Every year, the COE awards fellowships to fund summer (and spring and fall) research opportunities for Wesleyan students across all majors and class years. Most recently, the COE awarded more than 40 fellowships to Wes students. Learn a little bit more about each, below! Applications for summer 2024, fall 2024 and spring 2025 Bailey COE fellowships will open in January 2024.
Arlo Weiner ‘24 is a history and Middle East studies major. For his thesis, he is creating a documentary about the 1947 Texas City Disaster in which 576 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured. With the assistance of a 2023 Bailey COE summer fellowship, he spent his summer in Texas City and Galveston, meeting with witnesses of the disaster and conducting historical research.
What led you to choose the Texas City Disaster as the subject for this documentary project?
I picked this project because I was able to get in touch with a man named Carl Trepagnier, who wrote a fictionalized account of his experience of the disaster entitled Rise Up: A Novel about the 1947 Texas City Explosion. He offered to bring me to the town and offered to show me around and introduce me to other people who also lived through the disaster.
Every year, the Bailey COE awards fellowships to fund summer research opportunities for Wesleyan students across all majors and class years. Most recently, the COE awarded 35 summer fellowships and 1 fall fellowship to Wes students. Olivia Andrews ’24 is an art history major with a minor in film. Olivia’s summer fellowship project mainly centered around her great-grandfather, Tony Andrews, a black farmer who emigrated from Cape Verde by boat in 1926 and founded the family’s farm in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Our 33 class of 2024 ENVS linked majors have primary majors in 15 different departments, from film to government to feminist, gender and sexuality to chemistry. This diversity reflects the deep and widespread interest in environmental issues on the Wesleyan campus and our incredibly fertile coexist community! Dylan Campos ’24 (he/they) is a history and environmental studies major with a minor in global engagement. Learn more about Dylan, below!
Every year, the Bailey COE awards fellowships to fund summer research opportunities for Wesleyan students across all majors and class years. Most recently, the COE awarded 35 summer fellowships and 1 fall fellowship to Wes students. Natalie Angstadt ’25 is a junior majoring in Archaeology and Neuroscience & Behavior. Last summer she engaged in an archaeological dig at Trasimeno Archaeology Field School with the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy.
Each year the Bailey College of the Environment provides faculty-student research grants to provide faculty and their students an opportunity to conduct research that would not have been otherwise possible. Research in the O’Neil lab is focused on understanding the structure-function relationship of proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases, specifically ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease) and Alzheimer’s Disease. Thanks to a COE faculty-student research grant and a COE summer fellowship, Alison O’Neil, assistant professor of chemistry, Gloster Aaron, professor of biology, and Aaron Berson ‘24, an NS&B (neuroscience and behavior) and IDEAS (Integrated Design, Engineering, Arts & Society) major with a minor in chemistry, were able to collaborate on Professor O’Neil’s investigation of cis-chlordane as an environmental trigger of ALS.
Yuke Kirana ‘21 received her BA from Wesleyan in environmental studies and earth & environmental sciences. She is currently working as a data analyst at the Systems Change Lab at World Resources Institute (WRI), a global research nonprofit partnering with the Bezos Earth Funds and funded by the GEF Foundation, focusing on seven key areas relating to natural resources: food, forests, water, energy, cities, climate, and ocean.
Yuke’s interest in environmental studies began in high school, when she worked on a plastic waste reduction project as a student in Jakarta, Indonesia. “That project exposed me to the complexity of environmental issues,” says Yuke. “And it piqued my interest to learn more about the complex system that influences and shapes environmental initiatives.”