Researchers of Emory

Congratulations to Zoe Robbin, URP’s featured undergraduate student researcher for the month of April! Zoe is currently a senior and is the first-place winner of the first annual URP 3-minute thesis competition.  **How did you get started in undergraduate research?** I got started in undergraduate research when I was a sophomore. I networked a lot with my professors and developed a lot of relationships with them. My first experience as part of a developed research team was when I was able to assist with writing a systematic review of conception strategies for people living with HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. It was a great experience and highly recommend undergraduate to develop relationships with your professors because you never know when they might need assistance from an undergraduate. **What motivated you to select your specific research topic?** The research topic that I presented for the 3-minute thesis was about the influence of tribal networks...

Zoe is an Emory senior from Fairfield Connecticut who studies Quantitative Sciences and Arabic. She was the Emory Global Health Institute Field Scholar in 2018 and traveled to Jordan to conduct research on sexual harassment in partnership with the Information and Research Center of the King Hussein Foundation. She worked on a study that seeks to assess the prevalence and develop a primary prevention intervention against sexual harassment at the University of Jordan. A professor from the Rollins School of Public Health is leading this study in partnership with the research team at the King Hussein Foundation. She is continuing her research on sexual harassment in at the University of Jordan through her senior honors thesis. Her argument is that gender-roles in Jordan carryover from tribal institutions into institutions of higher education. She is establishing this link through Sex-role Spillover theory. Zoe’s thesis will also include an epistemological discussion about Orientalism ...

Michael is an Emory senior from Bethesda, Maryland who is majoring in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies (MESAS) and Arabic. He is currently doing a senior thesis project titled “Framing Azawad in the Age of Facebook: The MNLA, Social Media, Narrative, and Identity”. The goal of his project is to explore the ways in which officials and supporters of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (known as the MNLA, its acronym in French), a secessionist rebel group at the heart of the civil war in the West African country of Mali between 2012 to 2015, used Facebook, and what their Facebook postings tell us about the way the movement framed its own identity and goals. To do this project, Michael identified a number of public Facebook accounts belonging to officials involved with the MNLA’s communications, such as spokesmen, and other accounts belonging to supporters of the MNLA. He quantitatively categorized their Facebook postings between 2012 and 2015, approximately 6500 ...