Assistant Professor of Black and Latino Studies Dr. Rojo Robles has been selected as a 2022 Summer Faculty Fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for Higher Education. He will be participating in a professional development program titled, “Concepts of Black Diaspora in the United States: Identity and Connections among African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American Communities.”
Rojo Robles
Dr. Robles is a Puerto Rican professor, writer, playwright, and filmmaker. He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras with a BA in Theater and an MA in Comparative Literature. He holds an MPhil and PhD from the Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures Department (LAILAC) at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His research interests are located at the intersection of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Film and Afro-Latinx Cultural Studies. With a Baruch colleague, Rebecca Salois, who also teaches in the BLS Department, he co-hosts a podcast called Latinx Visions.
He has published articles in SX Salon| Small Axe Project, Taller Electric Marronage, The Puerto Rico Review, Revista Cruce, Revista Iberoamericana and has been a cultural critic at 80grados.net for more than a decade. He is the editor of Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri’s posthumous chapbook Condom Poems 4 Sale One Size Fits All (Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, 2019). He is currently at work on a book project about Boricua out-of-the-page poetics and dispersed archives of dissent. He is also developing a series of articles about cinegraphic and intermedial literature in Puerto Rico, Latin America, and US Latinx communities.
Since 2004 he is the artistic director of the independent group, El kibutz del deseo, dedicated to producing plays, films, and publishing fiction and poetry. He is the author of Los desajustados/The Maladjusted (2015) and Escapistas (2017) and the writer, director, and producer of the experimental film The Sound of ILL Days (2017).
Professor Louis-Pierre Arguin (Mathematics) has won a $278,839 grant from the National Science Foundation to study extreme value statistics in probabilistic number theory.
The funding will be disbursed from 2022 to 2024 and will support Arguin’s research, travel, and conference and workshop participation. The grant will also provide funding for two PhD students and two Baruch undergraduate research assistants. The undergrads will work on codes of numerical experiments.
Louis-Pierre Arguin
Arguin is also on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds a PhD in math from Princeton and a master’s degree in physics from the University of Montreal, where he also earned a bachelor’s degree in math and physics. He serves as an associate editor on the editorial boards of Electronic Journal of Probability and Electronic Communications in Probability.
His research interests are number theory, probability, and statistical mechanics. He recently published a textbook, A First Course in Stochastic Calculus, and he is the recipient of the André Aisenstadt Prize for outstanding research achievement by a young Canadian mathematician.
Baruch College alumna Katsiaryna (Kate) Milashevich (’21) is among eight CUNY students who have won 2022 Jonas E. Salk Scholarships for their scientific research. Her work on “Mitochondrial Distribution of Glycine Receptors in Motor Neuron Cell Lines” was done under the mentorship of Professor Pablo Peixoto (Natural Sciences).
Noting her “brilliance, drive, scientific curiosity, independent thinking, and integrity,” Peixoto said his former student “embodies the qualities of a promising future medical student and professional. Kate’s track record of excellence in the classroom, the research laboratory and in clinical volunteering certainly catalyzed her acceptance into medical school. It also contributed to the research environment at my laboratory, leveraging preliminary results that will support a future grant application to the National Science Foundation. She shows an outstanding promise as a future physician scientist who embodies the qualities of an ideal candidate to the Jonas E. Salk Scholarship.”
Kate Milashevich in lab
Milashevich graduated from the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences with an an Honors in Biology major and Communication Studies minor. Her research examined the existence of a hypothetical mitochondrial glycine receptor in cultured motor neurons using immunofluorescence imaging. Preliminary findings identified a correlation between the localization of mitochondrial fluorescence and the glycine receptor in non-differentiated cells.
Milashevich is currently taking a gap year before starting medical school in August. She hasn’t yet decided which school to attend. In the meantime, she’s working with patients at CityMD Urgent Care as a medical scribe to further develop her clinical experience.
Milashevich was drawn to medicine as a career path after her younger brother was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. “I began to explore a multitude of contemporary studies to understand his diagnosis,” she said. One topic that intrigued her was neuroinflammation and the role of the anti-inflammatory amino-acid glycine. She sought out Peixoto’s lab as a place where she could pursue her interests.
Milashevich also shadowed an opthalmologist and decided to pursue a career as a physician “to empower families through knowledge and benevolence. I hope to consolidate what I have learned about autism— to study patients from various angles, and to offer individualized care because just like in autism, every person is their own puzzle to solve.”
Milashevich credited her science education at Baruch with nurturing her interests and helping her establish a foundation for her future career. “Building this foundational understanding takes great care, support, and time, which I was very fortunate to receive,” she said. The small size of Baruch’s Department of Natural Sciences creates a family-like atmosphere where “the students all know each other and gather to study in groups allowing for different opinions and resources to coexist and flourish. The faculty know each student and are more than accessible and considerate. They reach out to you with your best interests in mind, to ensure no opportunity evades you … No matter my future ambitions, I still have a family at Baruch who cares for my success and remains approachable even after my graduation.”
This is Peixoto’s third student to win a Salk.
Salk Scholarship winners receive a total of $8,000 over the course of four years to help defray the cost of study for M.D. and D.O. degrees, as well as doctoral degrees in biomedical sciences.
In 1955, the Jonas E. Salk Scholarship was created by the Board of Estimate of the City of New to honor Dr. Jonas E. Salk, world-renowned scientist, developer of the first vaccine to prevent polio, and a graduate of The City College of New York.
Each year, Salk Scholarships are awarded to eight graduates of CUNY senior colleges who have been accepted by, and plan to attend, U.S. medical or graduate schools. Students are selected for the awards based on academic performance, especially scientific research conducted as undergraduates, along with their potential to make significant contributions to medical research.
Baruch College Associate Professor Mark Rice (History) has received a fellowship from the Fulbright US Scholar Program to conduct research in Peru. His project, “Seeking Roads to Progress: Highway Construction and Social Change in Peru, 1920-1960,” investigates the social and political consequences of road construction and infrastructure development in 20th century Peru.
Mark Rice in the Archivo General de la Nación in Peru
Rice’s field is Latin America and Caribbean history, with a focus on the Andean region and modern Peru in particular. He researches and writes about the history of tourism, travel, and infrastructure in the Andes. His work has been published by academic journals, collaborative projects, and the media, and he has presented research at academic conferences in the US, Latin America, and Europe.
His book Making Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru (University of North Carolina Press) examines the transformation of Machu Picchu into a global tourist attraction. Rice’s research emphasizes the important role travel and tourism has played in elevating Machu Picchu into a global symbol of Peru, and casts new light on the role that tourist-centered development plays in regional and national politics in the developing world. A revised version of the book was recently published in Spanish. He plans to write another book using research from his Fulbright fellowship.
Mark Rice, Inca Wall, Cusco
Professor Rice also studies and teaches the history of material culture, economic history, and social history. His work at Baruch’s Weissman School of Arts and Sciences includes teaching introductory courses on global history and the history of Latin America as well as classes focused on US-Latin American relations, economic history, and the history of tourism.
He was recently quoted by The New York Times for his expertise on Machu Picchu for a story about new research on the site’s name. The new findings “dispel the myth that Machu Picchu was an eternal lost city,” Rice told the Times. “Like most of the Andes, the site was, and continues to be, a dynamic place with a shifting history.”
Professor Rice completed his PhD at Stony Brook University and earned his BA in history from Cornell University.
The Fulbright award was originally announced in 2020, but his travel was delayed to Spring 2022 due to the global pandemic, and he is currently in Peru doing research.
