Sylvana Finn  (UC Davis) is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Group in Ecology at UC Davis, where she is co-advised by Dr. Elizabeth Crone and Dr. Neal Williams. She is fascinated by how organisms time their life cycles. In particular, she studies how bumble bee life cycles respond to environmental change, including warming temperatures and urbanization. She has found that bumble bees are highly responsive to environmental conditions, with some urban environments supporting year-round activity. Sylvana holds an M.S. in Biology from Tufts University and a B.A. in Biology from Skidmore College, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She is honored to hold the Phi Beta Kappa key of her late grandmother, whom she knows would have been especially proud of this achievement.

Melanie Kirkpatrick (UC Santa Cruz) is studying Molecular, Cell and Developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz. She studies how astrovirus, which causes childhood diarrhea, infects specialized mucus-producing cells in the small intestine.

Diarrheal disease is the third leading cause of death in children under 5 years old worldwide, killing over 400,000 children every year. Astroviruses are prevalent enteric viruses that cause diarrhea, and 90% of children have been infected by the age of 5. Melanie is using immortalized human cell culture models to study the host factors related to astrovirus susceptibility and replication. In particular, she is interested in how astroviruses replicate in goblet cells of the small intestine. Goblet cells produce the important mucus barrier that lines our digestive tract. In order to study infection in goblet cells, Melanie is pioneering new cellular models that allow us to determine how astroviruses infect these critical secretory cells. Her work will pave the way for future work in understanding how astroviruses cause diarrhea.

In addition to her graduate studies, Melanie also volunteers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a volunteer guide, facilitating touch pools and interpreting exhibits in order to inspire conservation of the ocean.

Hannah Kortbawi (UC San Francisco, Reed award) is working toward an MD and a PhD at UC San Francisco. Her work in the lab is focused on Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), an autoimmune disease that is linked to very common viral exposures in childhood. She is interested in identifying immune factors that make some individuals far more likely to develop T1D after a viral exposure compared to the general population. Her project spans building tools to identify the protein targets of autoantibodies, using computational approaches to identify themes in the sequences of those antibody targets, and interrogating the consequences of those antibodies in viral infection. Outside of her dissertation work, she leads the UCSF MD/PhD program’s Women’s Group and spends time mentoring high school students.

Flannery McIntyre (UC Berkeley, Hardardt award) is a PhD candidate in Musicology and Medieval Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, “Music and the Materiality of Knowledge in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages”, offers an alternative narrative for the role of music in Late Antique and Early Medieval culture. Whereas music in this period has traditionally been understood as a precursor to the liturgical standardization and the development of music notation in the ninth century, such a teleological focus obscures other facets of musical activity. Her approach, by contrast, centers material culture, allowing for a larger, more eclectic source base. Through canonical music sources, historical, and archaeological materials, she shows that music was used as a tool for scientific inquiry, a means of political legitimization, a way to establish women’s intellectual authority, and a bridge between classical and medieval intellectual traditions. While scholars have abandoned the pejorative label “the dark ages”, its effects on musical scholarship are still palpable. Her dissertation dispels this myth of musical lack, illuminating the richness and multivalence of early medieval music. Before starting her PhD, she earned an MPhil in Medieval Archaeology from the University of Cambridge and an A.B. in Archaeology and the Ancient World (Classical), Medieval Cultures, and Music (History/Theory/Composition) from Brown University.

Alejandra Rosselli-Calderon (UC Santa Cruz) is a Colombian astrophysicist working towards her PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). At UCSC she has had the fantastic opportunity to work on the advancement of our understanding of how stars and black holes dance together in the depths of space. We tend to think of stars as points of light in space that get pulled by one another via Kepler's laws of gravity. But real stars are rarely alone. Most are born in pairs or larger families, and their lives are shaped by nearby companions. Their fate can be completely changed by close encounters, mass exchanges, or even violent ejections. In her work she treats stars as evolving entities that grow, lose material, expand, and sometimes crash into neighbors. By letting stars behave like real physical objects inside multiple-body systems, we can learn not only where they go, but also what happens to them along the way. Alejandra uses cutting edge computational codes that use detailed physical laws of gravitational dynamics, equilibrium and hydrodynamics to understand these complex systems. These tools allow her to predict not only how stars and black holes react over the course of their lifetime, but what's more, how they will look when we see them through telescopes. She hopes that these predictions can guide what astronomers search for in the sky as more advanced telescopes keep being developed.

Alejandra is deeply grateful for the investment of Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association in the sciences and particularly in her as a scientist. We are living in a time where there is a deep societal mistrust of science and scientists, combined with deliberate attacks on immigrant communities. Alejandra hopes that through her science and outreach she can inspire future generations of scientists who might feel like they do not belong.

Jacob Steenis (UC Davis, Hendess award) is currently studying physics at UC Davis working on experiments based at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. At this site, superconducting magnets force protons to collide together at the highest energies ever produced by humankind. These collisions are key to understanding the fundamental properties of our universe because they have the potential to reveal “new physics.” And this new physics is what Jacob is searching for. Specifically, he searches for signatures of “millicharged particles.” These are particles that are theorized to have an electric charge about 0.1% that of the electron. If discovered, these could provide great insights into dark matter and could directly influence the way in which we mathematically describe electromagnetism.

Jacob has worked to develop the FORMOSA detector which aims-itself at the high-energy proton collisions of the LHC. This is a device specifically designed to search for millicharged particles, and over the course of 2025 has collected roughly 50TB (50,000 GB) of data. It is these data that will provide useful insights into the presence (or absence) of millicharges throughout the universe.

Jacob thanks PBKNCA and Ray Hendess for this wonderful opportunity and for the support in pursuing his dream of making meaningful contributions to the field of physics. He also wants to extend his most heartfelt thanks to Prof. Bob Cadmus at Grinnell College for helping him embark on this physics journey in the first place.

Sylvie Thode (UC Berkeley) is a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley, where she also serves as Program Associate at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Most generally, her research addresses the psychic and social costs of making sexuality into a basis for solidaristic political action. In her dissertation, Alone Song: Anticollectivism, AIDS, and the Edge of Solidarity, she takes up this question by turning to an archive of self-destructive poets, bitter literary critics, outed public intellectuals, and other cultural figures who felt themselves at odds with the collectivism of AIDS activist movements. In doing so, she offers a version of AIDS history that makes central the limit cases of queer theory’s solidarity with figures of its past.