On November 16, the IR Program hosted the 21st annual Anne E. Borghesani Symposium. The Anne E. Borghesani Memorial Prize is an incentive award that was created to inspire personal and intellectual growth, increase understanding of all peoples, and encourage a commitment to community by providing students with funding to travel and conduct research abroad. At the Symposium, six Borghesani recipients shared their experiences and findings with the larger Tufts community over hors d’oeuvres and apple cider. 

The locations of study were diverse, spanning four continents and six countries. The projects themselves were even more diverse, covering topics ranging from grassroots microfinance in Ghana to cholera prevention in Bangladesh. Prize recipients presented their research questions, methodologies, and results, as well as sharing how their time abroad impacted their own world perspectives.  

After their presentations, each student fielded questions from curious Tufts faculty, students, and the Borghesani family. The Borghesani’s attend the symposium each year along with family, friends and members of the Anne E. Borghesani Community Foundation.  Their support has been critical to the prize’s development, allowing students at Tufts the opportunity to passionately pursue questions of importance not only on campus, but in the larger world.

The 2011-2012 application is available at http://bit.ly/borg2012. Contact John Taylor (john.taylor@tufts.edu) with any questions.

Lillian Prueher (A12, Interdisciplinary Studies) sought to understand care-giving and concepts of illness and dying in contemporary Chinese culture by travelling to Beijing. After interviewing and working with practitioners from both public hospitals and local clinics, Prueher became convinced of the need to develop a more effective hospice network in Mainland China.

Lisa Pinals (E12, Electrical Engineering) conducted a series of primary school surveys and workshops in Melbourne, Australia, intending to bridge the gap between engineers and non-engineers. Finding that much engineering outreach work is to be done for all ages, Lisa is currently writing an article to be published in the June 2012 edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine.

Maia Majumder (E12, Engineering Science) collaborated with the International Centre of Diarrheal Disease Research (ICDDR, B) to pinpoint water quality as the intervention point for cholera prevention in Dhaka, the urban capital of Bangladesh. This was done using statistical analysis on three variables: water quality, sanitation, and socioeconomic status. Maia plans to continue the next phase of her research through focus on Matlab, a rural village in Bangladesh.

Jennifer LaMotte (A12, Spanish and Latin American Studies) studied the methods of healing “susto,” or soul loss caused by spiritual fright, in the Peruvian Andes. Specifically, Jennifer focused on the balance between Western and traditional medicine in effectively engaging local community members.

David Wang (E12, Biomedical Engineering) has been working on a long term research project to develop a vaccine against Cryptosporidium, a protozoan parasite that is the leading indicator of death among adult HIV/AIDS patients. In Kenya, where 8% of the adult population has HIV/AIDS, David examined immune responses to gp15, a surface protein of Cryptosporidium, and found that it could be an important putative vaccine candidate for cryptosporidiosis. Future research would involve examining Memory B cells and T cell responses.

Kristen Johnson (A12, International Relations) travelled to Ghana with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) to fill the research gap of data on informal savings and debt. By closely working with local Ghanaians, Kristen was able to assess the importance of social capital in spawning a variety of informal savings mechanisms depending on perceptions of risk and return.