Vanderbilt-Fisk Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunity

Jessica Power is a historian of the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. Her research interests focus on the history of slavery and abolition, with additional fields of expertise in the antebellum United States, comparative slavery in the Americas, and law and legal history. Power is also grounded in the collaborative world of digital humanities and investigates the relationship between digital scholarship, race, and local public history.

Power earned her undergraduate degree in History from West Virginia University in 2014. After graduation, she taught English at the University of Salamanca in Spain and, later, returned to West Virginia to teach Spanish in public elementary schools. In 2018, she completed her master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Vanderbilt University where she was awarded a Tinker Field Research Grant to conduct archival research in Havana, Cuba. That same year, she began to pursue her Ph.D. in History at Vanderbilt under the mentorship of Dr. Jane Landers. During her doctoral studies, Power also served as the Graduate Research Assistant to the Builders and Defenders Database directed by Dr. Angela Sutton, where she helped build a community-driven collaborative digital project about historic Black Nashville and the Civil War (https://buildersanddefenders.org/). This summer, Power successfully defended her dissertation, titled “The Occupation of Pensacola: Slavery and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World.” She will officially graduate with her doctorate degree in August 2024.

Power’s long-term career goal is to become a tenured professor at an institution where she can follow her academic passions in teaching, research, the digital humanities, and public history. She will be dedicated to teaching “living history” and will encourage students to think about how they relate to history and, vice versa, how the past impacts them today. She will further develop cutting edge digital research projects that train students in the digital humanities and that takes them outside of the classroom and into the communities around them.

During her postdoctoral fellowship, she will be mentored by Dr. Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and Director of the Slave Societies Digital Archive at Vanderbilt University, and Dr. Patrick Rasico, Assistant Professor of History and Discipline Coordinator for History in the Department of History and Political Science at Fisk University.

Velia Garcia is a structural biologist interested in the fundamental mechanisms of structure-function relationships of proteins involved in inflammation. Her current research is focused on understanding cell signaling interaction at the host-pathogen interface.

Garcia earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry at the University of Texas Pan American, a Hispanic-serving institution, where she was awarded a Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement Undergraduate Training Fellowship in 2014. She began the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program under the mentorship of Dr. Steven Damo at Fisk University. Upon completing her master’s thesis, she transitioned into the chemistry department at Vanderbilt to pursue her Ph.D. in the laboratory of Dr. Walter Chazin.

Garcia will complete her doctorate this summer. Through her experiences with minority-serving institutions, she understands how instrumental these institutions are in training the next generation of students. Garcia aspires to become a professor at a minority-serving undergraduate institution.

While in her postdoctoral fellowship, she will be mentored by Dr. Jennifer Gaddy, associate professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, and Dr. Steven Damo, chair of the Department of Life and Physical Sciences and assistant professor of chemistry at Fisk.

Meagan Rainock is a sociologist investigating three lines of inquiry: the social determinants of health, racial and ethnic inequality and empowerment, and deviance and social control. Her research aims to illuminate the role of racial stratification in the criminalization of mental illness.

Rainock earned her undergraduate degree in sociology from Brigham Young University, where she also received her master’s degree in sociology. She entered Vanderbilt to pursue her Ph.D. under the mentorship of C. André Christie-Mizell and wrote her dissertation, titled “Race-Gender Differences in Medicalization and Criminalization: The Consequences for Criminal Justice Involvement and Mental Health Treatment.”

Rainock completed her doctorate in spring 2023. Her long-term career goal is to become a tenured professor of sociology at a university where she can pursue both teaching and research. She will specialize in the study of racial disparities in health and criminal justice involvement in the hopes of making a significant contribution to this social issue through research that has a tangible community impact, and through mentoring students in the pursuit of solving social problems.

While in her postdoctoral fellowship, she will be mentored by Dr. Jonathan Metzl, Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor, professor of sociology and psychiatry and director of the Department of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt, and Dr. Shirley Brown, dean of the School of Humanities and Behavioral Social Sciences and professor of sociology at Fisk.

Anne Taylor is a neuroscientist studying addiction. Her goal in this research is to uncover the neurophysiological mechanisms of short- and long-term drug use and its relation to negative affective behaviors. She wants to use her work to create and disseminate educational tools for the broader community. She believes, as part of her duty as a scientist, that she should enrich the lives of individuals who have experienced adversity to minimize their risk for future negative health outcomes.

Taylor completed her undergraduate degree at Binghamton University, where she completed a research project with Dr. Christopher Bishop that was published in Neuroscience. She was awarded a National Institute on Drug Abuse fellowship, which allowed her to continue research during the summer of 2016 in Dr. Paul Meyer’s lab at the University of Buffalo. The experience with Meyer encouraged Taylor to apply for graduate school to pursue a career in the field of addiction research.

Taylor will complete her doctorate this summer. She aspires to be a leading expert in her field, with a particular focus on the plasticity mechanisms that underly the transition from alcohol use to abuse. She is committed to creating a supporting and inclusive learning environment and instill a love of lifelong learning in the students she teaches and mentors.

While in her postdoctoral fellowship, she will be mentored by Dr. Danny Winder, director of the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research and Bixler-Johnson-Mayes Professor and professor of molecular physiology and biophysics at Vanderbilt, and Dr. Brian Nelms, dean of the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and associate professor of biology at Fisk.