Brandon Boring ’22 and Jenna Hulke ’20, doctoral students in the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University, have been selected as 2023 Phil Gramm Doctoral Fellowship Award recipients, announced Friday (Sept. 15) through the Texas A&M Graduate and Professional School.
Boring and Hulke are two of seven Texas A&M doctoral students honored this year with the prestigious award, established in 2006 with the support of Phil Gramm, the former United States Senator from Texas who served as a professor of economics at Texas A&M for 12 years before being elected to Congress. The Gramm Fellowship Program seeks to promote, encourage and reward outstanding teaching and research by doctoral students whose command of their respective disciplines exemplifies the meaning of scholarship and mentorship in the highest sense.
Boring and Hulke and their fellow 2023 recipients will be celebrated in a Tuesday, Nov. 7, by-invitation-only ceremony during which each will be presented with a personalized award certificate and a fellowship in the amount of $5,000. In addition, all seven students henceforth will be recognized as Senator Phil Gramm Doctoral Fellows for general scholarship excellence and contributions to their disciplines.
“Brandon Boring and Jenna Hulke are outstanding graduate students,” said Dr. Adam R. Seipp, associate dean for graduate studies in Texas A&M Arts and Sciences and a professor in the Department of History. “Their excellence in teaching and research highlights the broad spectrum of opportunities in the College of Arts and Sciences. We look forward to following their future careers as leaders in their fields.”
Boring, a native of Baltimore, Md., earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from McDaniel College (2006) and a master’s degree in experimental psychology from Towson University (2016) prior to joining the Ph.D. program in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in 2018, where he is studying social and personality psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Vani Mathur. His current research assesses psychosocial factors that both contribute to and are affected by pain experiences, with specific focus on self and identity, social threats and pain communication. His dissertation addresses on the role of self-conscious emotions as predictors of pain outcomes. In addition to a 2022 dissertation fellowship from the former College of Liberal Arts, Boring was a runner-up for the 2022 G.F. Gebhart Journal of Pain Young Investigator Award. To date, he has authored or co-authored a dozen publications with multiple additional manuscripts in preparation and made more than two dozen poster presentations. He also has mentored several undergraduates, one of whom recently contributed to a published paper on the role of self-perceived stress reactivity on the development of chronic pain. Boring’s professional affiliations include the American Psychological Association, the International Association for the Study of Pain, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the United States Association for the Study of Pain. His work has been recognized in a USASP trainee spotlight and also featured by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Hulke, who is originally from Marshfield, Wis., earned her bachelor’s degree in zoology/animal biology from the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point (2012), then spent several years in the field before coming to Texas A&M in 2018 to pursue her doctorate in the Department of Biology under the guidance of Dr. Charles Criscione. She volunteered for a year in disaster relief with AmeriCorps and the American Red Cross Grand Canyon Chapter after graduation, then worked from 2015-16 as a field ecologist for a company specializing in control of vector-borne diseases — first plague in Colorado, followed by visceral leishmania, a parasite transmitted by sandflies, in India. From 2016-18, Hulke gained additional international field experience as a project manager for the University of California, Santa Barbara, living in Kenya, where she examined the influence of watering holes on the transmission of parasites in cattle and wildlife and realized her dream career is in research. At Texas A&M, her work focuses on the evolution of complex life cycles of helminth parasites in hopes of determining why many parasites require three hosts to reach a reproductive stage, while others only need two. To date, Hulke has published two papers as a first author and three as a co-author while also presenting her research at four national conferences and supervising seven undergraduate researchers. She also has served as a teaching assistant for several introductory biology courses. Criscione describes her as an asset to both science education and research within the department, which recently recognized her excellence in both capacities with its 2023 Lawrence S. Dillion Distinguished Graduate Student Award.
Gramm, who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, spent two decades serving in the U.S. Congress and Senate, where he used his economic and financial expertise to create important laws and policies as well as provide advice to fellow legislators and the White House. He authored numerous articles and books while at Texas A&M, ranging from monetary theory to mineral extraction economics. Currently, Gramm is the senior partner of Gramm Partners, a public policy firm in Washington, D.C., as well as the senior advisor at U.S. Policy Metrics.
To learn more about the Gramm Fellowship Program and other opportunities for graduate and professional students at Texas A&M, visit https://grad.tamu.edu/.