2022 Distinguished Graduate Student Alumni

The Division of Graduate Studies, Arts Division, Baskin School of Engineering, Humanities Division, Physical and Biological Sciences Division, and Social Sciences Division present the 2022 class of graduate student alumni honorees. Watch the recorded video of this event on the Graduate Division YouTube channel.

Brian Levine
Ph.D. Computer Engineering 1999
M.S. Computer Engineering 1996
Baskin School of Engineering

Director of Cyber Security and
Professor, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Brian Levine’s digital forensics tools have aided in the rescue of hundreds of children from sexually abusive situations. He researches the security, privacy, and forensics of computer networks. His recent work has focused on thwarting online child exploitation and other topics, including network privacy, mobile networking, and cryptoeconomics. Levine regularly partners with the FBI and the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program to develop tools for network forensics that help in the identification and apprehension of child sexual abuse suspects.

A professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst, Levine is also the founding director of the UMass Amherst Cybersecurity Institute and co-leads the UMass Amherst Rescue Lab, where he researches and applies new methodology to digital forensics, criminal investigation, and security and privacy.

Levine has published more than 100 papers and is the recipient of numerous awards, including an NSF CAREER Award (2002), UMass Amherst Spotlight Scholar (2016) recognition, and the IEEE Infocom Test of Time Award (2017). He became an ACM fellow in 2020 “for contributions to network forensics, security, and privacy, and thwarting crimes against children.”

William Long
M.A. Music: Conducting 2013
B.A. Music: Piano Performance 2011
Arts Division

Conductor, various professional music organizations

Conductor William Long continues to showcase his “masterful command of challenging, multi-stylistic works” (Opera News) with some of the world’s premier musical institutions. In the 2020-2021 season, Long made his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra as cover conductor in a wide variety of programs throughout the season, working with such conductors as Sir Simon Rattle, Gianandrea Noseda, and John Wilson. Upcoming engagements include his debut with the Metropolitan Opera serving as cover conductor for Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in my Bones. He returns to San Francisco Opera as assistant conductor for Così fan tutte and the world premiere of Antony and Cleopatra by John Adams and to Washington National Opera  for Carmen. Recent engagements for the London-based conductor include his debut with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, conducting the world premiere of Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones and continuing his relationship as a guest conductor and teaching artist at the prestigious Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California.

A frequent collaborator with the Washington National Opera, Long has appeared as cover conductor at the Kennedy Center for performances of Eugene Onegin, Candide, the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s Proving Up, and Terence Blanchard’s Champion. A native of California, he previously collaborated with San Francisco Opera as assistant conductor for Arabella, Hänsel und Gretel, and Le nozze di Figaro, and with Los Angeles Opera as cover conductor for Gordon Getty’s Usher House and The Canterville Ghost.

From 2013 to 2018, Long served as assistant conductor at San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle, where he prepared productions of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking and At the Statue of Venus, Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, Jonathan Dove’s Flight, Tarik O’Regan’s Heart of Darkness, and Philip Glass’s Les enfants terribles, among other projects.

Long holds a B.A. in piano performance and an M.A. in conducting from UC Santa Cruz, where he studied with Maria Ezerova and Nicole Paiement. He studied with Harold Farberman at the Conductor’s Institute at Bard College and Vance George at Westminster Choir College.

Harryette Mullen
Ph.D. Literature 1990
Humanities Division

Poet, Professor of Creative Writing
Humanities Division
UC Los Angeles

Harryette Mullen’s poems, stories, and essays are published widely and reprinted in over one hundred anthologies, including several published by Norton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Penguin presses. Her work appears in Best of Callaloo and was selected four times for the Best American Poetry anthology series edited by David Lehman with guest editors A.R. Ammons, Robert Hass, Terrance Hayes, and Robert Pinsky. She is a recipient of a Stephen Henderson Award, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Jackson Poetry Prize, United States Artist Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship, Artist Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts, Helene Wurlitzer Fellowship, Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, Katherine Newman Award for Best Essay on Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry. Her poems have been translated into Bulgarian, Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Kyrgyz, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Her poetry collections include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of her essays and interviews, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, published in 2012 by University of Alabama Press, received an Elizabeth Agee Prize. Her poetry collection, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, was published by Graywolf Press in 2013. A new work is featured on a Time Lost podcast from Perdu in Amsterdam. She teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA.

Sarah Peelo
Ph.D. Anthropology 2009
Social Sciences Division

Principal
Albion Environmental

Sarah Peelo is president and co-owner of Albion Environmental, Inc. She received a bachelor’s degree in combined sciences with a minor in anthropology from Santa Clara University in 1999, a master’s degree in anthropology from Colorado State University in 2002, and her doctorate in anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 2009, and meets and exceeds the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s Professional Qualification Standards (as defined in 36 CFR Part 61) for historical archaeologist.

As a company principal, Peelo manages Albion Environmental employees and finances. She also oversees projects that impact colonial and postcolonial archaeological sites and is well-versed in preservation legislation and regulations, such as Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and California Environmental Quality Act. She develops management plans and supervises projects, working closely with agency staff, clients, and construction personnel. She has broad field-methodological skills ranging from landscape investigations to detailed excavation of individual features, and is an expert in documentary research and material culture studies. She also specializes in ceramic analysis and has developed technical expertise in archaeometric analysis of ceramic materials, using techniques such as petrography and electron microprobe analysis. She has published articles on her work in journals such as Journal of California and Great Basin Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and American Antiquity.

Risa Wechsler
Ph.D. Physics 2001
Physical and Biological Sciences Division

Professor of Physics and at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Director, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC)
Stanford University

Risa Wechsler’s work is focused on the formation of cosmological structure, from the scales of the smallest galaxies to the largest scales in the universe. She is particularly interested in questions about our existence on the largest scales: What is the Universe made of and why? How did our galaxy and other galaxies come into being? How has the universe developed over the past 14 billion years? Her research combines numerical simulations and modeling with data from large galaxy surveys to answer these questions and to understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter and the physics of galaxy formation.

Wechsler joined the faculty at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 2006 and became director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology in 2018. She has played a leadership role in surveys that map the large-scale structure of the universe, is a founding member of the Dark Energy Survey and Rubin Observatory’s LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, and was the founding co-spokesperson for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration, which is currently making the largest 3D map of the universe. She has published more than 300 referred papers on a wide range of topics in cosmology, structure formation, and galaxy formation.

After receiving her Ph.D. in physics from UC Santa Cruz in 2001, Wechsler did postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, where she held a NASA Hubble Fellowship and the Enrico Fermi Fellowship. Wechsler is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is currently the Gregory Amadon Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. She currently serves on the National Academy Board of Physics and Astronomy and on the Board of Trustees for the Aspen Center for Physics. She is passionate about broadening access to physics and astronomy and about engaging the public with scientific discovery and has written about and discussed science in numerous public venues including TED, Teen Vogue, and the BBC.