doctoral students

Jessye Gassel has always been fascinated with spinning bodies. Gassel found herself looking forward to her high school physics class every day and knew, by junior year, that she would pursue it in college. A senior-year astronomy class honed that direction toward astrophysics.

George Mason doctoral student Caroline Toth looks at how adolescents’ social media use is associated with the structure of their in-person friendship networks. Her research shows that friendships were more likely among youth with similar levels of problematic social media use and digital status seeking.

Loveline Phillips never contemplated the academic path she found at the Schar School. But now that she’s discovered how her research skills can help others, there’s no stopping her.

George Mason University recently held its first-ever Qualitative Research Day, an event for PhD students of all disciplines to engage in hands-on and interactive opportunities with the goal of learning new qualitative research techniques and methodologies. The inaugural event is the latest innovation in George Mason’s ongoing efforts to find new ways to support its PhD students.

As a doctoral student at George Mason University, Jordan Sims has spent the past several years immersed, literally and figuratively, in the underwater ecosystems of Honduras, where her research is helping solve real-world challenges in coral reef conservation.

Tiphanie Raffegeau of George Mason University ’s School of Kinesiology in the College of Education and Human Development, and Christopher Rhea, Old Dominion University’s associate dean for Research and Innovation in Ellmer College of Health Sciences have been awarded a 4-VA grant to study the use of virtual reality to prevent falls in older adults.

A partnership between the Brazilian Air Force and the College of Engineering and Computing is yielding explosive results in blast research, in what one faculty members describes as a win-win collaboration.

Wrongful convictions can upend lives, particularly those of high schoolers, and can result in students becoming part of the school-to-prison pipeline. Talley Bettens, a doctoral candidate in George Mason University’s Department of Criminology, Law and Society, seeks to trace this issue to its roots: adolescent behavior and environment. 

By developing a new machine learning algorithm to apply variational inference to spatial statistics, Jin Hyung Lee has significantly improved high-dimensional data analysis efficiency and accuracy. The PhD candidate in the Department of Statistics received the 2024 Korean International Statistical Society Outstanding Student Paper Award for his work.

George Mason University history PhD candidate Jayme Kurland is living her dream this academic year as the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.