by Jenée Wilde, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of English

The Center for the Study of Women in Society has launched a new student-centered research initiative—the CSWS Undergraduate STEAM Summer Fellowship.

Over the summer, undergraduate fellows collaborated with University of Oregon faculty mentors to develop interdisciplinary research and creative projects that engage with STEAM fields—science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. Our STEAM fellows approach their inquiry with gender and intersectionality as an analytical framework. 

“We are so excited to support undergraduate research and creative projects that align with our mission,” said CSWS Director Sangita Gopal. “These team-based fellowships are designed to fill a need for undergraduate arts and humanities research opportunities at the University of Oregon by linking creative work and scholarship to research in the sciences.”

Student fellows receive up to $3,000 to pursue their research-based summer projects, while faculty mentors receive up to $1,000. The program also enhances pathways for under-represented students in STEAM to succeed. 

Initial funding for the program was raised from donations to the CSWS 50th Anniversary DuckFunder Campaign, with additional funding from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation (OVPRI) at University of Oregon.

We are honored to welcome the inaugural cohort of CSWS-OVPRI Undergraduate STEAM Summer Fellows:

• Cing Dim, Advertising, “Lost from Home, Disconnected from Roots” (faculty mentor Aye Thuzar).
• Sophia Foerster, Multidisciplinary Science, “Estrogen Signaling in Cartilage Extracellular Matrix Integrity and Composition in Inflammatory Systems” (faculty mentor Nick Willett).
• Anisha Srinivasan, Psychology, “A Feminist Framework for Studying Deficits in Recognition of Outgroup Faces” (faculty mentor Chanel Meyers).
• Alex Underwood, Sociology, “The Portrait Project: Preserving Queer History through Intergenerational Storytelling” (faculty mentor Judith Raiskin). 

In their applications, the 2025 STEAM fellows shared compelling personal stories and visionary gender-based projects that promise needed interventions and positive impacts within specific communities.

Amplifying Myanmar Women’s Voices

“I was born to a family of poor farmers in the Naulak tribe, indigenous to Myanmar, a country that is at war with itself in the devastating aftermath of colonization,” said Cing Dim, who used her summer fellowship to research and document the stories, cultural practices, and activism of Myanmar immigrant women in the region. The project, “Lost from Home, Disconnected from Roots,” will offer survivors who fled civil war and religious persecution a space to be heard while shedding light on displacement and intergenerational trauma.

“I do believe there is a profound generational trauma among my community, and I believe I have a role in changing it,” she said.
Before immigrating, Dim’s family faced religious persecution in Myanmar. “Through a miraculous chance, we were granted religious refugee status and admitted into the United States,” she said. “The road to get here and our life since have been difficult, but my roots are still alive within me and guide my every move.”

Years after leaving the war-torn country, Dim was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder in 2023. “It brought a profound sense of relief, finally giving a name to the enduring pain I had felt for so long,” she said. 

Experiences of abuse and hardship that Myanmar women like herself have faced motivate Dim to amplify their voices in the US and contribute to discussions of human rights, gender justice, and displacement through public awareness campaigns. 

“I applied for the CSWS STEAM Fellowship to explore how advertising can serve as a medium for feminist resistance and healing,” she said. “My research develops a campaign empowering survivors of sexual abuse, particularly those impacted by colonial legacies, to reclaim their voices. CSWS’s mission to support intersectional, justice-oriented research directly informs this work.”

Making Women’s Health a Priority

As a third-generation descendant of Diethylstilbestrol (DES)—a fertility drug from the 1970s marketed as safe despite inadequate research—Sophia Foerster knows intimately what it feels like to have pain dismissed by the medical system, especially as a woman.

“My grandma passed away when my mother was nine,” she said. “My mother was left infertile and underwent painful IVF. My twin sister and I were born prematurely with long-term health consequences. I am one of the thousands of women and children DES harmed because women’s health has never been a priority.”

For years, Foerster suffered from invisible pain that doctors could not identify and repeatedly dismissed—until she was finally diagnosed with endometriosis. This and other medical experiences motivated Foerster to explore systemic issues in women’s healthcare as a multidisciplinary science major at UO. Her next step will be graduate school for a degree in biomedical sciences to pursue research on critically understudied conditions that impact biological females.

“This exclusion of women has fueled my passion for changing the landscape in academia that fails to uphold standards of representation in research,” she said. “I believe recognizing the intersectional nature of sexism in policy, physical science, and professional fields is critical to addressing all the sources that contribute to this ongoing exclusion.”

Foerster works as an undergraduate research assistant for the musculoskeletal tissue engineering research program at the Willett Regenerative Labs, located in the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. 

“Sophia is dedicated to creating lab models that truly reflect each patient’s unique biology—something that traditional methods and experiments often miss,” said Nick Willett, associate professor of bioengineering at the Knight Campus. Willett is Foerster’s STEAM Fellowship faculty mentor.

“Her goal is to make research more inclusive by filling in important gaps about how men’s and women’s joints work differently,” he said. “With her strong background in biology and chemistry, she’s the perfect person to lead this innovative work.”

The fellowship allowed Foerster to work full time over summer on her current research developing a pre-clinical model that accounts for women’s hormones in states of chronic inflammation, particularly in Ehlers–Danlos Syndrome (EDS), with the hope that the model can better inform targeted therapeutics. 

“I applied for the CSWS fellowship because of its empowering focus on feminist scholarship,” she said. “It is an honor to be selected as an inaugural fellow to continue my research. I am inspired to address the complicated nature of gender inequalities that have flourished in male-centric fields like science and medicine with the support of the CSWS.”

How Gender Influences Recognition of Women of Color

Growing up, Anisha Srinivasan had two amazing women role models—her mother and her aunt—yet she witnessed her grandfather consistently overlooking his daughters’ achievements in favor of their husbands’ successes.

“In Indian culture, where male prestige is often prioritized, I saw firsthand how women’s accomplishments could be undervalued,” Srinivasan said. “My grandfather took immense pride in his sons-in-law but failed to extend the same recognition to his own daughters. Experiencing this from both within and outside this culture, as someone raised in the US, has allowed me to critically examine the larger sociocultural and political structures that shape gender dynamics.”

For her fellowship project, Srinivasan researched how gender influences the perception and recognition of women of color through an experimental memory-recall study aimed to test the intersection of race and gender in memory biases.

“This work highlights the mechanisms underlying person perception of women of color,” she said, “identifying biases in both race and gender that often lead to various downstream consequences such as fewer job offers made from networking and a persistent dismissal of their lived experiences by the same perceivers.”

Personal experience has fueled Srinivasan’s passion for clinical research that investigates sociocultural and political factors that influence individual psychology. Take trauma, for example: Although trauma is frequently addressed as a personal issue, being raised in oppressive political conditions where one is exposed to violence constitutes a form of trauma rooted in broader structural forces. Srinivasan wants to understand how such structural forces shape social perception and individual well-being.

“The reason I applied for the CSWS STEAM Fellowship is because of the Center’s deep investment in exploring the complexity of women’s lives and its expansive vision for empowering under-represented voices in research,” she said. “As someone deeply interested in women’s experiences and narratives, it felt like the most meaningful space to grow my research.”

Preserving Queer History through Intergenerational Storytelling

As a trans and queer individual, Alex Underwood says the practice of art has been crucial to his understanding of himself and the world around him.

“In a time when trans and queer people are able to seek little solace in the world around us, art is a visible expression of our most invisible feelings, thoughts, and potentials,” he said. “I applied to the CSWS Summer STEAM Fellowship because it is evident that under the ongoing threat of erasure and censorship, the complexities and joys of queer life must be preserved by queer people themselves.”

Underwood’s project documents queer histories through intergenerational storytelling and art—specifically portraiture. Participants in the project collaborated in cross-generational pairs to create portraits of each other as they shared stories, memories, and advice with one another in order to learn from and enrich each other’s lives. He plans to archive the results for exhibits and create a zine to share the stories and artworks.

Underwood’s project developed from two Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses taught by UO Professor Judith Raiskin—one that focused on queer archives and one on public-facing research and activism. These courses grew out of the Eugene Lesbian Oral History Project, which documents through interviews and archival research the lived experiences of lesbian elders in Eugene from the 1960s to the 1990s. Raiskin received CSWS research grant funding for the project.

“Much like the queer people who migrated to Eugene in the 60s, I also came to the University of Oregon to avoid identity-based prosecution and to be able to have access to trans-affirming health care,” Underwood said. 

Raiskin, who is Underwood’s STEAM fellowship faculty mentor, sees an urgent need for intergenerational community projects like this. 

“This is a historic moment of terrifying representations of trans people and an assault on their humanity,” Raiskin said. “It is also a time of violent attacks on women’s autonomy and freedom. Alex’s project of shared portrait making and storytelling is a brilliant and moving opportunity for women, lesbians, queer people, and trans people to claim their own self-understanding and share it with others.”

Information on the CSWS Undergraduate STEAM Summer Fellowship is available at csws.uoregon.edu.

You can support innovative undergraduate research focused on gender across the disciplines by going to the CSWS website and clicking the “Give to CSWS” button. 

—Jenée Wilde is the CSWS research dissemination specialist.