The MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) has named third-year PhD candidate Odinaka Kingsley Eze the winner of the 2026 Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize.
The 2025-2026 STS Committee on Prizes and Awards— Professors Robin Scheffler, Oliver Rollins, and Ishani Saraf— highly praised Aka’s paper, “A Rapid Course to Death: Cerebrospinal Meningitis and Epidemic Seasonality in Northern Nigeria,1905–1939.” In their prize citation, the committee remarked that his “lucid and deeply researched” account of epidemic response “reflects the interplay of the biological basis of the disease as a rapid, fatal, and environmentally mediated condition with the colonial and post-colonial structures of public health and biomedical research in Nigeria.”
Awarded annually by the STS Program, the Siegel Writing Prize was established in 1990 by family and friends of Benjamin Siegel, SB ’38, PhD ’40 to honor his memory. It recognizes a exemplary recent paper of fifty pages or less, and is open to graduate students from any department or school at the Institute.
Congratulations, Aka, on this recognition!
Second-year Thea Applebaum Licht is among thirty-five MIT doctoral students to be selected for the 2026-2027 Health and Life Sciences Collaborative Fellowship (HEALS). This highly competitive award recognizes students whose academic research intervenes in pressing problems across the health and life sciences.
During the fellowship, Thea will continue to pursue research on the history and political economy of the US pharmaceutical industry. She will also be part of an interdisciplinary cohort of students from across MIT’s five schools. Together, the HEALS fellows will complete targeted mentorship sessions with MIT faculty members and leverage a broad base of Institute alumni and industrial partners to grow their respective professional networks. The fellowship will culminate in an symposium wherein the cohort will present their work to the broader Institute community.
Congratulations, Thea!
Fourth year PhD candidate Diego Cerna-Aragón received an honorable mention in the 2026 Latin American Studies Association’s (LASA) Health, Science, and Technology Section paper prize. Diego’s paper was entitled “Orienting Capital: Transformations in the Production of Geological Information during the Peruvian Neoliberal Turn.”
Congratulations, Diego, on this recognition!
The Society for Cultural Anthropology has recognized Lisa Messeri PhD ’11 with the 2025 Gregory Bateson Prize for her book In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2024).
Awarded annually, the Bateson Prize commends an anthropological monograph that is interdisciplinary, experimental, and innovative. This year’s jury notes that Lisa and the two scholars who received honorable mentions “invite us to reflect on world-making at a time when harm, the instability of reality, and existence under oppressive settler-colonial regimes are expanding and taking new and intensified forms.”
Lisa currently serves as associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Yale University Department of Anthropology. The HASTS community congratulates her for this well-earned recognition.
Photograph courtesy of Yale University Department of Anthropology
On May 8-9, 2026, members of the third year cohort— Tathagat Bhatia, Ambar Reyes, Linda Ridzuan, Odinaka Kingsley Eze, and Danhue Kim (pictured l-r)— presented their dissertation proposals to the HASTS community.
Each of the soon-to-be PhD candidates delivered short remarks about their intended ethnographic and historical research projects (individual titles listed below) and received constructive feedback from fellow students and faculty alike. During the 2026/27 academic year, the cohort will disperse to field sites and historical archives across the globe, gathering data to refine, and ultimately answer, their research questions.
As always, the third years’ projects showcase the vibrant and interdisciplinary work that HASTS students do. The wider community commends the cohort for their hard work and wishes them success as they embark on the next phase of their degree.
Presentation titles and authors are listed below in the order of their delivery:
Cultures of Repair: Microbial Decomposition across Difference on Jeju Island
Selling a Plutonium-Powered Future: How Nuclear Reprocessing was Made, Unmade, and Made Again
Planetary Paperwork: Data Practices and the Making of Third World Earth Science
From Hustle to Infrastructure: The Making of a Transnational Resale Economy
Biafra: A Story of Science, Technology, and Innovation in Africa
Eighth year PhD candidate Taylor Bailey has curated First-Class Flora: A Stamp Collection of Medicinal Plants, an outdoor exhibition at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Drawing from the large stamp collection of chemical industry market researcher Richard Marston Lawrence (1906-1991), the exhibit poses the question: Why do we collect what we collect?
In its answer to that provocation, First-Class Flora suggests that stamps have served as visual emblems that communicate the history and professional cultures of science. Lawrence’s stamps, for example, bear the images of 220 individual medicinal plants from across the globe, each of which he classed into 26 categories of pharmaceutically useful substances. This kind of schematicity was a key component of Lawrence’s own work in the US chemical industry.
Bailey, who currently serves as Cain Curatorial Fellow at the Science History Institute, worked with colleagues Jahna Auerbach and Scott Bowe to digitize and install the exhibit. It will be on view until April 2027.
Image courtesy of the Science History Institute
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm (Eastern Time)
On campus: E51-095
Dissertation Committee
Christopher Capozzola
Elting Morison Professor of History
MacVicar Faculty Fellow
Committee Chair
Megan Black
Associate Professor of History
Director of Graduate Studies
Harriet Ritvo
Arthur J Conner Professor of History, Emeritus
Saul Zaritt
Assistant Professor and Program Director of Yiddish
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
The Ohio State University
Third year HASTS student Tathagat Bhatia has received a research grant from the MIT Center for International Studies. Awarded annually to a small number of students across the Institute, the grants provide funding for PhD candidates whose work focuses on international studies and requires travel for field research and/or visits to archives.
Financial support from CIS will allow Tathagat to advance their dissertation project, tentatively titled “Earthlike: Constituting the planet in the age of postcolonial worldmaking.” After passing their qualifying exams and presenting their dissertation proposal this spring, Tathagat will soon begin intensive, multi-sited archival research for this project.
Sixth year HASTS PhD candidate Zachary La Rock and recent alumna Elena Sobrino PhD ’23 traveled to Philadelphia, PA to present at the University of Pennsylvania’s biennial EnviroLab conference. Taking place between 10 and 11 April, the theme of this year’s convening was “(Un)Doing Catastrophe.” The event drew more than fifty graduate student and early career scholars from across the United States and Canada.
Elena, who is currently a lecturer at the Tufts University STS Program, presented a paper entitled “Fatigue and the Politics of Closure: Testing the Limits of Modernist Crisis Management in the Flint Water Crisis.” Zachary, meanwhile, presented a shortened version of his most recent dissertation chapter, entitled “Curative Malaise: Science, Magic, and Unsettlement in an Agricultural Epidemic.”
In addition to the conference panels and a lively screening of short films, Zachary, Elena, and sixth year HASTS PhD candidate Rustam Khan enjoyed a reunion with eighth year PhD candidate Taylor Bailey, who serves as curatorial fellow at Philadelphia’s Science History Institute as he concludes his dissertation research.
HASTS alumna Michelle Spektor PhD ’23 has been named a 2026 Fellow by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Currently a postdoctoral associate at MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, Spektor will use the fellowship to make progress on a project entitled “Making Biometric Citizens: State Power and National Belonging from the British Empire to the Digital Age.” This work builds from her HASTS doctoral research.
The ACLS, which marks its centennial of academic grantmaking in 2026, will award more than 5.3 million dollars in funding to the 63 members of this year’s cohort. Their proposals were selected from a pool of 2,000 applications following lengthy review by leading scholars in their respective fields.
Congratulations, Michelle, on this achievement!