School of Public Health because he wanted his work to have an impact beyond academia. He is interested in developing interventions and shaping policy to promote mental health, foster healthy aging and improve end-of-life care. He serves on the board of the Goals of Care Coalition New Jersey and on the Biomedical Ethics Committee of Penn Medicine-Princeton Health.

Elissa Kozlov

Phone: (914) 715-3012

Bio: Dr. Kozlov received her PhD in Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis with dual focuses in Clinical Psychology and Aging and Developmental Psychology. Following graduate school, she completed an internship in geropsychology at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Palo Alto, California. She then pursued at T32 fellowship at Weill Cornell Medicine in Behavioral Geriatrics. Throughout graduate school and internship, Dr. Kozlov completed clinical rotations in settings that serve older adults and adults with serious illness including hospice, palliative care, cancer hospitals and nursing homes.

Dr. Kozlov has two complimentary research areas. One area focuses on improving psychological outcomes for older adults and adults with serious illness. As part of this line of research, Dr. Kozlov has documented the gaps in mental health care within palliative care as well as the trajectory and prevalence of depressive symptoms at the end of life. Dr. Kozlov is currently working on a KL2 grant to pilot mHealth mindfulness therapy with caregivers of older adults with cognitive impairment to determine its feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy at improving quality of life and reducing caregiver stress anxiety and depression. Dr. Kozlov's other  area of research focuses on how to increase overall access to, awareness of, and knowledge about palliative care. As part of this research program, she developed the Palliative Care Knowledge Scale (PaCKS), a brief scale designed to assess layperson knowledge of palliative care and piloted a brief web-based intervention to improve knowledge of palliative care. She also documented knowledge deficits surrounding palliative care and analyzed web-based palliative care information pages to better understand what information about palliative care is available to laypersons. Dr. Kozlov has also developed scales and methodology to assess unmet palliative care needs in community-dwelling older adults who attend congregate meal sites (e.g., senior centers). 

Elaine LaFay

Phone:

Bio:  Elaine LaFay is a historian of climate and the body, specializing in the nineteenth-century United States. My current research seeks to understand the entanglements between climatology, medicine, and imperialism. My RCHA project, At the Tropics' Brink: Climates of Disease and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf South, explores how medical and atmospheric knowledge were entangled with American imperial anxieties and ambitions in the newly acquired territories of the Gulf South—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. 

Trip McCrossin

Bio: Trip McCrossin has been a member of Rutgers' Philosophy Department since 2003, working in various ways on the history and legacy of the Enlightenment in philosophy and popular culture.

Graduate Fellows

Jeffery Berryhill

Bio: Jeff Berryhill is a third-year student in the History Department at Rutgers. Prior to arriving at Rutgers, Jeff earned an MA in Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research and a BA from the Evergreen State College. His research interests include late twentieth century American political economy, public health & the provision of care, and social movements & protest. 

Kathryn Coniglio

Bio: Kathryn Coniglio is a 4th year PhD candidate and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in clinical psychology. Her research program centers on anorexia nervosa and behaviors related to extreme weight loss, such as pathological exercise. She also serves as co-chair of the Early Career Special Interest Group within the Academy for Eating Disorders. 

Joanna Federico

Bio: Joanna is a second-year history PhD student at Rutgers. She holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame and an MA in History from the University of Louisville. Her research focuses on the history of public health with particular emphasis on women, children and adolescents in the late twentieth century United States. Joanna has previously investigated the influence of collective memory on breast feeding advocacy. She is currently examining the science and politics behind youth violence prevention efforts developed by Congress and various agencies of the federal government in the wake of Columbine and other mass school shootings in the late 1990s.

Aaron Martin

Bio: Aaron’s research examines the social construction of existential threats and potential negative futures, the organizations and institutions that shape public understandings of these threats, and the effects of these understandings on policy and behavior. He is interested in the apocalyptic endings we create and why, and in imagining alternative perspectives for moving into the future.

Prior to Rutgers, Aaron spent six years building partnerships between government, philanthropic actors, and the social sector as a human rights and global development practitioner in Washington, D.C. He received his B.A. in English and Education from Houghton College.

Amadi Iruka Ozier

Bio: Amadi Ozier is a PhD Candidate in English Literature. Her dissertation explores the use of humor in African-American literature as a technology of discipline, producing alternative forms of black social thought. Her work often examines the intersections between humor and violence in American cultural production, focusing in particular on blackface minstrelsy and lynching mobs as two endemically American cultural art-forms.

Jayme Schlesinger

Bio: Jayme Schlesinger is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science department at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on terrorist decision-making and the effectiveness of terrorism, often within the context of religiously motivated terrorism. Her dissertation studies the effectiveness of terrorism by breaking down public responses to terrorist attacks and highlighting the role of public responses in shaping states’ counter terrorism policies.

Lisette Varon Carvajal

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Bio: Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate in history at Rutgers, studying the history of popular medicine in Colombia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her dissertation project titled “A World with no Doctors: Gender and Race in the History of Popular Medicine in Colombia 1700-1850” investigates the lives and medical practices of unlicensed healers, surgeons, and midwives, and analyzes the role of gender and race in the production of medical knowledge. Lisette received her BA from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, and she has worked in feminist and governmental organizations on topics of sexual and domestic violence in Colombia. She is also a host of the New Books Network. 

Hannah Groch-Begley

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Bio: