Strong Science Showing Leads Record-Tying Number of Doctoral Researchers to Win Harold N. Glassman Distinguished Dissertation Award

Four recent Georgetown doctoral graduates have been named recipients of the annual Harold N. Glassman Award, which honors distinguished dissertations in the humanities, social sciences and sciences at Georgetown.

This is the second time in the award’s 28-year history that four graduates have been selected instead of three. Georgetown’s Graduate Research Steering Committee typically selects one author for each of the categories of science, social sciences and the humanities, but the high caliber of this year’s science nominations merited two winners in that division, said Maria Snyder, the Graduate School’s associate dean for academic affairs. Only once before have recipients shared an award: In 2018, two psychology researchers won in the social sciences category.

This year’s winners are David Saxon (G’24, M’26) and Vaughn Shirey (G’23) in the sciences, Victoria Broadus (G’09, G’23) in the social sciences and Martina Thorne (G’16, G’23) in the humanities.

The honorees said Georgetown’s strong research ecosystem and support for doctoral scholars were essential in transforming their dissertations from proposal to award-winning publications. 

“I’m still in shock!” Shirey said of their win. “I never imagined that studying butterflies in Canada and Alaska would receive such recognition. I am very humbled and grateful for the stellar mentorship and collaborations that were developed over my time at Georgetown. Without them, this recognition would not be possible.”

In addition to commendation from their mentor, dissertation committee and senior faculty, awardees received a certificate at the Graduate School’s 2025 Doctoral Hooding Ceremony and a cash prize of $2,500 in each category.

This year’s cohort includes a neuroscientist, a lepidopterist and historians of West Central African culture in Brazil and decolonial narratives in Latin America. Meet the honorees and learn how their research is already making an impact.

David Saxon: Scrutinizing the Brain’s Emotional Center

Saxon, a neuroscientist, is captivated by how the brain develops and matures. Before arriving at Georgetown in 2018 as an MD/Ph.D. student, he studied neuroscience at Claremont McKenna College in California and spent two years researching neural stem cells at the Regenerative Medicine Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Saxon said he was drawn to Georgetown because of the collaborative research community in its Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience and the comprehensive curriculum of its School of Medicine.

His doctoral research centered on a niche area of the brain’s high-powered emotional core, the amygdala. By using a mouse model to study a group of late-maturing neurons in the amygdala’s paralaminar nucleus, Saxon found that the neurons became more responsive during adolescence and processed new social interactions during this key stage of physical and social development. He hopes that further investigations can reveal these neurons’ role in human social-emotional disorders, including autism and mood disorders.

Saxon’s project was supported by a highly competitive predoctoral fellowship award, the NRSA F30, from the National Institutes of Health and co-mentored by Stefano Vicini, a professor of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown’s School of Medicine and Joshua Corbin, Georgetown professor of neuroscience and interim director of the Center for Neuroscience Research at Children’s National Hospital.

Shawn Sorrells, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh and an external member of Saxon’s dissertation committee, said Saxon’s research “will have a substantial impact in the field of neural development.”

Saxon said he thought first of his advisors when he learned he won the Glassman Award.

“In science, the process of developing an independent perspective is daunting; the right mentors will empower you to establish your footing and enable exciting discoveries,” he said.

Saxon is finishing his fourth year of medical school at Georgetown and applying to residency programs in neurology.

Read Saxon’s dissertation, “Defining the Functional Identity of the Late-Maturing Paralaminar Amygdala,” on the Georgetown Library website.

Vaughn Shirey: Documenting Climate Change via Cold-Weather Butterflies

[Editor’s note: A photo of Vaughn Shirey receiving their Glassman Award is featured as the lead image for this article. That photo shows Shirey flanked by Graduate Studies Dean Alex Sens and Shirey’s mentor, Georgetown biology professor Leslie Ries.]

For Shirey, the phrase “butterfly effect” is literal. 

The concept, created by a meteorology professor to refer to the complexity and interconnectivity of nature, takes on new meaning in Shirey’s work. The researcher is exploring how butterfly populations in subpolar regions of North America have changed since the 1970s as their habitats grow warmer.

Shirey, who uses the pronouns they/them, arrived at Georgetown in 2018 from a Fulbright fellowship in Helsinki, Finland, at the Finnish Museum of Natural History’s Laboratory for Integrative Biodiversity Research. The Georgetown biology department’s range of expertise across subfields appealed to Shirey, who earned their bachelor’s degree in environmental science from Drexel University.

While conducting their doctoral research, Shirey discovered a scarcity of information on butterfly biodiversity in boreal and Arctic areas of North America. They created a modeling system that could take the existing, and often inconsistently sampled, data and accurately evaluate species population change over time. During their project, Shirey found that as temperatures increased in this region, populations of cold-adapted butterfly species decreased while warm-adapted butterflies became more prevalent.

Their research also included an intensive study that used machine learning to evaluate how the cold-weather Parnassius smintheus butterfly physically adapts to various environmental conditions.

Shirey’s mentor, Georgetown biology professor Leslie Ries, called Shirey’s work a sobering reminder of climate change’s impact. She said it documents ecological shifts that “not only show the degradation of polar ecosystems, but the homogenization of ecological communities in an increasingly human-dominated world.”

Shirley received funding through a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation and a STEM for the Public Good award from Georgetown’s Graduate Student Government. In 2023, Shirey also received a prestigious Smith Fellowship to support their postdoctoral research, which uses machine learning to identify causes of butterfly biodiversity change in the American Southwest. 

“One particularly poignant takeaway from Georgetown was a deepening of my love for the natural world,” Shirey said. “This has grounded me in all of the work I do. I try to carry this and cura personalis [care of the whole person] as much as possible through to my new position.”

Shirey is working as an assistant curator of lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, which has one of the world’s largest butterfly and moth collections.

Read Shirey’s dissertation, “Detecting Signals of Recent Climate Change in North American, Cold-adapted Butterfly Communities and Populations,” on the Georgetown Library website.

Victoria Broadus: Tracing the Legacies of Enslaved Miners Through Song

Broadus’ graduate experience at Georgetown was so nice that she did it twice. 

Broadus, who attended Brandeis University for her bachelor’s degree, earned her master’s in Latin American studies from the School of Foreign Service in 2009 and returned to Georgetown in 2017 for her Ph.D. in history.

In between her Georgetown studies, Broadus lived in Brazil for six years and worked in various research and writing roles. Once she decided to pursue a Brazilian history-focused Ph.D., she knew she wanted to study under Georgetown history professor Bryan McCann, who taught her during her master’s program.

Like McCann, Broadus is interested in music as a record of Brazilian history and culture. Her dissertation uses vissungos — verses sung by West Central African diamond miners working in Minas Gerais, Brazil, from the 18th through 20th centuries — to explore the history and legacies of this formerly enslaved population and their families to the present day.

“I hope my research helps illuminate how African communal song forms — and cultural forms more broadly — were fundamental for communal dignity, resilience, and survival among the enslaved and their descendants in Brazil,” Broadus said.

Broadus “essentially did the work of two dissertations” in her research, McCann said: “One a close, interdisciplinary analysis of vissungo, the other a sweeping overview of the history of ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology in Brazil, and the place of vissungo within that intellectual history.”

While earning her Ph.D., Broadus was awarded a DC Humanities grant to direct a short documentary capturing the community and history of the Park Regent apartment building prior to its closure in 2023. Broadus finished the film, Park Regent, in 2022 and screened it at the 2023 DC/DOX film festival.

Broadus served as a visiting professor of history at Oberlin College in Ohio from her graduation in August 2023 until this spring. She is returning to Georgetown this fall as an assistant teaching professor in the Department of History.

Read Broadus’ dissertation, “Vissungo: The Afro-Descended Culture of Miners and Maroons in Brazil’s Diamond District, 1850s-2020s,” on the Georgetown Library website.

Martina Thorne: Giving Wings to a Forgotten Indigenous Scholar’s Work

Thorne describes her academic path as full of exploration. After earning a J.D. in civil and mining law in her home country of Peru, she arrived at Georgetown in 2014 to pursue a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies.

While earning her master’s, she became interested in material culture, an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and the objects they create. She originally focused her Ph.D. research on Latin American material culture but pivoted to Latin American decolonial studies with the support of her mentors.

Thorne’s dissertation illustrates the life of 18th-century Afro-Peruvian naturalist Santiago de Cárdenas, who made foundational contributions to ornithology and aeronautics that Thorne argues were dismissed by de Cárdenas’ Spanish contemporaries because of his Indigenous identity. By removing the Eurocentric colonial lens that kept de Cardenas’ work in relative obscurity for centuries, Thorne’s research reveals his groundbreaking efforts to design an early flying machine, create a new avian taxonomy and conduct unprecedented research on the Andean condor.

Associate Professor Emeritus Veronica Salles-Reese, who taught Latin American studies and mentored Thorne, called Thorne “a true intellectual with a thirst for knowledge” and said that her dissertation will “further our understanding of the colonial power structure’s mechanisms to exclude Indigenous and mixed-blood peoples from intellectual discourses.”

Thorne’s doctoral research was supported by funding from the Cosmos Club Foundation, in addition to Georgetown’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Graduate Student Government.

“My doctoral studies at Georgetown shaped me profoundly — intellectually, methodologically and professionally,” Salles-Reese said. “The interdisciplinary approach cultivated during my MALS and Ph.D. programs continues to guide my research, while the mentorship and support I received have been foundational in the development of my first book project and my research agenda.”

This fall, Thorne will start an assistant professorship in Georgetown’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese as she writes her first book, Colonial Politics of Flight, based on her dissertation work.

Learn more about Thorne’s dissertation, “Poetics and Politics of Flight: Santiago de Cárdenas, the Literary Writing of Science and the Emergence of Decolonial Thought” on the Georgetown Library website.