I am a rising junior at Barnard studying history, concentrating on the history of empires and colonialism. I am researching the history of oysters in the 19th century, specifically the labor, ecology, and culture around oysters in places like New York Harbor, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Pacific Northwest to understand how people and the environment interact through food.

Although I am from Mexico City, I have lived abroad for most of my life in places such as London and São Paulo. Now, I am part of the Class of 2026 at Barnard College in New York, and my prospective majors are philosophy and economics. I am interested in understanding abstract concepts to then investigate their concrete manifestation in every-day life, hence the interdisciplinary nature of my research and leadership. Being the granddaughter of immigrants who fled from both the Spanish Civil War and the Cuban dictatorship, I am constantly drawn to the complexities of how people's identities, beliefs and economic realities shape their contribution to local communities. Ultimately, I am passionate about helping marginalised communities and contributing to a more egalitarian society as a whole.

My name is Hannah Ramsey (she/her), and I am a junior at Barnard College studying neuroscience and English, though my research is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing heavily from the fields of medical anthropology, sociology, and narrative medicine. Currently, I am researching how clinicians' reliance on body composition indicators (BCIs) in health assessments may contribute to the stigmatization of bodies. My intention with this work is to illuminate how moral and aesthetic biases within healthcare teams can negatively influence patient outcomes as a result of the stigmatizing effects associated with body-centric paradigms of health promotion. The goal of this research is to begin conceiving alternative approaches to promoting patients' physical health and subjective well-being that are both body-affirming and size-agnostic. Apart from this research, I also have personal and academic interests in creative writing, writing pedagogy, and advocacy as it relates to the neurodiversity movement. In my spare time, I enjoy writing poetry, playing guitar, and taking long walks outside!

Jasmine is from Santa Cruz, California and pursuing a combined major of Medical Anthropology and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard College'25. Her interests in public health and reproductive justice have led her to research on the changes in US maternal morbidity rates after the Supreme Court ruling of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which took away the constitutional right to abortion.

I am a senior at Columbia University majoring in History and Mathematics, and an alumna of the 2021-22 Columbia Laidlaw Scholars cohort. My Laidlaw research centered on the women's movement in early twentieth-century British India, with my first summer focused on the Indian writer, educator, and activist Mahadevi Varma's 1930s essays on the status of women in Hindu marriages, and my second summer focused on networks of women from across the British empire attending the Oxford in the 1910s-30s at the Unstable Archives Project. I remain very interested in intersections of gender, religion, and legal power between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and am currently writing a History thesis on the role of French Jesuit missionaries in shaping European knowledge of Indian religion at the turn of the eighteenth century.