Recent Graduate Student Accomplishments
Introduction
Our UIC Anthropology current and former graduate students have had a number of impressive accomplishments recently! Please join us in congratulating them.
Current and Recent Students
Benjamin Bernard-Herman won a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for this coming year. These are enormously competitive national fellowships and this is a huge honor for Benjamin.
María Isabel Guevara Duque's submission to UIC's 2026 Image of Research Competition, "Tracing Copper at Its Source: Geological Origins of Ancient Andean Metallurgy," has been selected as an Honorable Mention winner in the still image category. This year's competition received over 104 submissions this cycle, making it one of the most competitive years to date.
Riya Sharma received an honorable mention from the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society for her paper "Eating Traditional Foods the Traditional Way: Making a Market for Millets in India" in their Graduate Student Research Paper Prize competition.
Dr. Kevin Suemnicht (PhD 2025) received the Graduate College's 2025-2026 Outstanding Dissertation Award for the Behavioral and Social Science Division. This award was given for his thesis entitled defended last year "There Is No Word for What We Must Become": Social Movement in Southern Illinois."
Former Students
Danielle Silverman (MA 2024) has been promoted to a new position as Field Services Specialist in the Cultural Division at Merjent in Minneapolis. Prior to this Danielle worked at the CRM firm Gray and Pape.
Dr. Alize Arican (PhD 2021), Assistant Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY)-City College, has an article published in American Anthropologist this month. Prior to this, Alize completed postdocs at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University and in the Society of Fellows at Boston University.
Dr. Elizabeth Gravalos (PhD 2021) completed postdocs at the Negaunee Intergrative Research Center at the Field Museum, the Department of Anthropology at Brown University, and at the Department of Anthropology at Stanford. In 2025 Beth has moved into the position of Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University's Department of Anthropology
Dr. Ken Batai (PhD 2012) has moved from the University of Arizona to Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center where he works in the area of health disparities, medical anthropology, and anthropological genetics.