2018 Award Winners
Award for Artistic Excellence
Sarah Stinson Hurwitz (Gender Studies and Art): “Memorial Flag: Remembering Pulse”
Nana Cheon (Humanities and Arts), “Descent: Gender, Art, and Anthropology”
Chantal Striepe (East Asian Studies and Art), “Untangling”
Paloma Sierra (Creative Writing and Drama), “Dark Theater: A Study of Drama Performed Completely in the Dark”
Kazumi Kanagawa, Amber Lee, and Charles Van de Zande (Design), “AMZU”
The Boeing Blue Skies Award
First place: “Connect, Protect, Explore and Inspire the World” — Maitreyee Joshi (Computer Science), “Retinal Prosthetics: Restoring Sight to the Blind Using Computer Vision”
Second place: “Game Changer” — Sara Misra (Electrical & Computer Engineering) “Stable Stair Climbing for a Hexapod Robot using Onboard Sensing”
Third place: “Most Creative” – Caroline Hermans (Electrical and Computer Engineering), “Sending Love through Wearable Technology”
Dietrich Humanities Prize
Grace Wong (Global Systems & Management and Art), “Finding Tiananmen”
Ruth Scherr (Mathematical Sciences and Drama), “Laborious”
Stephanie Haber (Creative Writing), “Pittsburgh’s Oddities”
Amal Nanavati (Computer Science and Global Studies), “Speak Up: A Multi-Year Deployment of Games to Motivate Speech Therapy in India”
Avi Romanoff (Cognitive Science), “Too Many Captains and Not Enough Wire”
Henry Armero Memorial Award for BCSA
Sarah Adkins (Computer Science and Arts): Creating with the Machine: Interactive Algorithmic Composition in Live Performance
Mathematics Poster Competition
First prize: Zachary Singer (Mathematical Sciences), “Sparse Polynomial Approximations with Unknown Random Sampling”
Second prize: Matthew Bowen (Mathematical Sciences), “The Sprague-Grundy Function for Some Selective Compound Games”
Third prize (tie):
Sidhanth Mohanty (Computer Science), “Sum-of-Squares Refutation Threshold for Regular SORT_4 Instances”
Nicholas Sieger (Mathematical Sciences), “Cycle Double Covers”
Young Researcher Award: Zizhuo Chen, David Xu, and Yuzhi Guo (Computational Finance); Anni Huang (Business Administration), “Utility Optimization in the Agency Problem”
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Award
Best Oral Presentation: Henry Peck (Mechanical Engineering), “Using Virtual Reality Experiences and Games to Augment Pre-Prosthesis Training”
Broadest Applicability: Theodore Teichman (Neurobiology and Music Composition), “Training Dynamics of Sustained Auditory Selective Attention”
Best Multi-Year Project: Amal Nanavati (Computer Science and Global Studies), “Speak Up: A Multi-Year Deployment of Games to Motivate Speech Therapy in India”
Best Biomedical Application: Chaitanya Srinivasan (Biological Sciences), “Using Metabolomics and Lipidomics to Crack the Code on Asparaginase-Associated Pancreatitis”
Most Potential Impact on Senior Life Quality: Wyatt Swift-Ramirez (Chemistry), “Gentle Modification of Graphenic Materials for Cell Instructive Purposes”
Psychology Department Competition
Poster Competition
First prize: Kanisha Vaughn (Cognitive Science), “Effect of Passive and Active Threats on Fear States and Attention”
Runner Up: Marissa Dominick (Neuroscience), “The Role of Alpha-Synuclein in Functional Deficits After Experimental TBI”
Oral Competition
First prize: Kimberly Hochstedler (Statistics and Psychology), “Self-Disclosure among Emerging Adults with Depression and/or Anxiety”
Sigma Xi Poster Competition
First Prize: Christina Cabana (Chemistry), “Development of a tool for cell-type and location specific photoablation”
Second Prize: Diamond Moody and Hannah Smith (Physics), “Effect of anti-leishmania drugs on the structural and elastic properties of ultra-deformable liquid membranes”
Third Prize: Nathan Drucker (Materials Science and Engineering), Superconducting Resonators for Hybrid Spin Qubit and cQED Architectures”
SRC-URO Competition
Nathan Drucker (Materials Science and Engineering), Superconducting Resonators for Hybrid Spin Qubit and cQED Architectures”
Statistics Oral Presentation Competition
First place: Apoorva Havanur (Statistics and Machine Learning), “Impact of Social Networks on Buying Behavior”
Statistics Poster Presentation Competition
First place: Chi Fang (Mathematical Sciences); Yudi Jin, Frank Kovacs, and Maria Rodriguez de la Cruz (Statistics and Machine Learning), “Predicting Delay in Freight Transportation through Socioeconomic Events”
Second place: Samuel Bolig (Economics and Statistics), Jeffrey Ho and Aijin Wang (Statistics and Machine Learning), and Antara Mondal (Statistics), “Analysis of National Hockey League Injuries”
Third place: Irina Javed (Statistics and Machine Learning), “Investigating the Relationship Between Photometric Redshift and Galaxy Properties”
Honorable mentions:
Emily Chen and Christian Manaog (Statistics and Machine Learning), Qiuyu Wang (Mathematical Sciences), Boyan Zhang (Economics and Statistics), “Assessing the Performance of the False Discovery Rate Procedure in Detecting Cointegrating Stock Pairs”
Jun Hee Kim and Eun Kyung Kwon (Statistics and Machine Learning) and Qian Sha (Economics and Statistics), “CID Models on Real-World Social Networks and GOF Measurements”
Early Research Award:
Shannon Lu (Information Systems), “Determining the Proportion of Multiple Star Systems using APOGEE Radial Velocity Data”
Undergraduate Environmental Research Award
First prize: Theodore Teichman (Neurobiology and Music Composition), “Tree Hugger”
Runners up:
Alexander Peltier (Mechanical Engineering) and Tanishq Kancharla (Physics), “Active Magnetic Regeneration Refrigeration”
Alaina Anand (Chemical Engineering), “The effect of module size and spacers on heat transfer in membrane distillation”