Gold Graduate College Fellow

Patrick Smith

Community Health and Prevention
Dornsife School of Public Health

Patrick Smith is thrilled to join the Dornsife School of Public Health as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Community Health and Prevention. A registered nurse, Patrick has spent the last two years as a Complex Care Manager at Fenway Health, where he has worked to address health inequities and strengthen linkage to care for high-acuity patients with multiple chronic conditions. Previously, he spent two years conducting health systems research in Lesotho, first as a Fulbright research grantee studying the implementation of Lesotho’s national village health worker program, and later as a qualitative researcher with Partners In Health studying the impacts of a multi-level health system reform on accessibility and quality of primary healthcare services. As a clinician and researcher, Patrick is keenly focused on examining and deconstructing structural determinants of health disparities, particularly in the context of chronic diseases such as HIV/AIDS. At Drexel, he will join Dr. Alison Groves in studying social factors that reduce risk and enhance engagement throughout prevention and care cascades.

Blue Graduate College Fellows

Luis Alejandro Grande Branger

Communication, Culture and Media
College of Arts and Sciences

Luis is thrilled to be joining Drexel University as a first-year student in the Communication, Culture and Media PhD program. He has a Master’s degree in Liberal Studies from the University of Miami and a Master’s degree in Communication from the University of Puerto Rico. For his Master’s in Communication, Luis wrote a paper on the manifestations of identity within communication processes mediated by Facebook. He has worked in the field of Communication for over a decade in different capacities including: as a journalist, videographer, film critic, and film editor. His interests include semiotics, media representation and the effects of mediation technologies on the human experience. Luis was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela.

Elizabeth Espinal

Psychology
College of Arts and Sciences

Elizabeth Espinal is thrilled to be joining Drexel University as a first-year Clinical Psychology PhD student working under the mentorship of Drs. Evangelia Chrysikou and Maria Schultheis.  Her current research examines the electrophysiology of sleep rhythms in the brain and aims to uncover the neural mechanisms of offline memory consolidation and rehearsal during sleep, with the goal of improving diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric memory deficits.  Elizabeth is from New York City, and completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology with an emphasis in neuroscience coursework at Queens College, CUNY. She has spent the last two years working with surgical epilepsy patients and human intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data at North Shore University Hospital under Drs. Ashesh Mehta and Stephan Bickel in the Human Brain Mapping Lab.  Formerly a pastry chef, Elizabeth continues to enjoy experimenting in the kitchen, as well as anything outdoors, traveling with her husband, and a good book.     

Grace Ann Goetcheus

Environmental Science
College of Arts and Sciences

Grace Goetcheus is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth & Environmental Science. She graduated Tufts University in 2020 with a BS in Biology and BA in Anthropology. While completing her undergraduate degrees, Grace worked as a fossil preparator in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., where she was born, and as a field assistant for the Bighorn Basin Paleontological Institute in Montana, which led her to pursue paleontology. For her senior thesis at Tufts, she used 3D modeling to describe paleopathological features on the caudal vertebrae of Suuwassea emiliae, a sauropod dinosaur she helped excavate that is currently at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Grace is thrilled to begin her studies in vertebrate paleontology at Drexel University under the guidance of Dr. Ted Daeschler.  

Bengucan Gunen

Community Health and Prevention
Dornsife School of Public Health

Melissa Jenkings

Finance
LeBow College of Business

Melissa is delighted to join the Lebow College of Business as a PhD in Finance student. Melissa is an international student from Cape Town, South Africa and just completed her Master’s in Finance at Villanova University. Having a career in academics and research is one of her lifelong goals and she is beyond excited to start this journey at such a prestigious school as Drexel University. At Villanova, most of Melissa’s research involved Hedge Fund and 401k data. She is looking forward to continuing this research at Drexel as well as expanding into other topics such as Mutual Funds and IPOs. Melissa’s other interests include kayaking, travelling, and music.

Madison Miller

Management
LeBow College of Business

Madison is thrilled to join the Management Department to pursue her PhD with a concentration in Organizational Behavior. She has spent the past five years working in the Philadelphia area in research, communications consulting, and community development. Most recently, Madison served as Research Manager of the Criminal Justice Research Center at Penn State Abington, coordinating and conducting research surrounding the overdose epidemic. She is keenly interested in studying the factors and interventions that improve diversity and mental health in organizations. She is a graduate from the Penn State Schreyer Honors College with dual bachelor's degrees in Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Community, Environment, and Development.

Anya Prateek Pant

Mathematics
College of Arts and Sciences

Jesse Starger

Chemical Engineering
College of Engineering

Jesse is very excited to be joining Drexel as a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. He received his BS in Chemical Engineering from Tufts University in 2016, after which he spent a year working on a computational model of hydrothermal vents with Dr. Grant Garven. For the past three and a half years, he has worked at Moderna, leveraging first principles to design better lipid nanoparticles across multiple modalities, indications, and scales – most recently for the coronavirus vaccine.

Claire Trainor

Psychology
College of Arts and Sciences

Claire Trainor is thrilled to be starting as a first-year student in the Clinical Psychology PhD Program at Drexel! She will be working under the mentorship of Drs. Stephanie Manasse and Adrienne Juarascio at the WELL Center. Her current research interests include emotional processing and personality differences underlying eating pathology, and understanding how technology can augment treatment for eating disorders. Prior to joining Drexel, she spent two years working at the University of California, San Francisco under the mentorship of Dr. Daniel Le Grange, where she coordinated a study examining adaptions to Family Based Treatment for adolescents with anorexia nervosa. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and English at DePaul University in 2018. Claire is delighted to be joining the Drexel community and to explore Philadelphia! 

Kathleen Ward

Community Health and Prevention
Dornsife School of Public Health

Kathleen Ward, MSPH, CHES, is excited to join Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health to pursue her PhD in the department of Community Health and Prevention.  As an Urban Health Collaborative fellow, she will work with Alexis Roth, PhD, MPH in the Health Equity Advancement Lab to develop harm reduction interventions that improve health outcomes for marginalized populations in Philadelphia.  She received her BA in Communication Studies from The College of New Jersey in 2012 and went on to complete her MSPH at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she was also trained as an HIV and Hepatitis C educator, tester, and counselor.  As a senior research coordinator with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for 6 years, she worked to understand the facilitators and barriers to accessing healthcare for persons living with HIV, HCV, and substance use disorders.