Paula Peche
Majored in Hist & Soc Of Tech & Science, Minored in Major
Georgia Institute of Technology, Class of 2019
From Atanta, GA
Georgia Institute of Technology, Class of 2019
From Atanta, GA
Although most of my adult years have been spent working in universities: Boston University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego, I also worked for a computer company, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Hospitals in California and Colorado as a respiratory technician. Working in university systems provided opportunities for me to complete an Undergraduate Degree in Psychology and a Master's Degree in the History and Sociology of Technology and Science. I also have strong organizational and project management skills.
Follow Paula
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Georgia Institute of Technology
Wellesley College
University of California: San Diego
Harvard College
Coleman University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paula Peche Receives Degree from Georgia Tech
Paula Peche of Atanta, GA, has earned a Master of Science in History and Sociology of Technology and Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Peche was among approximately 3,80...
June, 12 2019 - Verified by Georgia Institute of Technology
Paula Peche was recognized for earning an academic award
STS certificate
Fall 2017 - Spring 2019 -
Added by Paula
Paula Peche was recognized for earning an academic award
Psi Chi National Honor Society (of Psychology) 1992
Added by Paula
Paula Peche was recognized for achieving Faculty Honors
Phi Alpha Theta
Added by Paula
Administrative Assistant at Spheron/Harvard Temporary Agency
Laboratory Coordinator in Molecular and Cellular Biology (Frances, Kunes and Schier Laboratories); Executive Assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government for Executive Dean John Haigh; Staff Assistant at Harvard Medical School for the Director of the Countway Library and the Center for Biomedical Informatics; Faculty Assistant in the Department of Physics for Professor Lisa Randall; and Interim Graduate Student Coordinator in the Harvard School of Economics.
October 2008 - July 2010
PhD Research Coordinator at Georgia Institute of Technology - College of Design
PhD Research Coordinator in the School of Architecture. Reported to the Director of the PhD Program, Chuck Eastman and Environmental Psychologist Craig Zimring. My position focused on coordinating the research projects for College of Architecture PhD graduate students. This included coordination of a National Institutes of Health ($365,000 Stair-Study grant focused on physical activity and obesity); the General Services Administration grant ($1,000,000, five-year grant on Post-Occupancy Evaluations of Federal Courthouses); and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant ($745,000, five-year grant focused on the use of evidence-based design medicine in the construction of Hospitals of the Future.
March 2003 - June 2008
Executive Assistant, Financial Administrator and Administrave Assistant at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Executive Assistant and Financial Administrator in the Franois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human rights (FXB). I worked for the Director of FXB. I also over saw correspondence for a Physician who worked with the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders, and a lawyer assigned to the United Nations representing the FXB Center (six months). Administrative Assistant for a professor in charge of a clinical trial for HIV/AIDS in the Center for Biostatistics (CBAR) (six months).
September 2000 - September 2001
Administrative Assistant, Cancer Grant Coordinator, Laboratory Administrator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Administrative Assistant to the Chair of the Foreign Languages and Literature Department Suzanne Flynn) and Academic Advisor for Foreign Language students; Cancer Training Grant Coordinator for the Chair of the Department of Chemistry (Stephen J. Lippard); and Laboratory Administrator for the Director of the Active Materials and Structures Laboratory (Nesbitt Hagood).
September 1994 - September 2000
Administrative Assistant at University of California, San Diego
Administrative Assistant at the University of California, San Diego while settling property issues. Oversaw the processing of grants and contracts in the Cancer Research Center for six months. Family and Preventive Medicine Department I worked as a data entry assistant on the NIH thirteen-year study of the effects of hormone replacement therapy in menopausal and post-menopausal women.
July 1993 - April 1994
Office Administrator and Academic Advisor at Boston University
Office Administrator and Cost Center Manager. A one-year grant working for the Chair of the Department of Religion. I also did academic advising for religion undergraduate and graduate students.
September 1992 - June 1993
Senior Legal Assistant and Administrative Assistant at Digital Equipment Corporation
Senior Legal Assistant to the Director of the Personnel Law Group (Sy Sackler) for two years. Oversaw the work of five legal secretaries in the areas of real estate, engineering, contracts, personnel, and corporate law. Administrative Assistant for four quality engineers in Manufacturing, Networking and Telecommunications. In the position, I helped revise Motorolas TQM manual and participated in the Six Sigma training program.
February 1987 - September 1992
Clinical Trials: A mystery novel
Clinical Trials is a novel that touches upon certain difficult periods of history. One of the protagonists served in the Army in the Vietnam War. Another protagonist served in the Marines in the invasion in Afghanistan. The antagonist is the son of Nazi psychiatrists who experimented on gypsies, mental patients, Jews, and African American Americans from 1933 to 1941. The heroines in the novel are victims and not strong women. If this novel had been written for women born in the twenty-first century, then they would have been characterized differently. Unfortunately, the heroines in my novel reflect a period of history when women lacked the agency and power of control over lives.
August 2023 -
Publications
Causing Species Deaths to Save Human Lives: The Harvest of the Horseshoe Crab Blood
Each year, half a million horseshoe crabs are captured and bled alive by pharmaceutical
companies to burst cells that contain the chemical called coagulogen. The coagulogen is used to
detect contamination in any solution that might come into contact with blood, by detecting
dangerous bacterial endotoxins in the liquid. The horseshoe-blood test is a big
business. Approximately 30% or more horseshoe crabs die and Some females become lethargic from the bleeding, and after returning to their habitats, their ability to spawn has been shown to dramatically reduce their ability to spawn. This paper focuses on the environmental impact of bleeding horseshoe crabs and alternatives that can be used to discover endotoxins.
July 2023 -
Classwork
Urban Redesign, Economic Development and Jobs
In 1956, after decades of debate and planning, Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, and the interstate network was born and then President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 to make it law. The federal government provided 90 percent of the funding—mostly from gasoline taxes—and each state would provide the rest (Behring, 2021).
The Interstate Highway System changed the American landscape. Workers cleared large swaths of land, demolished buildings, built bridges, and blasted through hills. The interstate highways shaped decisions made by individuals, governments, and businesses: roads dictated the location of housing developments, commercial buildings, factories, and truck terminals. Across the country, the interstates contributed to urban decline and suburban growth (Behring, 2021).
From 1956 through the 1960’s Atlanta built an interstate system that divided Midtown into east and west. Currently, east Midtown is dominated by art venues, high rises and office towers, and Georgia Tech Square. West Midtown houses Georgia Tech’s main campus, athletic facilities, and commercial and residential areas associated with the university. This division has resulted in creating accessibility and transportation problems for Georgia Tech faculty, staff and students living in east Midtown, and vice versa for west Midtown residents and employees.
April 2021 -
Classwork
Intelligence Surveillance of Loyalty and Security Risks: In Building an American National Security State
During the first decade of the twentieth century, to minimize opposition to his Progressive agenda, President Theodore Roosevelt initiated a national security government surveillance system. The primary focus of the government surveillance system was to investigate American citizens and organizations opposing the President’s Progressive agenda. These ‘populations’ were identified as security risks to the building of the American nation-state.
Margot Canaday’s The Straight State; Douglas M. Charles’ J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists and Hoover’s War on Gays; and David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare’s chronicle of the seventy-five year history of the use of surveillance to highlight the federal governments abuses of the civil rights of certain populations in the building of the American nation-state. During this period, the federal government appeared to target, and sometimes extradite, populations whose moral and political values differed from the Progressive party’s white, middle-to-upper-class conservative political and Christian religious values.
December 2018 -
Classwork
Public Healthcare: From the rise of 19th Century Surveillance Medicine to 21st Century Biomedical Risk Assessments to Prevent Illness and Disease
Final paper for Biomedical course.
I first became interested in medical surveillance when I did an archival project in a Methodology class in the fall of 2017. For that project, I focused on eighteenth and nineteenth century public healthcare in France and Great Britain. For the next three semesters, I expanded my medical knowledge by reading source material focused on American public healthcare from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. This final paper combines the above readings to examine the rise of medical surveillance in the eighteenth century, to twenty-first century biomedical risk assessments to prevent illnesses and disease.
November 2018 -
Classwork
Dracula : A new genre of mystery novel
Bram Stoker published Dracula at the end of a century that experienced revolutionary changes in social and legal reforms, medicine, science and technology. While scholars differ on their interpretations of the symbolism permeating Stoker’s most famous Gothic fiction, I believe Stoker, whether intentionally or unintentionally, introduced a new genre of fiction with a plot that is multifaceted and open-ended, that allows the novel to evolve and adapt to the rapidly changing world of literary commerce. On the one hand, Dracula has a simple story line filled with supernatural events, while on the other hand, if read at a much deeper level, it is an intriguing and multifaceted psychological thriller that can be read and interpreted from various vantage points depending on the knowledge and skill of the reader. This compositional design appears to have insured its sustainability. In order to prove the above hypothesis, this paper will dissect the story line from a nineteenth century medical perspective and not the fantastic.
August 2018 -
Classwork
The evolution towards diversity and inclusiveness in the social construction of STS.
Graduate final exam paper focused on the History of Science and Technology.
The purpose of this paper is to provide supporting evidence of the changes in the social construction of science and technology from a male-dominated exclusive community, to a gendered diverse community that includes minorities and women. To provide evidence for that premise, I have chosen three papers Professor Pollock introduced the second week of class by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, to show the beginning of this process; Professor Schatzberg’s assigned reading of Martina Heßler’s book Chapter on the Frankfurt Kitchen, and a study by Professor Mary Frank Fox on Programs for Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering, and finally, Professor Pearson’s assigned article on Robert K. Merton’s The Normative Structure of Science.
December 2017 -
Classwork
Week 11: 31 October 2017, Guest Lecturer: Germán Vergara (HSOC) STS & the Environment
Graduate seminar final paper focused on Science and Technology and the Environment.
I’ve never thought of myself as an environmentalist, but the recent hurricanes that flooded Florida, Houston and Puerto Rico, and the devastating fires in California, have resulted in my rethinking my participation in environmental issues. The week that Professor Vergara held a seminar on the environment provided an opportunity for me to read material that might give me insight into HSOC involvement in environmental issues.
There were three journal articles assigned by Professor Vergara for the October 31 seminar, but I am only going to concentrate on J.R. McNeil’s “The State of the Field of Environmental History,” because it is an in-depth discussion on the evolution of a new sub-set of history.
December 2017 -
Classwork
Minority Millennials in the Workforce: bringing new perspectives to a challenging world
“Lazy, Selfish, Entitled, Rude. We have been called all of these things and more by those who think they understand our generation” (Cerrone 2013).
In the fall semester of 2017 in my HTS 6743 and 7001 classes, I read several journal articles focused on females, minorities and millennials, that give conflicting information about this generations’ place in the workforce. I made the decision to focus on minority millennials for my oral history project because my experience working in a part-time job, in a retail store, with millennials does not reflect the data presented in the readings. I decided to go inside, the “black box” (to coin Latour), to go to the source of these studies to determine the veracity of the data. The group of individuals I interviewed were from a variety of backgrounds—attending college part-time and full-time, and focusing on careers in cosmetology, nursing, phlebotomy, home health care, business management, and graphic design, as well as Atlanta’s diverse music industry. They were married—with children—single with children and single. These participants had a story to tell and the following oral history project reveals their stories.
December 2017 -
Research Projects
What components allure young adult readers to dystopian fiction?
“Dystopian literature refers to the genre of books about unpleasant or repressed societies, often propagandized as being utopian. This wildly popular young adult genre may feature some common elements.”
Young adults appear to read dystopian fiction for several reasons. Therefore, to determine why this genre is popular with young adults several questions need to be asked and answered. For instance, “What are the elements in the compositional structure of dystopian fiction that attract young adult readers?” “Are young adult readers drawn to dystopian fiction because they relate to the teenage identity developmental crises the protagonists experience in these stories?” “Do young adult readers believe the governmental economic, educational and political policies that support social divisions among groups in dystopian fiction reflect current conditions in their own societies?” “How does the use of modern technology and virtual tools in dystopian literature draw young adult readers to this genre?”
April 2015 -
Classwork
Patrick Brontë and his four creative Genii: The causes and effects of their early deaths
The four creative Genii—Charlotte-Tallii, Branwell-Brannii; Emily-Emmii and Anne-Annii developed skills as writers early in life because of the profound influence of their father, Patrick Brontë—whose educational views were strongly influenced by Wordsworth—encouraged his children to roam freely on the moors, read whatever they liked from his bookshelves, gave them lessons in geography, history, and mathematics, and also managed to pay for art and music lessons on his poor clergy salary1 (Introduction).
Although Patrick Brontë’s home schooling and liberal encouragement to explore nature were factors in the Brontë children becoming such creative geniuses, ultimately, it may have been his genetic code, proximity and medical and outside educational decisions that contributed to the early deaths of his children.
In order to understand the above notions relating to the contributing factors towards the deaths of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, it is important to look at Patrick Brontë’s genetic and physical dispositions and cultural, behavioral and sociological aspects of spatial distances of the environments and individuals in which the Brontë family lived and ultimately died (proximity)—including Maria Branwell Brontë, and Maria and Elizabeth Brontë.
December 2012 -
Classwork
Media; Cultural, Economic, and Social Capital; the Division of Labor and Social Solidarity: How social interaction has changed in the Private-Public Spheres of Everyday Life (Classwork - May 2012)
“If we wish to understand the cultural transformations associated with the rises of modern societies, then we must give a central role to the development of communication media and their impact.” To fully understand how media and the distribution of knowledge have affected capital, social solidarity, and the division of labor in the private-public spheres of everyday life, one must look at the historical evolution of communication and social interaction—face-to-face and through the media, and the effect each has had upon the other. This paper seeks to do those tasks.
May 2012 -
Classwork
“Communication and Social Solidarity between faculty and graduate students: Disconnects when entering new academic institutions”
Undergraduate students who advance their goals in higher learning by entering graduate programs are often stratified by age, gender, ethnicity and cultures. These breaks in routine patterns of behavior (5) may cause disconnects—breaks in routine patterns of behavior . Especially, if students are leaving familiar spaces in which they have created an organic collective consciousness, where they have learned to navigate, and often manipulate, the rules and structures of hierarchical institutional systems to their advantage (Simmel). Students often place faculty in positions of power because they can influence access to knowledge because of the hierarchy in academic institutions . Students also measure access to forms of knowledge by events in their lives (112), and displacements and transformations to new public spheres with different frames of reference, can present challenges because of prior relationships with faculty who had positions of power.
It is this stratified group upon which I would like to focus my research study.
March 2012 -
Research Projects
