2026 - 2027 Franke Fellows

Franke Undergraduate Fellows

David Garsten

Recursivity and Theory of Mind: Investigating the Social and Emotional Underpinnings of Communication in Humans and Dolphins

David Garsten is a junior studying linguistics at Yale, interested in exploring similarities and differences between the faculty of human language and the learned communication systems of other species, both in their synchronic syntactic structure and in their evolution/emergence. He loves composing for film and video games, running around with his dog Sora, and speculating about alien morphology, internal representations of AI, and ancient hominin music. His website is: https://dudugan.github.io/.

This summer, David will conduct linguistic fieldwork in Tbilisi, Georgia, with members of the WOLF lab, before traveling to Batumi, Georgia, to volunteer at the Batumi Dolphinarium. Alongside humans, bats, and possibly elephants, dolphins are the only known species with both learned communication and fission-fusion societal structures - and dolphin communication is only just beginning to be understood. Recursivity and theory of mind are linguistic properties argued by some to be unique to humans, absent in the learned communication systems of other species.

Keith Pemberton

Dead Reckoning: Knowledge Graph Infrastructure as Epistemological Method for Primary Source Records

Keith Pemberton is a rising senior at Yale College double-majoring in History and Computing, Culture & Society. His research builds knowledge graph infrastructure that connects primary source collections at the level of meaning while preserving provenance, treating the gap between what a source actually contains and what a system claims to know as a design problem rather than an afterthought. The project sits at the intersection of archival theory and computing, asking how the historical record can function as durable, verifiable infrastructure for knowledge systems. The work draws on his fieldwork across West Africa and his ongoing engagement with questions of data sovereignty and documented absence.