Recipient: Ford Foundation Fellowship

Year: 2018

Elaina Aceves hopes to use her experiences as a Ford Foundation Fellow to become a better researcher and promoter of diversity in higher education.

“Being awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation is a valuable opportunity to have the funds to attend conferences about research and professional development all over the nation,” Aceves says. “I also am able to interact with other scholars to create connections with other universities and possible collaborators.”

Her research focuses on extending Ito’s and Kawamuro’s definition of the fractional Dehn twist coefficient (FDTC) of a braid in an attempt to find stronger results about detecting tightness or over-twistedness, which is used to classify contact structures in 4-manifolds.