Past Fellows 2013-15
English-Stonehouse Faculty Fellows
Josh Burk
Josh Burk has been named one of the English-Stonehouse Professors. Burk is the director of the College's neuroscience program and associate professor in psychology. Burk arrived atthe College of William & Mary in 2009 after fellow and teaching positions at Ohio State University and the University of New Hampshire. Burk received a M.A. from the University of New Hampshire in 1996 and a M.S.T. and Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire in 1999. His current research is focused on the neural basis of attention, learning, and memory with an emphasis on the roles of the cholinergic system in attention, orexins in attention, cholinergic system in decision-making, and the effects of adolescent nicotine exposure on learning and memory.
J.C. Poutsma
J.C. Poutsma has been named one of the English-Stonehouse Professors. Poutsma is a physical chemist in the College's chemistry department. Poutsma received his B.S. from Furman University in 1991 and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1997. His current research is focused on using mass spectrometry and high-level theoretical calculations to study the intrinsic properties of gas-phase biomolecules. His lab is especially interested in the chemistry of so called “non-protein amino acids”, which are naturally-occurring compounds that are not coded by RNA. These species serve as model systems for the lab to understand the subtle interplay between structure and function in biological molecules.
English-Stonehouse Student Fellows
Isabel Hardee
Isabel has been named an English-Stonehouse Fellow. She is a junior at William and Mary, working on a major in chemistry with a math minor. Isabel began her research in Professor JC Poutsma's lab in fall 2011 as an HHMI Freshman Scholar, and has loved working there every semester and summer since. Her current research involves the use of mass spectrometry in determining intrinsic properties of gas-phase molecules. She looks forward to learning more about the kinetic method and the calculations behind her current projects. In her free time Isabel is also a tour guide, on the honor council, social chair of the running club, and frequent volunteer at Williamsburg Doctor's Hospital. She eventually hopes to get a career in healthcare after graduation.
Kathy Huynh
Kathy is a senior Chemistry major at The College and has been a member of Professor Poutsma's Ionlab since the fall of her junior year. She was an English-Stonehouse Fellow during the summer of her junior year and has greatly enjoyed learning and working in a research lab. She is working on a number of projects involving the determination of thermochemical properties of various compounds using a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. She is also working on a project which tests the efficacy of the extended kinetic method in making the thermochemical determinations. After graduation, Kathy hopes to use her undergraduate research experience in a forensic science laboratory.
Diana Otoya
Diana has been named an English-Stonehouse Fellow. She is a junior Biology major at the William and Mary and has been working in Professor Burk’s lab since Spring 2013. This summer she worked on assessing whether rats could learn a novel signal detection task, namely, if they could detect whether removal of a light was a signal in attention performance tasks. Diana loves working in lab and looks to continue her research. Her follow-up goal for this semester is to test whether the basal forebrain cholinergic system, known to be critical for attention, is necessary for performance in this novel signal detection task. After graduation, Diana hopes to pursue a career in healthcare.
Cassidy Reich
Cassidy has been named an English-Stonehouse fellow. She is a senior Neuroscience major, Chemistry minor and has been working in Burk's lab since January of 2012. This summer, she completed a project on the effects of nicotine on a probability-discounting task, and she is currently working on a second project for her honors thesis. Cassidy loves being in lab and aspires to get a PhD in Pharmacology.
