Philip Decker GS, Victor Geadah GS, Sayash Kapoor GS, and Eliana Rozinov GS were awarded the 2025–26 Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, the University’s top honor for its graduate students. The fellows were honored at Alumni Day on Feb. 21.
The fellowship is awarded to one Princeton Ph.D. student each in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering divisions for their scholarly excellence. The award recognizes “scholarly ability, achievements, and character” and supports a student’s final year of study at Princeton.
The fellowship recipients were interviewed by The Daily Princetonian to discuss their research at Princeton and future plans.
Decker is reframing what we know about the Nazi-Soviet Pact
Decker’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: A Cultural and Diplomatic History,” focuses on the relationship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II through a lens of cultural similarity, rather than the common geopolitical explanation for their brief alignment.
Decker studied history as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College and minored in German and Political Science. Decker later pursued a master’s in international relations at the University of Oxford to further explore the intersection of history and political science.
In an interview with the ‘Prince,’ Decker said that his motivations for pursuing this research angle came from his grandfather’s experience of the Nazi invasion, but also an appreciation for German culture.
“I grew up hearing about my grandfather’s story, and it just struck me — obviously, there’s more than you see to this national relationship, and that story is what I’m telling in my dissertation,” Decker explained.
Decker explained that his approach to an extensively studied topic, like the rise of Nazism, is finding a niche and sticking to it.
“I tend to be a little contrarian,” Decker said. “And so I like to look at a problem that has been looked at before. And I say, ‘Well, okay, what is new territory that has not really been covered?’”
His advisor, Professor of History Yair Mintzker, remarked that “after Philip’s work, we will not think about those two crucial years in European history in the same way.”
Spending months traveling for archival research and searching through thousands of telegrams between Berlin and Moscow, Decker hopes his dissertation “to be a revision of the origin story of World War II.”
Rozinov and the question of the woman’s want
Coming to Princeton in 2020 after obtaining an undergraduate degree in comparative literature and English from Cornell, Rozinov wanted to expand on her studies through interdisciplinary study within Princeton’s English department.
Her dissertation, “Riddles of Women: Mythical, Modernist, Freudian” explores Freud and his “great question” of what a woman wants.
Rosinov cites the figure of Gradiva, a Roman sculpture, as central to her dissertation, replacing Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex. In an email to The ‘Prince,’ she wrote that “most people associate Freud with the drama of Oedipus and his belief in the Oedipus complex … it overlooks so many figures of women and queer women and women of color, throughout history, who were actually central to Freud’s work.”
Rosinov also designed her own undergraduate seminar, ENG 441: A New Eve: Women, Myth, and Power. The seminar is co-taught with Professor of English and Comparative Literature Maria A. DiBattista.
“Teaching is at the heart of my research, because it’s also the audience I hope will be interested in reading my work,” Rosinov noted. This seminar involves engaging students in their own questions on texts, films, and essays. She cited the seminar as one of the most rewarding experiences she has had at Princeton.
“Princeton has exceeded all my expectations — not only the department itself, but also the courses I’ve taken in others, like those in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, where I’m getting a graduate certificate,” Rosinov wrote.
She added, “I could not have a better or more generous group of mentors: I work with Anne Cheng, Maria DiBattista, and Zahid Chaudhary. On top of being amazing people, they are brilliant scholars. I hope to do for my own students what my dissertation advisors and my amazing undergrad advisors have done for me.”
Rosinov eventually wants to turn her dissertation into a book. She hopes people will recognize that “we shouldn’t shy away from creativity and our idiosyncrasies — our uniqueness helps bring us together.”
Geadah is providing nuanced neuroscientific answers
Victor Geadah, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Applied and Computational Mathematics, won the fellowship for his dissertation “Statistical Inference of Normative Processes in Neuroscientific Data,” which created mathematical models that identify irregularities in neuroscientific data.
Geadah, who previously studied applied math at the University of Cambridge, spoke extensively about exploring the intersection of theory and experimentation for his project — a “middle ground,” which he sees as ingrained into the Princeton research environment.
“I sought to operate in the middle, using an experimental background but still being in touch with theory to actually draw insights from real data, its complexities and its irregularities,” he told the ‘Prince.’
For Geadah, collaborating with others is also a core part of the thesis research process.
“I get personal fulfillment out of just interacting with smart people who come to me with beautiful ideas,” Geadah said. “I love to ask questions and get involved and try to integrate what they’re telling me. It makes for a quite symbiotic relationship,” he added.
Jonathan Pillow, Geadah’s thesis advisor and a professor at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, said in a press release that Geadah is “the go-to person when someone has a new idea.”
“Jonathan gave me all this freedom, and it was a perfect alignment with what I was interested in,” Geadah said.
Geadah will be a postdoc at the Flatiron Institute in New York following his time at Princeton, where he will work on statistical modeling and neuroscience theory. Eventually, Geadah plans to go into academia and cited Princeton as an “amazing” institution to work for in the future.
“I like the idea of leading a lab where we care about good theoretical work that is statistically driven as data-grounded, with the goal [of] eventually really understanding how we make decisions and what the unobserved processes are that guide those decisions,” he said.
Kapoor is evaluating artificial intelligence (AI) models
Sayash Kapoor, a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, has won the fellowship for his dissertation “AI’s Impact on Science and Society,” which is advancing evaluations of AI.
Kapoor, who holds a bachelor of technology in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, told the ‘Prince’ that his background as a software engineer at Facebook has influenced his view of government policies on “trillion dollar” technology companies.
“I really saw how much leverage there is, if you can influence policy in the right way,” he said.
“When I was looking for grad schools, Princeton stood out because it not only takes computer science research seriously, but also takes tech policy seriously,” he continued, citing his experience working at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
Kapoor has shared that his dissertation is the product of a coincidental collision between civil war prediction using AI models and concerns about AI prediction methods leading to irreplicable conclusions.
“When I started my dissertation, I started by looking at the field of civil war prediction in political science,” he stated. Many papers had found that AI models were far better at predicting civil wars than previous methods.
But Kapoor then ran into inconsistencies. “I spent a few months … trying to reproduce the results. And I ultimately found that every single paper that claimed AI was better than decades-old [prediction] methods failed to reproduce,” he stated. After fixing errors in the AI prediction models, “AI methods did not outperform the decades-old prediction methods in any of the cases,” he added.
This research became a “light bulb moment” for Kapoor, and he expanded his work to “many other fields.”
“We found that similar problems affected like two dozen fields and hundreds of papers,” Kapoor said. “I realized that good evaluations really are a bottleneck to AI’s impact on society.”
Kapoor then shared why the false scientific consensus that AI has been producing is harmful. “I think science and technology research are responsible for many positive improvements in people's lives. I think if we can’t trust the science that we are doing, then all of that progress gets stopped,” he noted.
“Developing more rigorous evaluations is one way towards improving confidence in scientific results,” Kapoor added.
“It’s a real honor to receive this fellowship, but I think it’s also a testament to how seriously Princeton takes societal impact,” he said. “It really feels like a testament to Princeton’s commitment to its mission of serving the public that it recognizes this type of work and awards it as it did in my case.”
Kapoor plans on going into academia and is currently searching for a job at a university.
David Estrada is a staff News writer for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Los Angeles and can be reached at de8214[at]princeton.edu.
Diya Kaur is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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