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2014 Award Winners

Alcoa Undergraduate Research Awards

First Place: Shikun Zhang (CS), "Bill Gates Kissing an Igloo - A Password Management Application with Provable Security and Minimal User Effort" 

Second Place: Clayton Ritcher (ECE), "Consolidate:  Using Near Field Communications to Merge Smartphones and ID Cards"

Third Place: Rachel Cohen (English), Marko Hudak (Economics & Statistics), William Sanders (Economics), Stephanie Stern (Social and Decision Science), Olga Subashko (Economics & Statistics, "Salary Expectations for Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë Students"

Award for Artistic Excellence

Cole Heiner (BHA), "14 Stories:  An Elevator Sonnet"

Nicolas Marlton (BXA), "In Celebration of Margo Lovelace"

Andrew Staiger (BHA), "Morphic Literature: Text with Space and Time"

Laura Contero, "PULSE: An Experiment on Context and Setting" 

Nicolas Hurt (Business Administration), Talia Levin (BHA), Anna Nelson (BHA), "Steel Town Short Film Screening"

Boeing Blue Skies

First Place: Ashrith Balakumar, (Mech E), Richard Shanor (Mech E), "Mechanical Design of Skylight Survey Instrument;" Kerry Snyder (CS), "Onboard Terrain Modeling for Suborbital Rocket Flight;" Neal Bhasin (CS), Edward Nolan (ECE), Brent Strysko (ECE), " Skylight Survey Avionics"

Second Place: Michael Ferraco (IS), Dillon Grove (IS), Nathan Hahn (IS), Jonathan Miller (IS), "Greenlight"

CIT Senior Honors Research Poster Competition

First Place: Dale McConachie (ECE), "Using Dynamic Movement Primitives on Snake Robots to Reduce Continuous Motion Planning for Discrete Obstacle Avoidance into a Parameter Optimization Problem"

Second Place: Andrea Pickel (MechE), "Finite Element Simulation Methodologies for Reflow and Mechanical Behavior of Magnetic Nanoparticle-Based Solder Composites"

Third Place: Sara Saheb Kashaf, (Chem E), "Effect of Varying the Number and Location and Voltage Gated Calcium Channels on Synaptic Facilitation in the Frog"

Dietrich Humanities Prize

Hayley Bryant (English), "A Narrative Approach to Understanding Stress Culture"

Louis Lamanna (English), "Moral Motivations and Stereotype Content"

Joshua Claudio (English), "Open Heart" 

Kate Fisch (History), "Resolving the Kashmir Conflict:  The Roles of the United States"

Richard Stuver (History), "Evaluating Development Programs Through A Participatory Framework:  Biogas Technology and the Kamalnayan Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation"

Johnson & Johnson Undergraduate Research Awards

First Place: Whitney Aronson (HCI), Dale Best (ECE), Arnob Mallick (ECE), Sara Saheb Kashef (Chem E), Matthew Sarett (ECE), Eric Wise (Mech E), "Tablet Based Tocodynamometer"

Second Place: Shan Huang (CS), "Assisting Pointing in 3D Environment Through Correcting Hand Trajectory for Depth Perception Error"

Third Place: Michael Ferraco (IS), Dillon Grove (IS), Nathan Hahn (IS), Jonathan Miller (IS), "Greenlight"

Psychology Department Competition

First Place Poster: Emma Bright (Psychology), "Communal Coping Among with Type II Diabetes"

Runner-Up Posters:

Monica Ly (BHA), "Effects of Musicality on the Short-Term Memory of Auditory Perceptual Objects"

Amber Hekler (Psychology), Nisha Singh (Psychology), "The Effect of Received Touch on Exploration Behavior"

First Place Oral Presentation: Alexandra Ossowski (Psychology), "The Directionality of the Relationship Between left Hemisphere Specialization for Word Reading and High Spatial Frequency Visual Information"

Sigma Xi Poster Competition

First Place: Sophia Wu (Chemistry), "The Effects on Peptide Binding Affinity for TNF by Conjugation to Polymers"

Second Place: Kevin Alastair Tan (Psychology), "Toward a Pathophysiology of Rumination:  Dorsal Nexus Resting-State Functional Connectivity in Depression Before and After Serotonergic or Behavioral Interventions 

Third Place: Andrea Costello (Chemistry), "Ultra-Photostable Genetic Targeting of Cyanine Dyes Using PEPtides"

SRC-URO Poster Competition

First Place: Andrea Pickel (MechE), "Finite Element Simulation Methodologies for Reflow and Mechanical Behavior of Magnetic Nanoparticle-Based Solder Composites"

Second Place: Annika Peterson (CS), "Formal Verification of a Controlled Flight Between Two Robots: A Case Study"

Third Place: Eli Zoughlin (MSE), "Investigation of Structure and Dynamics of Metal-Oxide Nanocomposite for On-Chip Electronics"

Statistics Competitions

First Place Statistics Oral Competition: Emily Wright (Statistics), "Artistic Music Discovery:  The Digital Road to the Top of Radio"

Honorable Mention: Zachary Branson (Economics & Statistics), "Comparing Propensity Score Methodologies for Analyzing High School Class Assignment"

First Place Poster Presentation: Shaina Mitchell (Mathematics), "Modeling Psychosis Trajectories in Alzheimer's Patients Using Latent Class Analysis with Nested Hidden Markov Models"

Second Place Poster Presentation: Kathryn McKeogh (Statistics), "Evaluating Statistics of Galaxy Cluster Detection"

Third Place Poster Presentation: Aleksandra Arkhangelskaya (Statistics), Cynthia Clement (Mathematics), Kathryn McKeogh (Statistics), "Impact of Advanced Placement Courses on College Readiness in the Pittsburgh Public High Schools" 

David Zimmerman (SHS & Statistics), "A Corrective Meta-Analysis of Personalized Normative Feedback"

Honorable Mention: Daniel In (Economics & Statistics), Karn Mishra (Statistics), Joseph Pane (Statistics), "De-Duplication of Civil War Killings in El Salvador"

Aashna Singh (Economics & Statistics), Hannah Worrall (Economics & Statistics), Tony Zhang (Mathematics), Ruiqi Zhao (Business Administration), "Stress Level at Ò»±¾µÀÎÞÂë and Solutions"

Triple Helix Competition

First Place: Julia Atwood (Chemistry), Kevin Long (Chemistry), Cat Mao (History), Alexander Orenstein (Biological Sciences), "RTD-1 M: A Modified Natural Antimicrobial Peptide"

Second Place: Evan Fisch (BME), "Dose-Response Effects in Treatment of Partial-Thickness Burns with anti-TNF-Hyaluronic Acid Conjugates"

Undergraduate Economics Program (EUP) Competition

First Place: Avery Calkins (Economics), "Public Health and Tuberculosis Mortality during the Framingham Tuberculosis Demonstration"

Second Place: Paul Ko (Economics), "Controlled School Choice with Mixed Bounds Approach: A Balance Between Stability and Diversity Considerations"

Undergraduate Environmental Research Award

First Place: Michael Ferraco (IS), Dillon Grove (IS), Nathan Hahn (IS), Jonathan Miller (IS), "Greenlight"

Runner-Up: Anshul Dhankher (BME), Gryphon Drake (MSE), Jinie Haytko (Chem E), Yatindra Patel (BME), Christine Sidoti (BME), Gihoon Song (Design), "Solar Sterilization and Distillation Unit for Water for Resource-Poor Settings"

Miriam Hegglin (CEE), "Trade-Off Analysis Between Energy Efficient Lighting Technologies" 

Abigail Burton (Chemistry), "TAML-Catalyzed Degradation of Propranolol"

Yahoo! Undergraduate Research Award

First Place: Lazman Dhulipala (CS), "Compressing Natural Graphs and A Practical Work-Efficient Parallel Connectivity Algorithm"

First Runner-Up: Connor Brem (CS), Jessica Phoa (History), "Beacon - Gesture Sensitive Bicycle Gloves"

Second Runner-Up: Vivek Nair (ECE), Clayton Ritcher (ECE), Nora Shoemaker (ECE), "Finding an Effective Way to Provide a Spatial Representation of the Surrounding Environment to the Visually Impaired"