Dissertation Fellowship Recipients Announced
The 2026-2027 Dissertation Fellowship is awarded to Saint Louis University Ph.D. candidates whose work, during their time at Saint Louis University, demonstrates outstanding academic achievement and whose dissertation will significantly extend the body of knowledge within their discipline.
The fellowship is 11 months and includes a stipend of $31,500, 12 hours of tuition scholarship, depending on the number of dissertation hours needed to reach the required 12, and health insurance. Summer attendance is mandatory. No other fellowship, traineeship, assistantship, similar appointment, or employment at the University or outside may be held concurrently with this fellowship.
The recipients are:
Stephanie Hartling - Psychology
Hartling's research explores how people's emotional experiences impacts their mental abilities across the adult lifespan. The dissertation project investigates how aging affects both the ability to stop (inhibit) responses to emotional cues and the neural patterns that support this control. This work helps us understand how the aging brain supports everyday decisions and points toward strategies that can strengthen emotional and cognitive health in later life. Ultimately, Hartling's goal is to understand how emotion affects cognitive performance to better support healthy aging for everyone.
Wilfredo Robinson Moore - Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Moore's dissertation focuses on making STEM graphics accessible for individuals who are blind or have low vision through the use of commercial touchscreen devices. Consider a bar graph from a statistics course or a line chart representing stock market trends—how can this information be perceived without sight? Moore's research explores how the full range of capabilities available in touchscreens, including haptic feedback, spatial audio, and AI assistants, can be efficiently combined to enable nonvisual exploration, understanding, and discussion of graphical information. The impacts of this work seek to raise the bar for how to think about accessibility in the digital world.
Alessandra Damico - Chemistry
Damico's dissertation focuses on advancing the chemistry of carbohydrates by developing new reaction methods and optimizing conditions for glycosylation — the process of forming sugar linkages. By improving the efficiency and selectivity of these reactions, my work aims to enable the synthesis of both simple and complex oligosaccharides, which are essential for understanding biological processes and developing carbohydrate-based therapeutics.
Daniel Grasso - Philosophy
In today’s unsettled world hope seems like an ever more important attitude for living a good life. Hope is often promoted as a useful means to an end relegating hope to something like the power of positive thinking. However, the Christian tradition has long viewed hope as something deeper and more central to human flourishing. Grasso's project seeks to better understand the way in which hope supports human flourishing in this deeper way. Taking his inspiration from Aquinas and the Christian intellectual tradition, Grasso argues that hopes are important desires that people build their identities and their lives around. Since hopes are difficult to attain it is important that they are safeguarded against vices like despair and sloth by virtues such as fortitude, temperance, and magnanimity. Likewise, hope is intimately connected with love as our hopes are encouraged and nourished by those we hope in. In short, hope is a central component of human flourishing; hope is not just a can-do attitude but an anchor for the soul.
Dominic Robin – English and Bioethics
In his dissertation, Robin examines the integration of emerging biomedical technologies through the lens of narrative theory, focusing on the ways that narrative ethics can expand conversations about emerging technology beyond measurable metrics like costliness and effectiveness. In particular, Robin is interested in the ways that technologies reshape space, creating assumptions about knowledge that then shape conversations about what is ethical and what is unethical. Another way of conceptualizing this conversation is through a consideration of the question, "Who's in charge?" Do humans through knowledge control their technologies or is it possible that technologies, in tangible ways, exert control over humans? Drawing from scholars like Martin Heidegger, Bernard Stiegler, and Walter Ong, Robin defends the latter position, arguing that a full consideration of emerging technologies must move beyond questions of costliness (is this technology less expensive than its alternative?) and effectiveness (does the technology accomplish a given task better than its alternative?) to consider the relationship between each emerging technology and the rhetorical space it is shaping.
The Office of Graduate Education also extends its thanks to the faculty reviewers who served on the Dissertation Fellowship Selection committee: Brittany Hollister, Ph.D., Biomedical Sciences (Committee Chair); Joseph Nichols, Ph.D. Education; Echu Liu, Ph.D., Public Health Studies; Ruth Warner, Ph.D., Psychology; Jonathan Sawday, Ph.D., English; and Ajith Karunarathne, Ph.D., Chemistry.