Research Award Winners

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Awards

2025 Winners

The 2025 Chancellor’s Awards Ceremony

Video recording: https://vimeo.com/1086152900
Photo Album: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjChaNq


Arts

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Ando, Kai (MERRILL)The Invisible Hands of Lisbon: The Black Africans That Kept The City Alive During The Renaissance. Mentor: Consuelo Endrigo-Williams
  • O’Leary, Gillian (JRLEWIS)Girl Blood, An Original Play. Mentor: Michael Chemers
  • Tran, Emily (KRESGE)Fruit Fashion. Mentor: dani wright
Dean’s Award
  • Goodman, Titus (PORTER): The Role of Social Media Strategies in Music Promotion. Mentor: Nina Treadwell
  • Lagrange, Celeste (PORTER): Be Brave. Be Bold. Be a Woman in a Man’s World. Mentor: Michael Chemers
  • Nguyen, David (CARSON): (Screenplay) Mister Whale. Mentor: Natasha V
  • Pettigrew, Yousif (OAKES): 2 Compositions and Performances for Guitar Ensemble. Mentor: Christopher Mallett
  • Reyes, Prema (PORTER): Re-membering Self: Mis/recognition in the work of Adrian Piper. Mentor: Jennifer Gonzalez
  • Taylor, Annalie (JRLEWIS): Stone and Body. Mentor: Sarah Sanford
  • Villar, Ella (PORTER): Challenging Memorialized Whiteness: Statues, Memory, and Race. Mentor: Jennifer Gonzalez

Engineering

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Chalamala, Megna (CARSON): Understanding the Instructive Effects of TPRX1 Splicing Variants during the Acquisition of Totipotency in Human Cells. Mentor: Ali Shariati
  • Hofkin, Aurora (NINE): Biochemical Characterization of Human Astrovirus 1 RNA-Dependent RNA Polymerase. Mentor: Rebecca Dubois
  • Rehman, Naomi (NINE): Incorrect-Path Prediction for Power Throttling Speculative Execution. Mentor: Heiner Litz
Dean’s Award
  • Chandrasiri, Samintha (COWELL), Nguyen, Brian (JRLEWIS), Polu, Tejas (JRLEWIS), Sud, Neo (COWELL), Wilson, Emil (NINE): Annota: Measuring The Impact of AI Feedback for QA Education. Mentor: David Lee
  • Gagnon, Delia (OAKES): Respiratory Syncytial Virus G Bound to a High-Affinity, Broadly Neutralizing Antibody to Inform Rational Vaccine Design. Mentor: Rebecca Dubois
  • Huynh, Kirsten (CROWN), Lui, Michelle (CROWN): Antibody Detection and Quantification of Group A Streptococcus. Mentor: Rebecca Dubois
  • Katreddi, Sriya (NINE), Pooskur, Prasiddh (JRLEWIS):“Who thought .zip was a good idea”: Analyzing Maliciousness in Newly-Released gTLDs. Mentor: Ram Sundara Raman
  • Petiwala, Zahra (CARSON): ReMiDi: Reconstruction of Microstructure Using a Differentiable Diffusion MRI Simulator. Mentor: Razvan Marinescu
  • Reyes, Clare (PORTER), Bautista, Jacob (CROWN), Benaryeh, Emmet (KRESGE), Bopparaju, Nivriti (COWELL), Duarte, Cesar (OAKES), Garcia, Joseph (PORTER), Krueger, Kendra (CROWN), Lai, Brenda (COWELL), Mahesh, Aurko (STEVENSON), Nandakumar, Vibitha (PORTER), Pillai, Monisha (CROWN), Sekula, Marshall (COWELL), Yankin, Daniel (PORTER), Yet, Zaden (MERRILL): UCSC iGEM 2024: Limnospira Inspired Foundational Technologies. Mentor: David Bernick
  • Vetha, Eric (CARSON): Improving Low-cost In-ground Soil Moisture Sensing System Using Backscatter Tags for Sustainable Agriculture. Mentor: Colleen Josephson

Humanities

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Maher, Molly (PORTER): The ClubHouse. Mentor: Marc Matera
  • Nguyen, Sabrina (COWELL): Does Freedom Mean Free? Manumission, Marriage, and Public Perception in the Roman Empire. Mentor: Martin Devecka 
  • Villar, Ella (PORTER): Beyond Occupation: Palestinian Solidarity Art and Futurity. Mentor: Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar
Dean’s Award
  • Amaya, Jonas (PORTER): Phenomenal Consciousness in Complex Adaptive Systems under Panpsychism and the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness. Mentor: Philip Groth
  • Ceron, Emmy (NINE): Bad Bunny: Music with a Purpose. Mentor: Madhavi Murty
  • Eiger, Vairagya (KRESGE): Adorned in Exile: Algerian Jewish Jewelry as Memory, Identity, and Resistance. Mentor: Alma Heckman
  • Larsen, Sophia (KRESGE): Calling God to the Podium: How the Ironies in the Book of Job Structure Modern Theistic and Absurdist Understandings of Faith, Justice, and Judaism. Mentor: Bruce Thompson
  • Robinson, Michael (MERRILL): From Bacchus and Midas Through Nationalism to Eroticism and Pop Art: How the Barberini Faun Has Been Shaped by Shifting Cultural Norms. Mentor: Elaine Sullivan
  • Sainz, Valerie (STEVENSON): Kateri Tekakwitha: Praise from the Pulpit, Power in the Pines (1626-1680). Mentor: Gregory O’Malley
  • Zimmerle, Mary (KRESGE): The English Mummy. Mentor: Elaine Sullivan

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Gonzalez, Noe (CROWN): A Monte Carlo Study of Higgs Bosons Produced via Vector Boson Fusion in the Boosted Regime @ \sqrt{s} = 13.6 TeV. Mentor: Jason Nielsen 
  • Subbotina Stephenson, Klaus (KRESGE): The Effects of Binary Reference Sources on JWST NIRCam Coronagraphy. Mentor: Andrew Skemer
  • Varga, Lukas (CARSON): Ancestral sequence reconstruction of vanadium dependent haloperoxidases. Mentor: Shaun McKinnie
Dean’s Award
  • Cecil, Annice (PORTER): Driving Forces of Diel Vertical Migration in Zooplankton from Alaskan Seagrass Beds. Mentor: Pete Raimondi
  • Garg, Stuti (NINE), Kollipara, Ishan (JRLEWIS), Murphy, Liam (PORTER), Svensson, Maya Diaz (CROWN), Weber, Alison (CARSON): A New Census of the Universe’s Entropy. Mentor: Stefano Profumo
  • Kelly, Danielle (CARSON): Structural mapping of an immunodominant antigenic site on the Norovirus Protruding Domain Capsid. Mentor: Rebecca Dubois
  • Lindemuth, Emma (CROWN): Reconstruction of Lake Baikal Vegetation to 500 Ka using n-alkanes. Mentor: Pratigya Polissar
  • Moosman, Owen (STEVENSON): Mitigating assembly and switch errors in phased genomes of polar fishes reveals haplotype diversity in copy number of antifreeze protein genes. Mentor: Joanna Kelley
  • Nielsen, Lindsey (COWELL), Heneghan, Sally (STEVENSON), Seida, Ellie (CARSON), Shenasa, Amina(CROWN): Using acoustic indices to evaluate the soundscapes of kelp forest and urchin barren ecosystems in Sitka Sound, Alaska. Mentor: Pete Raimondi
  • Van Dorn, Sydnee (PORTER), Stoaks, Grey (CROWN), Gott, Gabriel (CARSON): Influences on Community Composition of Intertidal Seagrass in the Sitka Sound. Mentor: Pete Raimondi

Social Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Bentley, John (KRESGE): The Dark Side of Development: The Acceleration of Genocide in Emerging Economies. Mentor: Kent Eaton
  • Fuster Tarrago, Blanca (CARSON): Reducing Provincial Disparities in Infant Mortality: A Difference-in-Differences Assessment of Plan Nacer’s Effectiveness. Mentor: Eleonora Pasotti
  • Venerable, Elyse (STEVENSON): Investigating the origins of the Oyo Empire war ponies in 17th-century Nigeria using strontium isotope analysis. Mentor: Vicky Oelze
Dean’s Award
  • Dollman, Matthew (PORTER):Cuba’s Welfare Regime: Authoritarian, Universal, and Strained. Mentor: Sara Niedzwiecki
  • DeLucchi, Natalie (MERRILL), Carroll, Daelaigh (MERRILL): Fascist Social Policy: The Expansion of Social Insurance under Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Mentor: Sara Niedzwiecki
  • Mathura, Christopher (STEVENSON): One Guyana?: Evaluating Potential Symptoms of the Resource Curse and the Promises of Sustainable Development. Mentor: Flora Lu
  • Spry, Sophia (JRLEWIS): AI Driven Welfare Reform: Predictive Risk Models in New Zealand, Chile, and the US. Mentor: Sara Niedzwiecki
  • Tien, Chelsey (NINE): Caregiver’s use of praise during a collaborative problem-solving task involving causal reasoning. Mentor: Su-hua Wang
  • Yu, Audrey (JRLEWIS): Language Effects on Parent-child Conversations About Human Traits. Mentor: David Menendez
  • Zalunardo, Vivian (STEVENSON):Addressing “Glazed Separateness”: Invisibility, Domesticity, and Resistance of Black Women in the Works of Toni Morrison. Mentor: Dean Mathiowetz
2024 Winners

The 2024 Chancellor’s Awards Ceremony is available to watch here: https://vimeo.com/953660070

Arts

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Kairo Chin (Porter)Clyde’s
  • Kyla Perkins (Merrill): Theories on How to Decarcerate the Museum
  • Danny Moshayedi (Stevenson), Katherine Garcia De La Rosa (Kresge), Madeline Finkel (Kresge): Unforgettable Lies: Framing Jamie Snow
Dean’s Award
  • Zella Bonita Vacaron (Kresge): From Giving Violets to Gaining Visibility: Looking at Artwork by Self-Identified Lesbian Artists
  • Alice Barreras (Porter): Always Offer a Gift of Silver to the First Magpie Seen in Spring
  • Lily Mia Nash (Carson): Climate Grief Quilting Bee
  • Kasey Morales (Kresge): Fragmented Mind of the Torn Soul / Womanhood
  • Celeste Wilkinson (Merrill): Hybridity of Costume and the Development of Race: Conflicting Meanings within the Portrait of Don Francisco de Arobe and Sons Pedro and Domingo
  • Cecelia Selznick (Stevenson): Indigenous Land Politics: Artistic Resistance Presented by Zapatista Climate Justice
  • Chanel Chavira (Stevenson): The Reclamation of Hawaiian Featherwork: Exploring History and Tradition in Relation to the Present

Engineering

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Coen Adler (Crown): Fair Augmentation of Decision Trees Through Selective Node Retraining
  • Natalie Valett  (Nine): Connectivity-Based Heuristic Algorithms for Restoration Prioritization
  • Danielle Haley  (Porter): Structure and antigenicity of the porcine astrovirus 4 capsid spike
Dean’s Award
  • John Minnick (Carson): Automated tools for accurate and precise dosing of granular solids
  • Yuhao Chen (JR Lewis), Hanwen Yang (JR Lewis), Chloe Wong (JR Lewis), Juan Aguenza (Cowell), Sai Bhujangari (Cowell), Benthan Vu (Cowell): Assessing the Impact of Prompting Methods on ChatGPT’s Mathematical Capabilities
  • Luqman Zaceria (Cowell): Automatic Vectorization of Architectural Floor Plans
  • Siddarth Mamidanna (Crown), Shiyuan Huang (Merrill), Shreedhar Jangam (JR Lewis): Can Large Language Models Explain Themselves? A Study of LLM-Generated Self-Explanations
  • Akhil Gunasekaran (Crown): Knowledge Distillation Through Time For Future Event Prediction
  • Varun Kodur (Crown), Jordan Nichols (Stevenson), Allison Jaballas (Crown), Julia Saltz (Cowell), Nikita Rajesh (Crown), James Larbalestier (Kresge), Zokhira Mukhammadyunusova (JR Lewis), Tyler Gaw(Oakes), Srikar Bevara (JR Lewis), Mckenna Smith (Crown), Ashlyn Nhu-Ngoc Huynh (Nine), Blanca Gil(Merrill), Katherine Warren (Cowell), Daniel Li (Porter), Edgar D Cruz (Crown): TABI: Toxic Algal Bloom Interference
  • Ananthajit Srikanth (Nine), Chi Jasmine Tai (JR Lewis): Embers, Wind, and Fire: An investigation of the effects of embers and wind on wildfire propagation

Humanities

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Jacob Press (Stevenson): “You Just Take It For Granted When You’re Growing Up”: Filipino Cockfighting in the Pajaro Valley
  • Ian Doyle (ihdoyle) (Oakes): Red Dawn Over Derry: A History of Socialist Republicanism and Radicalism in the Troubles
  • Ethan Waldo (ewaldo) (JR Lewis): Regulation of Prostitution in 19th Century Paris: Effects of Urbanization on Sexual Institutions
Dean’s Award
  • Jackson Young (Cowell), Isabel De Blois (Kresge), Valerie Sainz (Stevenson): A Night in Harlem: Mapping the Nightclubs of 1930’s Harlem
  • Leonardo Colletta (Stevenson): Ireland As We Would Surely Have Her
  • Maia Mislang (Porter): Sex Work and Prostitution in the American-Occupied Philippines
  • Bronwyn Eyre (Stevenson): Silent Soldiers: Uncovering the Stories of Indigenous Nurses in the First World War
  • Molly Maher (Porter): Tensions in Paradise: The Om Commune as an Alternative Cultural Experiment
  • Lily Marx (Kresge): the earth as skin

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Aditi Gangadharan (Nine): Optics Testing for SCALES
  • Darshika Ravulapalli (Kresge): Adressing Discrepancies Within Emission-line Modeling Using a Machine Learning Approach
  • *Eva Zlimen (Carson): Extensive Ice Pollution of Uranus and Neptune’s Atmospheres by Upsweep of Material During the Nice Model Migration
Dean’s Award
  • Alekhya Meduri (Crown): Equipped with a Cre-Dependent CRISPR-CAS9 System to Investigate Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis in Bengalese Finch Models
  • Anna Voznyuk (Merrill): Biogeography and activity of cyanobacterial and non-cyanobacterial diazotrophs throughout the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre
  • Darian Mohsenin (Kresge): Mapping Cell-Type-Specific Gene Expression across the Developing Songbird Forebrain
  • Kathryn Echandia-Monroe (Nine): Comparative RNA sequencing analysis reveals KRAS A146P presence in rare form of Gliosarcoma
  • Keaton Ferguson (Crown): Accuracy of the disconnected bump scan conducted on ATLAS prototype pixel modules using the RD53a readout chip
  • Nitya Jain (Nine): Phylogenetic Analysis of Type II Toxin-Antitoxin Systems
  • Olivia Jackson (Carson): PIENU to PIONEER: Constraints on Rare Pion Decays in Search of Dark Sector Physics

Social Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Alexandra Singer (Nine): Repression and Mobilization in the Digital Age: a Triangular Set of Relations
  • Lila Bell (Kresge): Women Talking: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and the Requirements of Womanhood
  • *Ameyalli De La Rosa (Merrill): ¡El es Dios!: Mexican Folk Catholicism and its Rebellious Ecologies
Dean’s Award
  • Gerard Labriola (Merrill): Bringing Each Other to Greatness: Narratives of the Revolutionary Vanguard and Horizontal Alternatives in Zapatista Theory and Practice
  • Reva Samant (Merrill): Ending Solitary Confinement: A Look Outside the Eighth Amendment and Litigation
  • Diana Garcia (Merrill), Sydrah Al-Saegh (Cowell): Peer Relations and the Importance of Cultural Identity in Classroom Motivation
  • Shavit Melamed (Carson): Radio Activities: Extracurricular College Radio and Academic Success
  • Lauren Elscott (Carson): The Judicial Paintbrush: The Ongoing Evolution of Copyright Law and its Relationships with Creators, Corporations, and Artificial Intelligence
  • Kasey La (Merrill): What Was My Error?: Online Processing of Speech Disfluency by Foreign-Accented Speakers
2023 Winners

Arts

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • lavender higley (Kresge)Random With A Purpose XXXI: The Community Movement
  • Kyler Salameda (Cowell) and lavender higley (Kresge): Eye Like The Way She Moves
  • Miles Bernath (Porter): Eisenstein In Japan: How Japanese Art Influenced Film Theory
Dean’s Award
  • Sarah Krulder (Porter): Unrooted Ornamental (Scotch Broom)
  • Tamara Muradyan (Porter): Unbelievable!/Reach for the Stars, Aubrey!
  • Maxwell Ward (Cowell): Bridging Past and Present: Formulating a Community Archaeology Project at Lagunas de los Cóndores
  • Aja Bond (Cowell): If a Banner Drops in the Woods and No One’s There to Read It, Does It Make a Statement?
  • Emily Tran (Kresge): Mementos
  • Zoe Linstrom (Porter): Social Ills: Narrating Contemporary Political Issues Through Oil Painting
  • Marcel Bell (Oakes): Love Jones

Engineering

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Joseph M Cruz (Kresge): Investigating the COBRA NG2 Hemagglutinin for Universal Flu For Vaccine Development
  • Kiana Imani (John R. Lewis), Elizabeth Beer (Cowell), Izabella Balius (Eight), Zoe Petroff (Crown),Jonathan Zau (Kresge), Cambell Strand (Crown), Lauren Paule (Eight), Joanne Shen (Nine), Yixuan Peng (Porter), Nathan Mccall (Crown), Vidhata Singh (Crown), Christopher Schade (Crown), Haripriya (Nine),Thiago Feitosa (Eight): Helo: Accessible Type 2 Diabetes Medication Through Stable Expression of Exendin-4 in S. cerevisiae
  • Hayley Coyle (Crown): Deep Learning and High-Resolution Drone Imagery for Accurate Plant Species Mapping in California Coastal Communities
Dean’s Award
  • Cally Lin (Nine): Developing and Deploying the Xena Gene Set Enrichment Analysis Appyter
  • Fan Xia (Crown): Organoid Culture Modifications to Improve Brain Organoid Fidelity
  • Anand Verma (Porter): Validating Binding Interactions of CX3CR1 with RSV G Glycoprotein
  • Samuel Nangle (Cowell): Structural Studies of Respiratory Syncytial Virus G Glycoprotein Central Conserved Domain and Fab 2b11
  • Maxim Biryukov (Crown): Applying Dijkstra’s Shortest Path Algorithm to the 1D Euler-Lagrange Equation
  • Bradley Tait (Porter): Can 2D Stack Up to 3D, or Will 2D Fall Flat?
  • John Madden (Crown): Soil Power Sensor

Humanities

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Vann Jones (Merrill): What to Expect When He’s Expecting: A Complete Guide to Transmasculine Reproduction (website)
  • Elina Juvonen (Stevenson): “A Great Big Warm-Hearted Southern Family”: The United Daughters of the Confederacy in New York City
  • Rachel Ledeboer (Porter): Metamorphoses of the Metamorphoses: An Examination of a 16th Century Venetian Printed Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the University of California, Santa Cruz Library Special Collections & Archives
Dean’s Award
  • Owen Cooksy (Cowell): The Death of an Irish Soldier: Irish Nationalism, Ulster Nationalism, and the Murder of Henry Wilson
  • Maria Hele (Nine), Ashley Marshall (Stevenson): Re-Membering Motherhood: Transforming Futures through Reassembling the Iconicity of the Mother
  • Colin Hirschberg (Rachel Carson): Restrictions on Mandarin Bei-Passives
  • Tatum Kubik (Stevenson): Redefining ‘Normal’ Bodies: Disability Studies in Fever Dream
  • Russell Moore (Oakes): The Color and Politics of Locomotives on the Central Pacific Railroad
  • Ryan Nguyen (Oakes): Observational Reports and Cognitive States: Sellars and McDowell
  • Ann Niland (Kresge): To Identity Or Not To Identity: Diversity, Marketing, and the White Savior in Science Fiction & Fantasy From The Dark Tower to Star Trek

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Samuel English (Merrill): The Hidden Friend‘s Wake: Dark Matter and a Binary at the Galactic Center
  • Valery Ortiz (Nine): Molecular Mechanisms of PCH-2 and HORMADs during meiosis I
  • Martin Gutierrez (Oakes): Rescue of Blood Coagulation Factor VIII Exon-16 Mis-splicing by Antisense Oligonucleotides
Dean’s Award
  • Amanda Mohr (Merrill): The Importance of Exoplanet Research and TOI5527.01
  • Emma Snyder (Rachel Carson): Response of Dittrichia graveolens to competition with non-native grasses in varying soil conditions
  • Jennifer Waldo (Stevenson): Investigating the potential of helicopter-vessel communication for bycatch avoidance in tuna purse seine fisheries
  • Maryke Grobler (Oakes): Chromosomal Fusions, But Not Chromosomal Inversions, Activate a PCH-2 Dependent Checkpoint That Promotes Crossover Formation in C. elegans
  • Noelle Yaitanes (Porter): Investigating the Role of Kinase Tails in the Regulation of Circadian Period
  • Orazio Bagno (Cowell): Studying RNA Helicase Involvement in Alternative 3′ Splice Site Selection Using CRISPR and RNAi
  • Samantha Scarlett (Crown): Synthesizing Chemically Diverse Cyclic Peptides in Effort to Determine Structure-Permeability Relationships for Drug Discovery

Social Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Annabel Bouwer (Crown): The Mindful Gaze: Trait Mindful People Under Instructed Emotion Regulation Selectively Attend to Positive Stimuli
  • Brianna Barrientos (Kresge): The Perseverance of Filipino Labor: An Analysis of the Competing Forces Between Filipino Advocacy and San Francisco Racial Politics
  • Brooke Johnson (John R. Lewis): Unpacking the Colonial Legacy of the Global Waste Trade: the Impact of National Sword as a Critical Juncture
Dean’s Award
  • Brent Horning (Nine): Globalization of the Gaze: Divine and Secular Seeing in the Durga Puja Festival of Kolkata
  • Elina Juvonen (Stevenson): Family and Foreign: Investigating Representation and Contradiction in 1950s Women’s Magazines
  • Gepeng Ding (Nine): The Cost of Political Stability: Reckoning of Policy Adjustment in China’s Local Government Financing Vehicles
  • Jiayue Sun (John R. Lewis): Children’s Engagement During a Museum Visit to a Mammoth Fossil Exhibit
  • Joy Anderson (Kresge): Affirming the Strengths of LGBTQIA+ Families in San Francisco: Barriers to Redefining Family in the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
  • Morgan Yates (Stevenson): The Influence of Interactions with Pet Dogs on Psychological Distress
  • Serena Campbell (Merrill): “The University Needs to Listen”: Moving from Mainstream to Critical Environmentalism at UC Santa Cruz
2022 Winners

Arts

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Luis Booth (Nine) and Blair Hammond (Kresge): Any Face, Whatever Body
  • Sofia Tomanov (Porter)Jane Avril: Spectacle and Spectator in the Art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
  • Nicole Rudolph-Vallerga (Porter): Seance of Duality: Summoning Those Living In-Between
Dean’s Award
  • Aja Bond (Cowell): All Day I Dream About Soil
  • Brandon Castro (Porter): Sancho & The School of Quetzalcoatl
  • Claire Apana (Porter): IMPRESSIONS
  • Christy Yee (Merrill): From Me to You
  • Gabriel Wall (Porter): (Don’t) Just be Yourself: Fashion, Play, and Identity in the Post-Ironic Age
  • Ira Irvani (Porter): The Dream is Gone/ What Cinema Could’ve Been … Gender and Sexual Ambiguity in Pre-Code Hollywood and the Motion Picture Production Code of 1934 
  • Robert Jeffrey (Merrill), Spencer Greene (Porter), Philippa Fuschich (Porter): we’re here because we’re here

Engineering

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Connor Masterson (Eight): Hardware Acceleration For Multi-Scalar Multiplication In Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  • Eric Vin (Oakes): Labelled Control Improvisation
  • Torrey Bronwell (Porter), Franklin Zheng (Ten), Tobin Berger-Cahn (Porter), Denise Calderon (Kresge), Yi-Chi Chu (Merrill), Rose Delvillar (Eight), Alfonso Gaminao (Merrill), Tarabyn Grismer (Cowell), Emily Hallamasek (Eight), Julia Howard (Crown), Stephen Hwang (Merrill), Tanya Ivanov (Crown), Rhea Kamath (Ten), David Kelaita (Porter), Natasha Liu (Eight), Nabil Mohammed (Ten)Progenie: Programmable Gene Disruption in Pathogenic Bacteria
Dean’s Award
  • Alan Brilliant (Nine): Quantum Circuit Superoptimization
  • Meghan Mathers (Eight), Meghan Burr (Cowell), Samuel Magdaleno (Eight): Aiden Mcfadden (Eight): CRISPy Lettuce

Humanities

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Lucy Dasilva (Stevenson): Memories of the Blacklist Era
  • Rane Vigil (Kresge): Apartheid and the Bloody Origins of Khayelitsha 
  • Ryan Hart (Merrill): Power, Law, and Symbolism: Hammurabi’s Code over 3700 years
Dean’s Award
  • Gavin Williams (Merrill): The Blood of the Nopal: A Case of Indigenous Cochineal Cultivation from 1521-1796
  • Nicholas Masher (Oakes): The Site and the Memorial: Hiroshima’s Peace Complex in Cold War Japan

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
Dean’s Award
  • Ariella Stewart (Cowell): Fezf2 promotes differentiation in hippocampal post-natal neural stem cells
  • Irene Franco (Eight): Investigating the Binding of Amyloid-beta with the Prion Protein Regulatory Domain
  • Jodi Lee (Merrill): RNA-seq Analysis Reveals Mode of Splicing Inefficiency: Coordinated Intron Retention
  • Kenneth Gee (Crown): Identifying Nonstationarity in Ecological Time Series using Empirical Dynamical Modeling
  • Mara Baylis (Cowell): Selection against mitochondrial mutations occurs across life stages in Drosophila 
  • Nina Blanch (Porter): Cloudy and Cloud-free Thermal Phase Curves with PICASO: Applications to WASP-43b
  • Tobin Berger-Cahn (Porter): Determining Single-Cell Multilineage Capacity of Developmentally Restricted Hematopoietic Stem Cells (drHSCs)

Social Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Chloe Magidoff (Ten): Without an Umbrella in a Rainstorm: The Significance of Shelby County v. Holder (2013)
  • Ciara Clarke (Kresge): Uprooted: (Un)Natural Histories of Eucalyptus in California
  • Joel Montejo (Oakes): Mexico’s Response to COVID-19: How a Comparison with Brazil Explains the Country’s Deficient Response
Dean’s Award
  • Claudia Torres Arias (Oakes): Beyond Survival: Fostering Thriving Immigrant Communities in Santa Cruz through Multi-Faceted Social Services
  • Fiona Debernardi (Kresge): “No Harm, No Foul?” Evaluations of Cheating Across Contexts
  • Grace Brieger (Cowell): Field Guide to Birds of the UCSC Arboretum
  • John Jezek (Stevenson): Neighborhoods: What Exactly Are We Defending? Representation, Race, and Land-use Politics in Santa Cruz
  • Leigh Rodi (Stevenson): Sustainable Fiefdoms: A Comparative Analysis of the Political Economy of Tourism in Northwest Peru
  • Nona Golan (Merrill): The Geo-Legal History of the Kabarra Wetland & al-Gawarna People in Israel/Palestine
2021 Winners

Arts

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Jacinto Salz (Porter): AFTER BURNS
  • Klytie Xu (Porter): For Each Name, A Color; For Each Color, A Name
  • Holly Edelman (Stevenson): Standing Watch for Wandjina: The Systematic Setbacks of Aboriginal Cultural Copyrighting
Dean’s Award
  • Jourdain Barton (Kresge): “Other Art Histories: Islam,’Art,’ and the Baptistère de Saint Louis”
  • cnconti (Cowell): Alexander the Great and Alexios III of Trebizond: Culture as Politics
  • Reya Borbridge (Porter): Farms, Farmers, and the Field
  • Kirra Mccoll (Kresge): Guerrilla Gardener
  • Gioh Sung (Cowell): In Absentia
  • Jordan Fickel (Porter): oliveros bot
  • Kylie Smith (Ten): Speaking from the Heart: A Senior Lecture Recital

Engineering

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Analysis of the First Malware to Attack a Power Grid
    Dominic Lucchesi (Crown)
    Aviv Brook (Stevenson)
  • Identifying and Investigating Wolbachia-to-Arthropod HGT Events
    Serafina Nieves (Eight)
Dean’s Award
  • Maxim Kuznetsov (Crown): A New Dimension: Visualizing Immersive Genome Graphs
  • Arash Parsa (Merrill): CO2 Monitoring Assembly
  • Michelle Shimberg (Cowell): Development of a Non-Enzymatic Electrochemical Glucose Sensor using Copper Oxide
  • Komaplastics: Cellulose-Based Biodegradable Agricultural Plastic
    Kyra Eyerman (Porter), Rachel Mace (Cowell), Melody Azimi (Nine), Alicia Jorgenson (Eight), Sophia Huei Min Sneddon (Eight), Navdeep Kalkat (Ten), Joshua Elkins (Oakes), Claudia Fiorella Paz Flores (Ten), Faith Williams (Crown), Taylor Ziccardi (Cowell), Gabriel Sanchez (Kresge), Neil Smith (Merrill), Thomas Kensok (Porter)
  • Issei Mori (Nine): Physarum Telam

Humanities

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Paola Berumen (Kresge): Expedited Removal in 2020. An Analysis of the Department of Homeland Security vs. Thuraisingam Supreme Court Case:
  • Jonah Gertz (Porter): Japan and Methamphetamine: the Afterlife of Occupation and the Hiropon Age
  • Ashley Ippolito (Ten), Yutong Guo (Cowell), Sage Meadows (Crown), Ollie Tarango (Cowell), Noa Nevo (Stevenson): The Effect of Reduced Relative Clauses on Agreement Production
Dean’s Award
  • #MeToo: An Intersectional Interrogation and Centering of Black Women
    Amelia Huster (Eight)
  • Modalities of Governance: Cartography in Colonial Africa
    Avni Lal (Cowell)
  • Remember Us: Holocaust Representations in European-Jewish Émigré Film, 1942-1945
    Maya Gonzalez (Cowell)
  • The 1721 Boston Smallpox Epidemic and the Origins of the Opinion Editorial
    Matthew Tracey-Cook (Stevenson)
  • The Emergence of an Ever-Changing Hong Kong Identity
    Kimberly Szeto (Nine)
  • The Idealized Feminine Self: 
Effortlessly Sexy, Confident, and Cool
    Jasmine Simone (Kresge)
  • The Stela of Maya: Family and Marriage Relations in Ancient Egypt
    Vicky Chin (Ten), Ollie Tarango (Cowell), Mary Shamon (Stevenson), Alyssa L Rodriguez (Cowell)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Molecular Classification of Pediatric High-Risk Leukemias Using Expression Profiles of Multimodally Expressed Genes
    Sneha Jariwala (Ten)
  • Variation in resting strategies across trophic levels and habitats in mammals
    Ishana Shukla (Oakes)
  • Searching for Primordial Black Holes
    Olivia Ross (Kresge)
Dean’s Award
  • Characteristics of plant communities invaded by Dittrichia graveolens (Asteraceae), as it spreads away from roadsides in Santa Clara County
    Andrew Lopez (Eight)
  • Constraining the Asymmetry of Type Ia Supernovae using Late-time Spectra
    Erika Strasburger (Crown)
  • Examining the Self Interaction of Dark Matter through Brightest Cluster Galaxy Offsets
    Dane Cross (Porter)
  • Geochemical and Isotopic Evidence for the Escape of Ice Sheet Fluids
    Michael Scudder (Crown)
  • Pan-Cancer Analysis of Driver Mutations and Modules in Cancer Genomes
    Carlos Arevalo (Porter)
  • Unburned carbon in the Outer Layers of Type Ia Supernova Ejecta
    Rodrigo Angulo (Crown)
  • X-RAY-OPTICAL SCALING RELATIONS FOR THE DARK ENERGY SURVEY Y3 REDMAPPER CLUSTERS
    Jose Jobel (Oakes)
    Paige Kelly (Porter)

Social Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Cielo De La Rosa (Eight): Investigations on chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) termite-fishing cognition: Issa, western Tanzania
  • Kimberly Dare (Nine): Propelling UCSC Undergraduates of Color in Environmental Studies Through Mentorship
  • Morgan Bishop (Oakes): The New Vagrancy: The Evolution of Moral Policing in Anti-Homeless Policy
Dean’s Award
  • Samuel Lindquist (Porter): Central Bank Features and Recession Severity: Evidence from 2008
  • Lauren Woo (Cowell): Consent as a Defense to Assault Charges: A BDSM Case Study
  • Sophie Kennedy (Nine): Evaluation, Adherence, and Reporting: When, Why, and How College Students Support New Behavioral Norms During the COVID-19 Pandemic 
  • Nivie Oron (Kresge): Fat as Flawless or Fatal? Weight Stigma and its Effect on Perceptions of Fat, Health, and Eating Disorders.
  • Chiara Fishburne (Porter): Meanings of Magic: The Pickets and Undergraduate Participation
  • Aryan D’Rozario (Merrill): Pakistan’s Military Legacies: Army, Nation, and State
  • Siena Elvins (Ten): “Through the Dignity of Work”: The Tension Between Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in the Remediation of Homelessness Taking Place in Santa Cruz, CA
Archives
2020 Winners

Arts

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Cat’s Cradle
    Georgio Klironomos (Crown)
    Erica Li (Ten)
    Herman Wei-Jye Wu (Merrill)
  • Exploring Personal Boundaries with Adults who have Developmental Disabilities through Serious Games and Brainwaves
    Samantha Conde (Merrill)
  • Inspiration Point / Filling the Imaginary Void: Addressing “Documentary Distance” in the Representation of Historical Violence (FILM AND PAPER)
    Keanu Ramos (Porter)
Dean’s Award
  • Gateway into The Abyss: Unlocking the Transcending Realms and Enlightened Truth Through Exploration of Occult Iconography in Hilma Af Klint’s The Swan No.24
    cnconti (Cowell)
  • A Portrait of G.H. Wells
    Eli Crespin (Kresge)
    Katelin Kai-Lin Ong (Stevenson), Laura Gonzalez (Cowell), Yvonne Gonzalez (Crown)
  • Cendrillon – Winter 2020
    David Kronenberg (Porter)
  • Nymph Mania: J. W. Waterhouse’s Femme Fatales and Victorian Anxieties About Shifting Gender Dynamics
    Chloe Calhoun (Crown)
  • Psychopathic Dismemberment and Psychic Slaughter: Spectatorship, Affect, and Gender in the Slasher Cycle
    Snow Martin (Porter)
  • The Norris Center Archives
    Saul Villegas (Porter)
  • The Pirates of Penzance Spring Opera 2019
    Kylie Paige Smith (Ten)

Engineering

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • De novo creation of spliceosomal introns by different transposition mechanisms across diverse eukaryotes
    Landen Gozashti (Eight)
  • Flow-based Detection of Rip Currents
    Issei Mori (Nine)
  • Posture Monitoring and Corrective Seat Cover
    Ali Fallahi (Porter), Christopher Cheney (Ten), Zachary Haughton (Cowell)
Dean’s Award
  • Ancestry HMM with Gene Conversion
    Trevor Ridgley (Crown)
  • Characterization of the Differentiation Patterns of Histone H3 K27M Neural Stem Cells
    Liam Tran (Nine)
  • Identifying and validating Wolbachia-to-arthropod HGT events
    Serafina Nieves (Eight)
  • Introner Elements drive ongoing intron gain in Oikopleura dioica
    Preet Kaur (Eight), Landen Gozashti (Eight)
  • Investigating Regulation of Nonsense-Mediated Decay During the Inflammatory Response
    Matthew Cattle (Cowell)
  • Protecting Newcastle Disease Vaccine with Intrinsically Disordered Proteins
    James Hahn (Cowell), Andrew Zarzar (Nine), Aren Pageler (Crown), Ikenna Anigbogu (Eight), Jiasui Xu (Nine), Jonah Pierce (Merrill), Liana Shuang Beld (Eight), Preet Kaur (Eight), Marcella Mirabelli (Stevenson), Marcus-Charles Strauss (Cowell), Martina Pedersen (Porter), Melody Azimi (Ten), Rita Ousterhout (Stevenson), Shayan Vahdani (Porter), Varuna Amita Dharasker (Ten), Kaitlyn Myers (Merrill)
  • Sorting an Array Using the Topological Sort of Corresponding Comparison Graph
    Balaram Das Behera (Crown)

Humanities

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • An Intellectual History of Public Discourse in the Post-Civil War Era: Infanticide and Emerging Reproductive Regulations
    Angela L Cortes (Stevenson)
  • One Does Not Simply Define Memes: A Prototypical Theory to Understanding Internet Memes
    Samrawit Tariku Ayele (Nine)
  • Pure Potential
    Irma Yuliana Barbosa (Porter)
Dean’s Award
  • A Pragmatic Account of Singular They
    Clara Agnes Mcmahan (Kresge)
  • A Vice Contrary to Nation: The Emerging Heteronormative Nationalism of the French Revolution
    Bailey Jonathan Troth (Crown)
  • Aristotle’s Politics and The Charge of Egoism
    Cynthia Lissete Gonzalez (Oakes)
  • Goodness without God is Good Enough
    Landon Austin Mitchell (Porter)
  • Properties of Match and Align in Kinyambo
    Max Mason Tarlov (Kresge)
  • The Far Eastern Republic and Historical Memory
    Charles Raymond Wagoner (Kresge)
  • The Grey Area: Rethinking the Problem of the Color Line in Vietnam War-era Korea and Japan
    Farrah Safari (Kresge)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • CONSTRAINING THE RELATION BETWEEN CLUSTER VELOCITY DISPERSION AND RICHNESS USING THE REDMAPPER YEAR 3 CATALOG
    Vernon Robert Wetzell (Stevenson)
  • Structural Studies of a New Class of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor for Cancer Immunotherapy
    Nina Miranda Harpell (Eight)
Dean’s Award
  • A Chandra X-Ray Follow-Up To The Dark Energy Survey Year 3 redMaPPer Catalog
    Lena Sofia Eiger (Nine)
  • An Analysis of Germanium Quantum Dots in conjunction with MAPbI3 Host Perovskites for Hybrid Photovoltaic Materials
    Phoenix Nalu Hakumele Gallagher (Stevenson)
    Shayan Hassanzadeh Zargar (Cowell)
  • Constraints on the Final Fermions of an Exotic Higgs Decay
    Violet Piper (Crown)
  • Manganese Oxide Deposition on Defective Graphene Oxide Nanosheets for Enhanced Antibacterial Activity Under Monochromated Light
    Jasmine Chiayu Liu (Crown)
  • Optimizing Molecular Inversion Probe Assays to Characterize Human-Specific Neurodevelopmental Genes
    Taylor Dolores Real (Porter)
  • The Reducing Capabilities of Diisobutylaluminum Borodhydride
    Madison E Landi (Eight)
  • ANION-DRIVEN CONFORMATIONAL CHANGES IN CK1δ REGULATE CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS
    Alfred Manning Freeberg (Eight)

Social Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • A California Case Study on Procedures to Reassemble and Reevaluate Archaeological Artifact Processing
    Allysha Ann Leonard (Eight)
  • Adding New Lenses: Making Health Equity Work in Immigrant Communities Marked By Various Forms of Violence
    Cinthia Cristal Magana Moreno (Porter)
  • Incarceration and Healthcare in the Santa Cruz County
    Priyanka Praveen Kulkarni (Oakes)
Dean’s Award
  • “Agents of Change”: Progressive Democratic ‘Diffusion’ Across U.S. House and State Legislative Elections in 2018
    Margarita Vargas (Porter)
  • Analyzing the Effects of Federal Aid on Partisan Representation in the American States
    Parker James Strohmeyer (Oakes)
  • Comparing Sexual Themes in Rap Music by Female and Male Music Artists: A Qualitative Study
    Jessica Lorraine Walsh (Stevenson)
  • Differential Vulnerability to Climate Related Disasters Among Communities Along the Santa Cruz Coastal Landscape
    John Calvin Mcclure (Crown)
  • Harm, Responsibility, and Ambiguity in Judgements about Sexual Behaviors
    Anjuli Megan Corzine (Cowell)
  • Oakland, California’s Points of Nutritional Hope
    Louis William Garcia (Stevenson)
2019 Winners

Arts

Dean’s Award

  • Anak, how are you? (My child, how are you?)
    Jelica Ross Alcarmen Hipolito (Porter)
    Sabrina Anne Ilumin (Nine)
    May Michele Alvarez (Merrill)
    Angie Morales (Eight)
  • HAVC 100A Research Paper: Refining Tastes
    Ava Lizette Kristy (Cowell)
  • John Hughes, Teenagers, and the Corporate American Dream
    Nicholette Lindsay (Kresge)
  • Our World in Wilson’s Hands
    Samwell Tarciano Gervacio (Cowell)
  • Sister of Mine
    Leah Esther Fuentes (Cowell)
    Samuel Joseph Noval Gouldthorpe (Cowell)
    Leslie Carrillo-Lorenzo (Eight)
    Ariel Baruch (Cowell)
    Cameron Currie Mccrea (Stevenson)
    Megan Lucille Neelley (Cowell)
  • The Duality of the Face in Cinema: From Ubiquity to Obscurity
    Rachel Aisha Abrahams (Porter)
  • The Myth of Leisure: Bean Bag Chairs and Corporate Tech Campuses
    Daniel Scott Fisher (Porter)
  • Worlds: An Exploration of the Self
    Zoe Joy Elliott (Eight)

Chancellor’s Award

  • dinosaurily
    Joyce Wei-Shin Lin (Porter)
    Fen Swanson (Kresge)
  • Fabrications, Articulations, Activations: Creating Vā Through Intentional Juxtapositions & Decolonizing the ‘Dusky Maiden.’
    Alex Simpson Hiatt (Kresge)

Engineering

Dean’s Award

  • Computational Models of Polymer Synthesis Driven by Dehydration/Rehydration Cycles: Repurination in Simulated Hydrothermal Fields
    Mason Ellis Hargrave (Crown)
    Spencer K Thompson (Stevenson)
  • Dissecting the impact of signaling strength on T cell function using chimeric antigen receptors
    Lilian Eden Yao (Ten)
  • Lens Characterization for Multifocus Microscopy Applications
    Brandon Jared Lynch (Porter)
  • Significance of NRROS in CNS Homeostasis
    Amr Khalid Makhamreh (Ten)
  • Understanding the Role of ZNF765 and/or L1PA Retroelements in Defining Embryonic Stem Cell Phenotypes
    Paola Isabel Angulo (Merrill)
  • Virtual Reality Video Games for Eye Disability (Lazy-Eye)
    Ocean Lavonne Hurd (Crown)
  • Waterlab 3
    Jared Jonathan Roberts (Ten)
    Randall Jamison Abel (Porter)
    Alexander James Koran (Stevenson)
    Joshua Douglas Spangler (Nine)
    Liam Thomas Corcoran (Crown)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Design Framework for the Electrical Characterization of Alcohol Sensors
    Alexander John Flora (Oakes)
    Nebyu Tilahun Yonas (Crown)
    Brian Hien Nguyen (Kresge)
  • Introner Elements Persist in Algal and Protist Species
    Landen Zackery Gozashti (Eight)
  • Portable Progesterone Production in Yeast
    Jessica Faith Scherer (Eight)
    Mykhaylo Dudkin (Ten)
    Laura Diane Valine (Crown)
    Dante Moreno (Porter)
    Gina Y-Vang Tran Cuneo (Merrill)
    Claire Elizabeth Bispo (Merrill)
    Justin Lau (Nine)
    Harman Singh (Oakes)
    Manuel Varela (Merrill)
    Emily Katherine Mount (Ten)
    Vanessa Jasmine Ventura (Nine)
    Ryan Michael Modlin (Crown)
    Nicholas Scott Hammond (Crown)
    Morgan Claire Tardy (Stevenson)
    Larry Hinojos (Ten)
    Megan Eleanor Macpherson (Crown)

Humanities

Dean’s Award

  • “Hello, My Name is “Foster Kid.”
    G Grayson (Oakes)
  • “I Remain an Irishman…and a Jew:” Conflicting Identities of Ireland’s Jewish Politicians
    Michele Lipson Cole (Cowell)
  • Anger and Forgiveness in “The Tempest” and “Cymbeline”
    Cynthia Lissete Gonzalez (Oakes)
  • Monster and Memory: Godzilla and the Unearthing of Grief in the Wake of Nuclear Disaster
    Anney Traymany (Kresge)
  • Reverberations from the “Earthquake”: Collective Memory and Why Mizrahi Israelis Vote for the Israeli Right
    Avery Jayne Weinman (Nine)
  • Right to a Roof: The Fight for Rent Control and Tenant Protections in California 1978-1995
    Jessica Brittany Ann Chuidian-Ingersoll (Merrill)
  • South Sudanese Refugees and Youth: Complex Narratives of Gender, War, and Diaspora
    Nyereath Dep Nhial (Ten)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Anglicisms: Use and Perceptions in the Tijuana-San Diego Border
    Brianda Alicia Caldera (Kresge)
  • Imagining the Future Human through Design Fiction & Speculative Fiction
    Natalie Gonzales (Merrill)
  • My Body Can’t Salute A War Machine: Bodily Resistance in Leslie M. Silko’s Ceremony
    Fatima Sadaf Mohammadi (Cowell)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • An Analysis into the AGN Fraction in Dark Energy Survey Galaxy Clusters
    Raziq Shaquille Noorali (Porter)
  • Effects of simulated solar arrays on seed dynamics in California desert plant species
    Sophia Haji (Eight)
  • Elucidating the Role of ROBO1 in NOTCH Activation Within the Mammary Gland
    Pinky Lee (Stevenson)
  • Enrichment of Damaged DNA by Target Replacement of Deaminated Cytosines
    Lourdes Marcela Gomez (Crown)
  • The Evolution of Binaries in a Gaseous Medium: Three-Dimensional Simulations of Binary Bondi-Hoyle-Lyttleton Accretion
    Andrea Carol Antoni (Kresge)
  • The Origin of LIGO Sources: Understanding The Formation Channels of Stellar Mass Binary Black Holes
    Martin Jose Lopez (Crown)
  • Tidal Disruptions of Main-sequence Stars of Varying Mass and Age: Inferences from the Composition of the Fallback Material
    Monica Paulina Gallegos Garcia (Oakes)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Ion Microprobe Depth Profile Analysis of Micron-Scale Metamorphic Rims on Detrital Zircons from the Pelona-Orocopia-Rand Schist
    Elizabeth Anne Langdon-Lassagne (Porter)
  • Structure and Binding Kinetics of Monoclonal Antibody 1G1 Support the Inclusion of the Respiratory Syncytial Virus G Protein in Vaccine Development
    Joshua Ryan Dillen (Cowell)

Steck Award

  • Evolution of Helium Star – White Dwarf Binaries Leading up to Thermonuclear Supernovae
    Tin Long Sunny Wong (Crown)

Social Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • Propagating Discourse: Community Gardener Motivations in the California Central Coast
    Tina Milz (Kresge)
  • BLACK ON WHITE LOVE: HOW RACIAL/ETHNIC IDENTITIES INFLUENCE PARTNER-DECISIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS
    Manfred Cullen Sy (Crown)
  • Emotional Granularity, Coping, and Adjustment in First-Generation College Students
    Edward Wonbin Kim (Crown)
  • People Who Garden: A Closer Look at Urban Community Gardeners in the California Central Coast Region
    Yeun Byun (Eight)
  • The Role of Cognitive Biases in Identifying and Disciplining Plagiarism
    Carmelle Bareket-Shavit (Stevenson)
  • Violence vs. Violence: Why the Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto Administrations Exacerbated Violence in Michoacán
    Karen Michelle Lazo (Merrill)
  • Worse than Death: An Analysis of Excess Death and the Necropolitics of Dying in Public Space
    Sara Jane Kelley (Ten)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Beyond the Duality of Sumak Kawsay: Living Well amongst the Waorani
    Alejandra Aviah Zeiger (Nine)
  • Failure of International Mediation in Ethnic Conflict: the Oslo Accords and the Israel-Palestine Conflict
    Shannon Elise Nichols (Nine)
  • Raising (Pitch)forks for Climate Justice: Leveraging a Just Transition in Dismantling Big Meat
    Laurel Brooke Levin (Stevenson)
2018 Winners

Arts

Dean’s Award

  • Bachelor of Music Senior Recital, Voice
    Madeline Erica Lippmann (Cowell)
  • Queer Selfies and the Shifting Landscapes of Queer Space
    Addison Wilks (Kresge)
  • Senior Recital- Baroque Violin
    Benjamin Andrew Dorsey (Porter)
  • Sleep Talk
    Kristal Nur Chan (Porter)
    Sarah Elizabeth Romero (Porter)
  • Sunset Bubbles
    Rachel Maryam Smith (Porter)
  • The Light Years
    Natalie Jauregui Ortiz (Porter)
  • The Missionary Image Paradigm and Response
    Hattie Clark Fletcher (Cowell)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Performing Resistance: Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck in Postwar Cinema
    Asher Guthertz (Porter)
  • Reflecting on Blackness: Conceptual Art, Race, and Racial Issues in the Art of Adrian Piper and Glenn Ligon
    Paula Yahaira Lopez (Stevenson)
  • Trauma
    Sophia Catherine Restall (Merrill)

Engineering

Dean’s Award

  • Automatized Surface Functionalization for Diagnostic System
    Eduardo Hirata Miyasaki (Crown)
    Aditya Anantha Narayan Gumparthi (Crown)
    Ali M E Kh H Aljuraidan (Crown)
  • Bugs without Borders
    Pratibha Jagannatha (Crown)
    Thuy-Khanh Tran-Dao (Crown)
    Tyler Dylan Myers (Eight)
    Alexander Bryant Pearce (Kresge)
    Brittney Dalleen Wick (Stevenson)
    Casidee Frances McDonough (Eight)
    Daniel Martin Schmelter (Kresge)
    Evan Alec Pepper-Tunick (Stevenson)
    Jethro Mitchell Marasigan (Ten)
    Marissa Victoria Taub (Ten)
    Mark Christian Lund (Eight)
    Mckenna Hicks (Stevenson)
    Sara Medor (Stevenson)
    Thomas Miranda Sousa (Ten)
  • CNNs on FPGAs for Track Reconstruction
    Thomas D Boser (Eight)
  • Designing an EMG Controlled Assistive Glove for Stroke Survivors
    Margaret A Pearce (Crown)
  • Elucidating the relationship between Wnt and AR pathways in Prostate basal cells during Homeostasis
    Alexander Kenneth Zee (Nine)
  • Indoor Autonomous Navigation System
    Daniel Cornelius Hunter (Crown)
    Kelvin Chau Silva (Nine)
    Kevin Antonio Beher (Crown)
    Kyle Stokes Ebding (Crown)
    Juan Cristian Huerta (Merrill)
  • Sources of HIV-1 Mutations During Infection
    Jimmy Chan (Crown)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Electrospatial Analog Front End for Monitoring of Cerebral Organoids
    Henry Julian Hinton (Merrill)
  • Sequencing and Assembly of Varroa Destructor Genome
    Blaise Arman Nasri (Stevenson)
    Ash O’Farrell (Ten)
    Juan Carlos Perez (Crown)
    Adam Lamine Zoubeidi (Eight)
    Samuel Robert Royle (Cowell)

Steck Award

  • Exploring Transposable Elements Regulated by ZNF649
    Invalid User (Ten)

Humanities

Dean’s Award

  • Nationalist Propaganda During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939): Appeals for International Support and the Western Fear of Communism
    Christian Allen Culton (Nine)
  • Shifting Through the Madness: Nature in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft and Georg Büchner
    Angel Hinojosa (Merrill)
  • Small Victories: Identity, Autonomy, and Female Memory of Soviet GULAGs
    Riley Lynn Gervin (Nine)
  • South Asian Cultural Productions and the Garden
    Deanna Corrine Duffy (Merrill)
  • Speculative Fiction as a Weapon of Intellectual Warfare: The Battle to Imagine a Racist or an Anti-Racist Future
    Zachary Clay Brenner (Stevenson)
  • The Necessity of Sacrifice: Female Martyrdom and the Heroic Figure
    Victoria Skye Jones (Merrill)
  • Trials of Multicultural Liberalism: A Visual Examination of Occupy Wall Street’s Resistance Art and Settler Colonial Expressions of Power
    Issabella Ann Nguyen (Eight)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Designating “human” versus “other” in a post-human world: A pragmatic approach to the problem of human essence
    Misa Courtney Hayashi (Merrill)
  • Kinderlach and Communists: or A Comparison between Soviet Ethnic Policy and Labour Zionism Through the Lens of the Infamous JAO
    Ian Joseph Kussin-Gika (Cowell)
  • On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party
    Rosa Lee Petterson (Merrill)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • A Widespread Nitrogen-fixing Invader Experiences Negative Soil Feedbacks Despite Increased Root Nodulation and Mycorrhizal Colonization
    Elizabeth Jane Davis (Merrill)
  • Constraining Dark Matter Models Using Isolated Elliptical Galaxies
    Megan Renee Splettstoesser (Merrill)
  • Creating Theoretical Transmission Spectra of Exoplanet Atmospheres
    Zafar Rustamkulov (Crown)
  • Mechanistic and Structural Studies on Human Astrovirus Serotype 8
    Carolina Cuellar (Stevenson)
  • Partial Obscuration and Reddening of Active Galactic Nuclei by Outflowing Dust
    Peter Zachary Harrington (Eight)
  • The Location and Quantity of the Dust Causing Internal Reddening of Active Galactic Nuclei
    Clio Zane Powell Heard (Merrill)
  • The regulatory roles of alternative splicing and intrinsically disordered regions of proteins in circadian rhythms
    Ivette Perez (Crown)

Chancellor’s Award

  • A new statistical method for characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets
    Cassandra Starr Henderson (Kresge)
  • Constraining Type Ia Supernova Progenitor Scenarios with Extremely Late-time Photometry of Supernova SN 2013aa
    Wynn Vicente Jacobson-Galan (Crown)
  • Operation of the Prospective SiD BeamCal in the Expected High-Radiation Forward Environment of the ILC
    Benjamin Randolph Smithers (Merrill)

Social Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • Beyond Inclusion: Ethnographic analysis regarding the precarity of disability and the need for belonging on UCSC campus
    Evelyn T Drake (Ten)
  • Bridging Theory & Practice: A Critical Understanding of Sustainability at UCSC
    Cristal Santamaria Gonzalez (Oakes)
  • Building Renter Power: Rethinking the Role of the Nonprofit in California’s Tenants Rights Movement
    Jessica Brittany Ann Chuidian-Ingersoll (Merrill)
  • Can Re-Enfranchisement Help Offenders Rehabilitate? Exploring the Relationship Between State Felon Disenfranchisement Laws and Three-Year Prison Recidivism Rates
    Alice Marie Malmberg (Cowell)
  • Mergers and Acquisitions: An Investigation of Changes in Firm Value
    Christopher James Connelly (Oakes)
  • Talk to Me, Not About Me: Has News Coverage about Autism Begun to Embody More Perspectives of the Neurodiversity Movement?
    Noa Sarah Moskowitz Lewin (Kresge)
  • “Toward Cultural Sensitivity for Marginalized Patients”
    Rosemary Garcia (Oakes)

Chancellor’s Award

  • CONTEMPORARY COLONIALISM: OKINAWA EXPERIENCES OF U.S. MILITARY OCCUPATION
    Riri Shibata (Stevenson)
  • The School-to-Prison Pipeline in Stockton
    Natalie Ariana Keller (Stevenson)
  • “Becoming American” One Word at a Time: Refugee English Classrooms and the Language of Personhood.
    Sarah Jane Cameron (Eight)
2017 Winners

Arts

Dean’s Award

  • BOUQUET
    Alex Escobedo (Porter)
  • Ghosts, Copper and Flies: Sammy Baloji’s Reconciliation with the Past
    Lucy Shannon Ashton (Kresge)
  • Immigration Game
    Hesiquio Mendez Alejo (Oakes)
  • Marshall
    Benjamin Howland Gartzman Judkins (Kresge)
  • Ola
    Emilio Kobak (Porter)
  • Performing the Everyday: The Postmodern Aesthetics of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A
    Sophia Jeanne Dimatteo (Merrill)
  • Reconciliation
    Roan Talullah La’Roue Bontempo (Porter)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Bachelor of Music Senior Recital, Guitar
    Janet Sanchez (Eight)
  • Blasting Through the City: Combating Feminicide Through Public Art in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
    Stephanie Ethel Howe (Ten)
  • Trash Toss
    Aubrey Lynn Isaacman (Porter)
    Hesiquio Mendez Alejo (Oakes)
    Nathan John Lie (Ten)
    Grace Ko (Nine)
    Linda Viet Nguyen (Crown)

Engineering

Dean’s Award

  • Creating and Characterizing a Diverse Corpus of Sarcasm in Dialogue
    Davan Harrison (Kresge)
  • High-throughput functional screen of skipped exons contributing to lung cancer development
    Maximillian Gabriel Marin (Crown)
  • Home Assistance Help Alert Senior Design Project
    Conrad Leroy Christensen (Crown)
    Jeffrey Zheng (Porter)
    August Salay Valera (Crown)
    Jesus Soto (Eight)
    Brian Keith Nichols (Crown)
    Kevin Chung-Kit Lee (Ten)
    Jacob Jonathan Giefer Lee (Eight)
    Marco Antonio Carmona (Ten)
    Jamielynne Albay Batugo (Crown)
  • Nanocell: Simple Nanopore Sensor with Smartphone Interface
    Alexander Phillip Martin-Ginnold (Porter)
  • Nautilus Senior Design Project
    Joseph Robert Carlos (Nine)
    Andrew Mikhail (Crown)
    Michael Brian Bissani (Cowell)
    Patrick Miskill Lee (Kresge)
    Xiang Qi He (Crown)
  • Real Time Peak Detection for Translocation, Control, and Analysis in Solid State Nanopores
    Mark Wyatt Harrington (Nine)
  • SlugSat
    Matthew Richard Carberry (Kresge)
    Eric Fredric Wells (Nine)
    Eric Ortega (Eight)
    Matthew David Moranda (Cowell)
    Marcel Tress (Ten)
    Navneet Kaur (Crown)
  • Structural and Kinetic Studies of Respiratory Syncytial Virus Neutralizing Antibodies
    Jacob Thomas Wolff (Cowell)
    Natasha Lorraine George (Crown)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Project Star Catcher: Virtual Reality Game for Upper Limb Exercises Based on Constraint Induced Therapy
    Aviv Elor (Nine)
  • UCSC iGEM 2016 Individual Thesis
    Henry Julian Hinton (Merrill)

Steck Award

  • Structural Studies to Understand Evasion of an Astrovirus serotype-2 subtype to a Potent Neutralizing Antibody
    Edmundo Ismael Perez (Ten)

Humanities

Dean’s Award

  • From ‘Oriental Despotism’ to the Obshchina: The Place of Asia and the Asiatic Mode of Production in the Works of Marx and Engels
    Arash Ehya (Stevenson)
  • Language and the Law: A Comparison of the American and Islamic Legal Systems
    Marcus James Dovigi (Porter)
  • Male Homosexuality in German Cinema: The Lurid Ride Through the West and the Discrete Cruise Through the East
    Serene Tseng (Oakes)
  • Shaping the Terrain: Racing the Movies 2011-2015
    Sydney Kimiko Kasahara (Porter)
  • The Contrast Between Moral Interaction and Amoral Conduct in the Transatlantic Slave Trade
    Martin Heeney Dietz (Merrill)
  • The Hijra Community of Bangladesh
    Mariel Paul (Oakes)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Deir el Bahri Project: The Lineage of Royal Legitimization
    Cori Ann Hoover (Stevenson)
  • Prostitution at the Border Towns: Moral Reform and Abolition along the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1903-1920
    Miguel Angel Giron (Oakes)
  • The Art of Living Archives: Heartographies in Queer/Feminist Historiography
    Hannah Kamilla Higgins (Oakes)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • A vibrational study of Fe2P2O7 and Cr2P2O7 under high-pressures: Structural implications for novel phosphate materials
    Nicolas Alexis Blanc (Oakes)
  • Determination of the Structural Mechanism of the CDK4-Cyclin D1-p27 Complex
    Katharine Leilani Bunch (Oakes)
  • EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF A GLOBULAR CLUSTER
    Krystal M Ruiz-Rocha (Stevenson)
  • Kondo-Ising and Tight-Binding Models for TmB4
    John Young Shin (Porter)
  • Potential of Industrial Sapphire Sensors for Use in ILC Calorimetry
    Gregory Ransford Carl Rischbieter (Eight)
  • Single Cell Knock-out of the Fragile X Mental Retardation 1 Gene in the Mice Cortex
    Alejandro Anaya Rocha (Oakes)
  • The Role of Pds1 in Cell Size Control in Budding Yeast Cells
    Quincy Joseph Okobi (Eight)

Chancellor’s Award

  • MODELLING ACCRETION STREAM AND DISK EVOLUTION IN WASP-12/b
    Ian Curtis Weaver (Merrill)
  • Removal of Oxoanion Pollutants via Silver Bipyridine Acetate
    Derek Chase Popple (Merrill)
  • The Existence of Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes that Paralyze RHESSI
    Alexander Gerd-Dara Infanger (Kresge)

Social Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • An Eco-Archaeological Study of Indigenous Clam Bed Management at Colonial Period Toms Point (CA-MRN-202), Tomales Bay, California
    Alec Jazz-Rio Apodaca (Merrill)
  • Bats in the Agricultural Matrix: The Effects of Agricultural Intensification on Bat Community Composition
    Molly Rose Carter Jacobsen (Kresge)
  • Growing up as a Second-Generation White American Hindu: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to an Ethnographic Study
    Darshani Alahan (Cowell)
  • Transitioning from Ego to Eco-Focused Cognition: Altruistic Intelligence and the Momentum of Social Justice Engagement
    Celia Willson Ringstrom (Merrill)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Can the Heartland Be Healed?: Challenges to Community Organizing in Poor White Rural America
    Madeleine Lorna Keller (Kresge)
  • Flooding and Sustainable Flood Management in the UK
    Rosemary Dekker Applen (Porter)
  • Popular Liberation in the Midst of a Peaceful War
    Joanna del Carmen Beltran Giron (Porter)
2016 Winners

Arts

Dean’s Award

  • DeCamp – Alzheimer’s Awareness Short Film
    Jared Scott Zabel (Merrill)
  • Overground
    Alexandra Susannah Willis-Paulsen (Oakes)
  • Pas de Trois: Trio A Dancing Between Performance, Film, and Art
    Quest Sky Zeidler (Porter)
  • Remembering the American Vietnam War Veteran: A Holistic Quagmire of Memory
    Britany Aganon Valdez (Nine)
  • Tehching Hsieh’s Outdoor Piece: The Invisibility of Hegemonic Poaching in the Public Sphere
    Saeli Claire Lucia Miller Eshelman (Stevenson)
  • The Death and Rebirth of Anna May Wong: Strategic Re-Narrativization and De-Reification Through Social Media
    Jasmine Lee Ehrhardt (Porter)
  • Visual Designs for Love’s Labour’s Lost: A Shakespeare to Go Performance
    Emily Graily (Porter)

Chancellor’s Award

  • How Many Syrians?
    Rachel Maryam Smith (Porter)
  • Loteria Vida
    Marisol I. Medina-Cadena (Oakes)
  • Posing Questions: Identity Construction in the Portrait Studios of Bamako, Mali
    Jessica Harumi Owens (Kresge)

Engineering

Dean’s Award

  • Bolt Motorbike Senior Design Project
    Alexis Anne Bartels (Crown)
    Zachary Spike Levenberg (Oakes)
    Bruce Dylan Gordon (Crown)
    Garrett Austin Deguchi (Cowell)
    Francisco Javier Alvarado (Oakes)
  • DEVELOPMENT OF A QUARTZ NANOPIPETTE FOR INTRACELLULAR SUPEROXIDE SENSING
    Joanna Bridgett Perez (Oakes)
  • Hyper Spectral Imaging for Precision Agriculture
    Niraj Raniga (Ten)
  • Motor-Assistive Glove
    Victor Ardulov (Merrill)
    Kyle Jeremy Cordes (Crown)
    Devin Martin Cody (Crown)
  • Roton Rotary Rocket
    Gabriel Andrew Orpia (Merrill)
    Andrew Wu (Cowell)
    Oliver Pablo Rene (Kresge)
  • SEADS (Smart Energy Analytic Disaggregation System)
    Ian Anders Lofgren (Crown)
    Nikita Maximovich Sokolnikov (Stevenson)
    Ramin Ebrahimi (Oakes)
    Colin Y Peter (Ten)
  • SlugLife
    Michael Young (Ten)
    Ahmadullah Tokhi (Eight)
    Ivan Alvarado (Eight)
    Jose Luis Guzman (Merrill)
    Raquel Julie Abrams (Cowell)
  • User requirements of games designed for people with developmental disabilities
    Taylor Lane Gotfrid (Crown)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Nanofabrication of Patterned Nanomagnet Arrays
    Soren Eric Almquist (Eight)
  • Structural Studies on Respiratory Syncytial Virus Fusion Glycoprotein
    Sara Teodros Haile (Crown)

Humanities

Dean’s Award

  • Rachel Dolezal’s Drag Race: A Critical Psychoanalytic and Cultural Analysis of Post-racial Melancholia and the Racial Passing Narrative
    Steven Isaac Hernandez (Ten)
  • El español en los EEUU: El fenómeno del ‘Bilingual Compound Verb’
    Martin Calderon (Merrill)
  • Incarcerated Words
    Ciera-Jevae Timiza Gordon (Oakes)
  • Sean and Julia O’Faolain: Generationally Conceptualizing Collective Memories of Trauma in Fiction
    Clare Elizabeth Moran (Cowell)
  • The Qualiafications (or Lack Thereof) of Epiphenomenal Qualia
    Francesca Jean Hovagimian (Porter)

Chancellor’s Award

  • African Asylum Seekers and Ethnic Nationalism in Israel
    Hana Faye Rothstein (Kresge)
  • An investigation of phonetic and phonological change and the influence of English on Modern Irish
    Eileen Rose O’Neill (Cowell)
  • Yours, Truly
    Robin Aleksandra Estrin (Porter)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • Allelopathic alkaloids of an invasive shrub and their effect on the growth of ectomycorrhizal fungi
    Jennifer Briana Thompson (Cowell)
  • ENERGY DENSITIES OF FORAGE FISH FROM THE MESOPELAGIC ZONE OF THE NORTH PACIFIC OCEAN AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR A HIGH-LEVEL MARINE PREDATOR, THE NORTHERN ELEPHANT SEAL (MIROUNGA ANGUSTIROSTRIS)
    Xochitl Seancia Clare (Kresge)
  • From dirt to diamonds: A mineralogical comparison of granular rheologies
    Marshall James Danese (Eight)
  • INVESTIGATION OF A ONCHOCERCIASIS BIOMARKER DERIVATIVE (GLUCURONIC ACID) VIA A TWO COMPONENT SYSTEM BASED ON BORONIC ACID APPENDED VIOLOGENS RECEPTORS
    Adriana Guevara Landeros (Ten)
    Angel Resendez (Ten)
  • Scaling of Dentition and Prey Size in the California Moray (Gymnothorax mordax)
    Jacob Saunders Harrison (Kresge)
  • Spectroscopic Galaxy Cluster Measurements for the Dark Energy Survey
    Benjamin Ernest Stahl (Crown)
  • X-Ray Analysis of Active Galactic Nuclei in Clusters from the Dark Energy Survey
    Erica Marie Bufanda (Eight)

Chancellor’s Award

  • CLOCKWORK: EXPLORING ACTIVATION MECHANISMS OF THE CIRCADIAN TRANSCRIPTION FACTOR CLOCK:BMAL1
    Kyle Madison Franks (Cowell)
  • Influences of floral abundance, richness, and spatial distribution on urban garden bee communities
    Montserrat Plascencia (Stevenson)

Steck Award

  • Editing of Kinesin Heavy Chain to Elucidate its roles in Neurodegenerative Diseases
    Alexandra Marie Houser (Eight)

Social Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • 32 Years After Orwellian “1984”: The Surveillance State and National Security
    Ean Lyons Brown (Stevenson)
  • An Illustration of Converging Placekeeping Strategies in the Face of the Cultural and Economic Violence of “Columbusing” in San Francisco’s Mission District
    Cecilia C. Pena-Govea (Kresge)
  • EFFECTS ON SOIL CARBON AND NITROGEN CYCLING ASSOCIATED WITH GRAZING BY DIFFERENT SPECIES IN A KANSAS TALLGRASS PRAIRIE
    Christopher James Barnard (Porter)
  • Justice Jettisoned: The Culture of ‘National Security’ in Mexico
    Alvaro Manoelle Mendizabal (Oakes)
  • Modes of Resistance: Signs, Olives, and Fire
    Melissa Suzanne Otero (Merrill)
  • Seed Saving Strategies in San Ramon, Nicaragua
    Adriana Murguia (Oakes)
  • The Naypyidaw Rationale: Cultures of Power and Constructions of Legitimacy in the Republic of Myanmar
    Nicholas David Zinter (Porter)

Chancellor’s Award

  • How Will the Kayapó be Dammed? The Impacts of Environmentalist Assumptions on a Kayapó Community in the Brazilian Amazon
    Antonio Egidio Peluso (Merrill)
  • Social Dominance Orientation’s Effects on Attitudes Towards Crime, Prisoners and Prison Reform
    Beverly Iniguez Conrique (Cowell)
  • UNTOLD DELIVERY STORIES: ZAPOTEC WOMEN’S BIRTHING EXPERIENCES IN THE CENTRAL VALLEY OF OAXACA
    Mireya Mateo (Oakes)
2015 Winners

Arts

Dean’s Award

  • Construction of Critique
    Naja Le Fevre Grundtmann (Nine)
  • De-historicized
    Melanya Hamasyan (Porter)
  • Empathy: A Granddaughter’s Story
    Regina Alyana Decastro Ortanez (Kresge)
  • Phenomenological Formations and an Aesthetics of Diaspora: the Work of Yinka Shonibare
    Haley Katherine Bott (Kresge)
  • Social Structure Through Architecture Research Project
    Kristen Erina McCormick (Nine)
  • Still Life Studies on Paper and Photo
    Karina Jimenez Hernandez (Porter)
  • The Play About The Baby
    Lily Ann Sorenson (Porter)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Alimento
    Karina A Monroy (Porter)
  • Shifting American Ideologies from the 1930s through 1950s: John Garfield’s Hollywood Persona As a Case Study
    Krystal Catalina Cardenas Ledesma (Merrill)

Steck Award

  • Bodies of Trauma
    Dominic Romano (Porter)

Engineering

Dean’s Award

  • 96-Well Plate Optical Sensor Project
    Stephanie Erin Owyang (Crown)
    Cory Robert Ibanez (Crown)
    Justin Thomas Blaich (Crown)
  • Eye Tracking Autism for Mobile
    John-Michael Burke (Merrill)
    Michael William Madsen (Crown)
    Nathaniel James Cancio (Crown)
  • Hyperspectral Imaging UAV
    Edgar Guadalupe Valdez (Oakes)
    Eric Paredes (Merrill)
    Matthew Anthony Silva (Kresge)
  • MECH v2
    Robert Michael Hoffman (Crown)
    Donald Joseph Fuller (Stevenson)
    Patrick David Ayers (Crown)
    Andre Lepin Nguyen Van Qui (Cowell)
  • Reprogramming Orangutan Fibroblasts to Integration-free Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells
    Alex Preston Richard Phillips (Eight)
    Andrea Marina Reyes-Ortiz (Eight)
    Vincent F. Meng (Nine)
  • SiO2 nano-rod Distributed Bragg Reflector
    Gregory Ryan Jorgensen (Stevenson)
  • Smart Energy Analytic Disaggregation System (SEADS)
    Henry Clemens Crute (Crown)
    Bryan Abraham Smith (Cowell)
    Pavlo Milo Manovi (Eight)
    Andrew Jacob Ringer (Crown)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Enabling genotype associations of large insertions and deletions by canonicalizing variants across collections of bacterial strains
    Alex Navarro Salazar (Crown)
  • High-throughput Cell-capture Device for Semi-automated Single-cell Nanobiopsy and Nanomanipulation
    Rolando Cruz Perez (Kresge)
  • Modular Smart Solid Wingsail
    Tyler Eliot Peterson (Crown)
    John Summons McCullough (Crown)
    Eric Cao (Nine)

Humanities

Dean’s Award

  • A Call for Older, Holier States: Blood as Ink and the Count’s Electric Telegraphy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
    Michael Joseph Moreno (Crown)
  • Against the Monster: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Radical Detroit and the African American Struggle for Democracy in the Workplace
    Nicholas Claymore Watter (Stevenson)
  • Reluctant Solidarity: The Positioning of Free Blacks During the Baptist War
    Marley Gwen Lix-Jones (Kresge)
  • The “Gente-ficatio” of Boyle Heights
    Magally Alejandra Miranda Alcazar (Kresge)
  • The Sadeian Fairy Tale Pornography: An Exploration Into A New Feminist Language
    Sophia Gabrielle Blaauw Apt (Kresge)
  • Tu comprends tu? – Questions of Quebecois
    Chantale Yunt (Merrill)
  • ייִדישע פֿאָלקסמעדיצין פֿון דעם בעל שם טובֿ צו אַנ-סקי און אַריבער/Jewish Folk Medicine from the Baal Shem Tov to An-sky and Beyond
    Noah Barrera (Stevenson)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Contemplations of the Whale
    Paige Hamilton Welsh (Kresge)
  • Rhyme in the Chamorro language poetry of Joaquin Flores Borja (And what it tells us about poetry and language)
    Jake Wayne Vincent (Stevenson)
  • Tracing Contributions: Salvadoran Women in the Diaspora and the 2014 Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) Presidential Campaign
    Samantha Pineda (Ten)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • Destabilization of the PAS domain core in the Earlydoors mutation of mouse Period2 accelerates the circadian clock
    Colby Renee Sandate (Kresge)
  • Impairment of microtubule motors and their interactions with affiliated proteins leads to disrupted axonal transport in Drosophila motor neurons
    Michael Jon Malone (Oakes)
  • Investigating the Molecular Mechanism of CHRONO: A Novel Repressor of the Circadian Clock
    Nicolette Fatima Goularte (Eight)
  • Kinesin Light Chain Involved in Kinesin-1 Driven Cytoplasmic Streaming in Drosophila Oocytes
    Steven Paniagua (Crown)
  • Stochasticity in Nebular Emission Lines
    Theodore Frederick Rendahl (Porter)
  • The effects of different bacterial food on germline development
    Kristen Renee Brosamer (Cowell)
  • Vector Boson Scattering at the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider
    Niklas Kelly Garner (Crown)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Beyond cyclosporine A: conformation-dependent passive membrane permeabilities of cyclic peptide natural products
    Christopher Liam Ahlbach (Ten)
  • Lipoxin biosynthesis by human lipoxygenases
    Shannon Renee Barbour (Kresge)
  • Seeing and Hearing Massive Black Holes Feeding on White Dwarfs
    Jacqueline Goldstein (Crown)

Social Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • Changes in species richness, abundance and community composition of arboreal twig-nesting ants along an elevational gradient
    Penelope Noel Gillette (Kresge)
  • Forced Youth Gay to Straight Conversion Therapy: A Form of Child Abuse
    Markie Lauren Flores (Kresge)
  • Images in Humanitarianism: The UNHCR and Appeals Imagery
    Mallika Ponnappa Palecanda (Nine)
  • Political Participation of Students in Istanbul: Revitalized Turkish Youth as Influential Political Actors
    Zoe Rose Mackay (Stevenson)
  • Resistance of Mayan Women Against Obstetric Violence
    Marina Gonzalez Flores (Ten)
  • Seductive Images in Lecture: Does Extending the Time Between Testing and Learning Still Produce The Seductive Details Effect?
    August Twopearls Masonheimer (Ten)
  • The Social, Economic and Political Impacts of Direct Trade Coffee Production in Santa Barbara, Honduras
    Katherine Suzanne Slocum (Kresge)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Debugging the Industry: An Ethnography of Exclusion in the Technology Workplace
    Natasha Colette Buck (Porter)
  • The Benefits of Saving on New Learning
    Sean Michael Stone (Ten)
  • WATER RELATIONS AND PHOTOSYNTHESIS FOR ARTEMISIA TRIDENTATA ACROSS A GREAT BASIN DESERT-SIERRA NEVADA ELEVATION GRADIENT IN THE HISTORIC DROUGHT YEAR OF 2014
    Charlotte Chiara Reed (Eight)
2014 Winners

Arts

Dean’s Award

  • Die Antwoord: An Antagonistic Negotiation of Post-Apartheid Afrikaner Identity
    Atara Melody Jaffe (Stevenson)
  • Art Department Promotional Film
    Shawheen Keyani (Kresge)
  • Bachelor of Music Recital in Percussion
    Aiden Michael McKee (Porter)
  • Imaging Identity: Amateur Photography from Kodak to the Camera Phone
    Lauren Paulina Tomicich (Porter)
  • In Absence of a Portrait: The Mrs True Series
    Kiera Lauren Stasny (Porter)
  • Machinal: Costume Design
    Karina Sookwongse Chavarin (Kresge)
  • Midnight Warrior
    Alex Santana (Porter)
  • Random With A Purpose XXII
    Amelia Rae Nommensen (Porter)
    JJ Hersh (Merrill)
    Amanda Linn Newsum (Crown)
  • Santa Cruz Silent Cinema
    Seth Martin Crumrine (Merrill)
  • Werewolf
    Sam Griffin Clevenger (Porter)

Engineering

Dean’s Award

  • ABEL trap circuit analysis and upgrades
    Felipe Neira Barreto (Merrill)
  • Analysis of Solar Array in a Solar Window Wall
    Michael Joseph Flores (Crown)
  • ARS Ground Station Rev. 2
    Kayla Castillo Hidalgo (Oakes)
    William Ye (Cowell)
    Julie Thao Do (Crown)
  • Crystal Structure of the Human Astrovirus Capsid Core
    Payam Angha Yousefi (Porter)
  • Dental Robotics: A Method to Automatize Dental Veneer Preparation.
    Ikuru L Kanuma (Kresge)
  • Evaluating Dynamic Storytelling in Fables
    Carolynn Renee Jimenez (Porter)
  • Illuminating the Mitochondria and the Mitochondrial Genome’s role in Neurodegeneration with Nanopipettes
    Akshar Venkatramanan Lohith (Crown)
  • Motorized EMG-Controlled Hand, M.E.C.H
    Taylor Eric Furtado (Crown)
    Ivan Romero (Ten)
    Kyle D. Lawrence (Merrill)
    Alexander Paul Lynchosky (Kresge)
    Michael Gee Ho Sit (Oakes)
  • P-OSRA
    Thomas Joseph Goddard (Ten)
    Konstantin Litovskiy (Merrill)
    Nathan Melaai Nichols-Roy (Eight)
    Matthew Brian Reed (Crown)
    Igor Shvartser (Kresge)
    Nicholas Hayden Smith (Eight)
    David Steven Zeppa (Porter)

Steck Award

  • Computational Design of ASiP as Drug to Treat Melanoma
    Beau Norgeot (Porter)

Humanities

Dean’s Award

  • Back to Nature: Human Subjectivity and the Possibility of Empirical Knowledge through Education
    Camille Avril Charette (Cowell)
  • Epistemology as Therapy: John McDowell on Truth and “the Space of Reasons”
    Jan Willem Jorritsma (Eight)
  • Marguerite Porete in the Context of Female Religiosity and the Heresy of the Free Spirit
    Jan Willem Jorritsma (Eight)
  • Maria – a Telenovela for the Stage (Medea)
    Stephen Eugene Richter (Porter)
  • On the Causative Construction
    Rachelle Sierra Boyson (Stevenson)
    Nicholas William Eggert (Cowell)
    Hannah Elizabeth Dorothy Elston (Porter)
    Brittny H Fadelli (Nine)
    Sean Isamu Johnson (Ten)
    Cecilia Rose Lopez (Kresge)
    Chelsea Ann Miller (Porter)
    Vincent James Del Prado (Kresge)
    Kristen Anne Sheets (Merrill)
    Anthony Randall Zavala (Stevenson)
  • OUR STRUGGLE: WHY THE STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE EXPELLED ITS WHITE MEMBERS
    Trevor Michael Stober (Kresge)
  • Perpetuation, Subjugation or Colonial Prosperity: The Laws of Slavery and Elite White Power within Colonial Virginia, New Netherlands, and New York
    Samantha Marie House (Ten)
  • Splendid Failures in Blake and The Marrow of Tradition
    Emily B Wolper (Stevenson)
  • The Semantics of Nothing If Not Constructions
    Michael Anthony Titone (Kresge)
  • “AN AESTHETICS—OR ETHICS—OF INCOMPLETION”: J.M. COETZEE’S NOVELS AS WORKS OF ETHICAL MOURNING
    Emma Juliette Train (Porter)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • An introduction to the symplectic embedding capacity of 4-dimensional ellipsoids into polydiscs
    Priera Hortenzia Panescu (Kresge)
  • Application of Inorganic Materials to Desulfurize Jet Fuel
    Laura Yon-Why Chong (Crown)
  • Effects of Ehrharta erecta on the redwood understory and implications for restoration
    Anna Lane Godinho (Eight)
  • Energy Minimization of Knotted Vortex Tubes
    Emily Yvonne Healy (Cowell)
  • Identification of Yersinia genes that influence activation of host NFκB triggered by the Type III Secretion System
    Natalia Guadalupe Herrera (Kresge)
  • Modeling the Complex Dynamics of Financial Markets using a Physical System with Stochastic Properties
    Indra John Heckenbach (Kresge)
  • Polymer and Dye Characterization for Optimization of Luminescent Solar Concentrators
    Kaitlin L Hellier (Porter)
    Brett Akihiko Petersen (Cowell)
  • Structural and Functional Studies of the Human Astrovirus Capsid Protein
    Elizabeth Ariadne Lagesse (Crown)
  • Synthesis and Reactivity of Chloromagnesium Dialkylaminoborohydride
    Christopher Lindsay Anderson (Porter)
    Alexander Thomas Lill (Ten)
    Alexander Yueharn Joh (Oakes)
    Zefan Quinn Hurley (Cowell)
  • The Effects of El Niño Conditions on Marine Mammal Strandings in Central California
    Kathryn Lee Pelon (Crown)

Social Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • A WOMENS WORK IS NEVER DONE: GENDERED DIVISIONS OF LABOR, PATRIARCHY, AND EMPOWERMENT IN BAHÍA DE CARAQUEZ, ECUADOR
    Nicholas Charles Bendinelli (Stevenson)
  • Bringing Learning to Life: Utilizing Gardens as Tools for Experiential Education and Assessing the 2014 California School Garden Survey
    Sarah Diane Hendrix (Stevenson)
  • Politics of Invisibility: The Violence of Mass Incarceration for the Mentally Ill
    Rosalie Bronwen Evans (Merrill)
  • PRIVILEGED PERSPECTIVES OR DIVERSE DISCOURSE? DISPARITIES IN STUDENT PERCEPTIONS OF AND PARTICIPATION IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AT UCSC
    Cheslea Michelle Pack (Eight)
  • Struggling for the Commons: An Ethnography of Ruins, Gentrification, and Social Justice in Detroit, Michigan
    Andrew Ryan Szeto (Kresge)
  • The Bittersweet Truth of Strawberries Among Farmworkers in Watsonville
    Abel Rivas (Merrill)
  • The Effect of Poverty on Expectations and Aspirations of Youth in Ejido Ruben Jaramillo, Mexico
    Kimberly Susan Pistilli (Crown)
  • The Historic and Contemporary Use of Sterilization: A Method of State Control and Genocide
    Sarah Megan Gray (Ten)
  • Witnessing Femininity: Evangelical Women and Gender Construction
    Rebecca Irene Maness (Porter)
  • “De-Facing” Power to Reduce Partner Violence and Enhance Psychological Well-being: Maasai Women and Land Ownership
    Marina Dominguez Castro (Porter)
2013 Winners

Arts

Dean’s Award

  • B.M. Senior Recital
    Elliott Viet Quoc Nguyen (Kresge)
    Jennifer Ying Lependorf (Porter)
  • Big, Black, and Bold: A Historical Textual Analysis of Black Women on Television Sitcoms
    Ashley Simone Young (Ten)
  • By Resort to Parables: Space, Time, and Awakened Minds in The Lotus Sutra.
    Michael Patrick Yarnell (Porter)
  • Rethinking Fragonard: Jean-Jacques Rosseau and the Contemporary Rococo
    Lois Ruby Rosson (Merrill)
  • Sean Hayward – Senior Recital
    Sean Pryce Hayward (Kresge)
  • The Dichotomy of Visual Beauty: Portraiture of the Ideal and Anti-Ideal
    Tiffany Ann Seagrave (Porter)

Engineering

Dean’s Award

  • A Novel Method to Mobilize Stem Cells for Transplantation in Cancer Therapies
    Herman Tsang (Eight)
  • Assessing Functionality of GFP+ Hematopoietic Stem Cells in Neonate Bone Marrow
    Chethan Jujjavarapu (Crown)
  • Co-functionality of AlkB and BER DNA Repair Genes in Response to Chemotherapeutic Agents
    Ramsey N Aweti (Nine)
  • Error Rates for Nanopore Discrimination Among Cytosine Markers Along Individual DNA Strands
    Jacob Matthew Schreiber (Crown)
  • Evaluation of the Effect of Age on the Function of Fibroblasts through a Wound-healing Assay
    Margaret Kathleen Rose Donovan (Nine)
  • LASSIE (Live-in ASSistant for Independence and Eldercare)
    Peter Samuel Cottrell (Merrill)
  • MOCVD Growth of Indium Phosphide Nanowire Networks for Thermoelectrics
    Amanda Nicole Flores (Crown)
    Juan Jose Diaz Leon (Ten)
  • Nanomaterials for energy
    Juan Jose Diaz Leon (Ten)
  • Saccharid Sensitive Polyelectrolyte for Charge-based Sensing with a Solid State Nanopore
    Ace Gita Galermo (Crown)
    Alexander Lee Wollenberg (Crown)
  • Unfoldase-mediated protein translocation through an α-hemolysin nanopore
    Douglas Benjamin Marks (Kresge)
    Jeffrey Matthew Nivala (Porter)

Humanities

Dean’s Award

  • A Tale of Two Dummies
    Matilda Catherine Morrison (Merrill)
  • Gothic and Dickens: An Examination of Ghosts, Memory, and Self/Other Relations
    Melissa Ann Ottele (Cowell)
  • Italian Clitics
    Emma Marie Peoples (Stevenson)
  • Japanese Numerals and Numeral Quantifiers
    Sylvia Opal Primrose (Merrill)
  • Surviving on the Interface
    Kristoffer Walter Hellen (Cowell)
  • The “Fortuyns” of Europe
    Cory Robert Schiff (Nine)
  • Vegetable Gold: Gardens as Transition Points in Marvell and Milton
    Lauren Elizabeth Young (Porter)
  • Where Light Looks: Edward Hopper and Ekphrasis
    Conner Killian Lowe (Cowell)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • A SPICE Analysis of ILC Long-Ladder Noise
    Khilesh Pradip Mistry (Crown)
  • An investigation into small RNAs’ role in the genomic gymnastics that take place during macronuclear
    Cameron Walker Ferguson (Stevenson)
  • BioCAM: Biological and Chemical Annotation by Mode-of-Action
    Emerson Walker Glassey (Merrill)
  • Critical Conditions For The Detonation of Helium Matter: An Investigation Into The Destruction Of Wh
    Cole James Holcomb (Nine)
  • In Situ Generation of Dichloroindium Hydride via Reduction of Indium (III) Chloride
    Panathda Victoria Bayrasy (Nine)
  • REGULATION OF LIFESPAN BY THE MES-2/3/6 COMPLEX AND H3K27ME3 DEPLETION DURING AGING IN C. ELEGANS
    Geoffrey Thomas Slaughter (Oakes)
  • Searches of RHESSI Data for Weak Signals Associated with Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes
    Paul Robert Buzbee (Eight)
    Justine Whitney Matten (Crown)
  • Studies with Helicobacter pylori: Filling in the mystery sequence of the cagY gene and determining w
    Sarina Yvonne Porcella (Merrill)
  • THE EFFECTS OF AUTOPHAGIC PROTEINS ON FOCAL ACCUMULATIONS OF KINESIN MUTANTS IN DROSOPHILA AXONS
    Michelle Fay Sloan (Cowell)

Social Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • For The Record: The Struggle Over Foreclosures and Loan Modifications in the Immigrant Community of
    Aleshia Barajas (Merrill)
  • Indigeneity in the Neoliberal Era: Anti-Mining Protests in Puno, Peru
    Emma Katherine McDonell (Eight)
  • Indigenous Youth Perspectives, Oil Development and Human Environmental Rights in Ecuadorian Amazonia
    Nestor Silva (Merrill)
  • Neoliberalism, International Law, and the Failures of Privatized Water Systems to Increase Access to
    Allison Jill Bach (Kresge)
  • New Media & Communication Paradigms: Intersections of Social and Technological Progress
    Daniel Alexander Kagan (Stevenson)
  • Sanitation Services and Perceptions of Possibilities: A Case Study of Old Fadama in Accra, Ghana
    Carson Brian Watts (Oakes)
  • Testing the Predictive Validity of the Sexual Double Standards Scale in Undergraduate Women
    Alexa Rae Paynter (Cowell)
  • What is Water Equity?
    Matthew Alan Goff (Kresge)
2012 Winners

Arts

Dean’s Award

  • A Little Perspective
    Julia Marjorie Reardin (Porter), Nicholas Anthony Denova (Porter), Wilsa Nadinne Querubin Derro (Cowell), Dylan Alexander Sachse (Porter), Laura Maili Lindauer (Kresge)
  • Championship Boxing game/bookset
    Louise Leong (Porter)
  • Huichol Foundation 501c3 – Sustaining Indigenous Culture Through Art
    Nicolas Benjamin Secunda (Eight)
  • Stephanie Hoffman Senior Recital in Classical Voice
    Stephanie Karen Hoffman (Kresge), Zachary Lev Ragent (Cowell)
  • The Madrid Skylitzes: Norman Interpretation in a Byzantine Chronicle
    Michele Lee Jennings (Ten)
  • Thinning Veil
    Erik Nelson Ladue (Porter), Marissa Kahn Putnick (Kresge), Jennifer Ellen Schuler (Porter), Ashley Elizabeth Bowen (Kresge), Gregory Wren Towle (Porter)

Dean’s and Chancellor Award

  • Landscape as Cultural and Political Process in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Art
    Margaret Florence Wander (Porter)
  • Senior Recital in Violin Performance
    Zachary Lev Ragent (Cowell), William Joseph Long (Nine)

Engineering

Dean’s Award

  • A Declarative Approach for Machine Learning at Scale
    Joshua Daniel Rosen (Crown)
  • Dual Motor Differential
    Gregory Alan Dreisen (Ten)
    Peter Kingman Turner (Ten)
    Steven Paul Lewis (Porter)
  • FMVilla
    Gabriel Sanchez (Oakes)
    Leland Noboru Takamine (Stevenson)
    Tiffany G Yee (Ten)
    Jian Wang (Crown)
  • Fully Automated RNA-Seq Sample Preparation
    Wilson Liang Liu (Eight)
  • Metal Detection with Functionalized Nanopores
    Xiang Li (Crown)
  • Programmable LED Signs for Campus Buses
    Benjamin Jacob Cizdziel (Crown)
  • PsySlug
    Vadim Maximov (Crown)
    Nicholas F Lutz (Cowell)
    Maria Arbuzova (Stevenson)
    Maria Hristova Mishkova (Ten)
    Brian Sean Nguyen (Ten)
  • sixtypercentoff.com
    Sarah Elizabeth Ross (Crown)
  • Thermal Challenges on Solar Concentrated Thermoelectric CHP Systems and Thermal Battery Systems
    Vernon Keith Wong (Crown)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Single-cell Manipulation Using Nanopipettes
    Michelle Marie Maalouf (Oakes)

Humanities

Dean’s Award

  • Ambrosia: Slightly Tilted
    Cheyenne Christine Street Houck (Porter)
  • Iris
    Julianne Dolores Ruetz (Cowell)
  • Libertine Culture in Pre-Revolutionary France: ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ in Historical Perspective
    Mary Elizabeth Wolff (Kresge)
  • Peeling the Onion: Feminism, the Media, and Unchanged Fairy Tale Discourses Beneath the Surface of S
    Victoria Bonnie Zdeb (Kresge)
  • Re-collecting the Past: Memory and Literature as Historical Intervention
    Ronald Allen Rose (Eight)
  • Shedding Light on a Dark Age: Britain in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries
    Ian Powell Hickey (Stevenson)
  • The Disenfranchised Culture of the Lower Literati: Wealth, Status, and Transcendence of Elite Cultur
    Dylan Andrew McCarty (Merrill)

Chancellor’s Award

  • “Naked” Security: Re-Imagining Full-Body Scanners
    Angelo Jack Haidaris (Kresge)
  • THE DUTY OF INTELLECTUALISM: Reconciling Chomskyan Activism and Foucauldian Excavation
    Lisa Johanna Clark (Kresge)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • A Glimpse of the Markoff Spectrum
    Travis William Morrison (Nine)
  • Alternative Splicing Coupled To Nonsense-Mediated Decay in Regulation of Splicing Factor Expression
    Diana Kathleen Summers (Crown)
  • Attractiveness of California Native Perennial Plants to Natural Enemy and Pest Insects
    Maya Sertic (Porter)
  • Calibration and Deployment of an Electromagnetic Flowmeter for Cross-Hole Hydrogeologic Experiments
    Amalia Evangeline Slovacek (Nine)
  • Examining Long Ladder Limits for ILC Silicon Strip Detectors
    Taylor Christopher Cunnington (Cowell)
  • Inhibition of the Primary Circadian Transcription Factor by PASD1, a Cancer Testis Antigen
    Patrick Jack Sammons (Eight)
  • Properties of antibiotic resistance in H. pylori and enzymatic studies of P. aeruginosa lipoxygenase
    Jason Vu Minh Hien Nguyen (Merrill)
  • Stability Analysis for a Borehole to be Drilled into the Tohoku Fault Zone, Japan
    Stephanie Michelle Nale (Eight)
  • Stability Analysis of the Companions of Upsilon Andromedae
    Irina Goriatcheva (Stevenson)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Creation of Synthetic Radial Velocities to Follow Up TESS Observations
    Barbara Giusti (Oakes)

Social Sciences

Dean’s Award

  • Constructing a ~100 Year Record of 15N in the California Bay Area Utilizing Foliar Tissue of Four Sp
    Johnathan Robert Becker (Porter)
  • Contesting Hegemonic Understandings of Security: The Need for the Prioritization of Human Security
    Tessa Adriana Mizokami (Stevenson)
  • Drinking the Kool-Aid: How Race, Gender, and the NPIC Create a Recipe for Low Accountability
    Rio Edleson Scharf (Eight)
  • Legacies of Development in Intibucá, Honduras: An Analysis of State and Non-State Intervention
    Savanna Teale Susnow (Nine)
  • Patient Information Privacy and Security in Ghana: Current Policy and Suggestions for the Future
    Lucas Burton Healy (Oakes)
  • Sustainable Development in Low-Income Housing: A New Technology
    Aldinette Marceline Lockett (Eight)
  • The effect of Soil and Canopy Heterogeneity on Seedling Recruitment in Restored Tropical Pasture
    Victoria Marie Stout (Stevenson)
  • The Roles of Belonging, Academic Self-Efficacy, and Family in First Generation of College students G
    Jose Luis Ochoa (Ten)
    Michael J Levine (Stevenson)

Chancellor’s Award

  • Patterns of Intimacy and Distancing in Young Women’s (and Men’s) Romantic Relationship Stories
    Jerika Christine Norona (Oakes)

Steck Family Awards

2025 Winner
Engineering

Naomi Rehman (College Nine)
Project: Incorrect-Path Prediction for Power Throttling Speculative Execution
Mentor: Heiner Litz

2024 Winners
Science

Eva Zlimen (Carson College)
Project: Extensive Ice Pollution of Uranus and Neptune’s Atmospheres by Upsweep of Material During the Nice Model Migration. Mentor: Ruth Murray-Clay

Social Sciences

Ameyalli De La Rosa (Merrill College)
Project: ¡El es Dios!: Mexican Folk Catholicism and its Rebellious Ecologies.
Mentor: Mayanthi Fernando

2023 Winners
Arts

lavender higley (Kresge College)
Project: Random With A Purpose XXXI: The Community Movement
Mentor: Ted Warburton

Science

Student: Joseph M Cruz (Kresge)
Project: 
Investigating the COBRA NG2 Hemagglutinin for Universal Flu For Vaccine Development
Mentor: 
Rebecca DuBois and John Dzimianski

2022 Winner
Science
2021 Winner
Science

Olivia Ross (Kresge College)
Project: Searching for Primordial Black Holes
Mentor: Stefano Profumo

Archives
2020 Winners

Arts

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • Cat’s Cradle
    Georgio Klironomos (Crown)
    Erica Li (Ten)
    Herman Wei-Jye Wu (Merrill)
  • Exploring Personal Boundaries with Adults who have Developmental Disabilities through Serious Games and Brainwaves
    Samantha Conde (Merrill)
  • Inspiration Point / Filling the Imaginary Void: Addressing “Documentary Distance” in the Representation of Historical Violence (FILM AND PAPER)
    Keanu Ramos (Porter)
Dean’s Award
  • Gateway into The Abyss: Unlocking the Transcending Realms and Enlightened Truth Through Exploration of Occult Iconography in Hilma Af Klint’s The Swan No.24
    cnconti (Cowell)
  • A Portrait of G.H. Wells
    Eli Crespin (Kresge)
    Katelin Kai-Lin Ong (Stevenson), Laura Gonzalez (Cowell), Yvonne Gonzalez (Crown)
  • Cendrillon – Winter 2020
    David Kronenberg (Porter)
  • Nymph Mania: J. W. Waterhouse’s Femme Fatales and Victorian Anxieties About Shifting Gender Dynamics
    Chloe Calhoun (Crown)
  • Psychopathic Dismemberment and Psychic Slaughter: Spectatorship, Affect, and Gender in the Slasher Cycle
    Snow Martin (Porter)
  • The Norris Center Archives
    Saul Villegas (Porter)
  • The Pirates of Penzance Spring Opera 2019
    Kylie Paige Smith (Ten)

Engineering

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • De novo creation of spliceosomal introns by different transposition mechanisms across diverse eukaryotes
    Landen Gozashti (Eight)
  • Flow-based Detection of Rip Currents
    Issei Mori (Nine)
  • Posture Monitoring and Corrective Seat Cover
    Ali Fallahi (Porter), Christopher Cheney (Ten), Zachary Haughton (Cowell)
Dean’s Award
  • Ancestry HMM with Gene Conversion
    Trevor Ridgley (Crown)
  • Characterization of the Differentiation Patterns of Histone H3 K27M Neural Stem Cells
    Liam Tran (Nine)
  • Identifying and validating Wolbachia-to-arthropod HGT events
    Serafina Nieves (Eight)
  • Introner Elements drive ongoing intron gain in Oikopleura dioica
    Preet Kaur (Eight), Landen Gozashti (Eight)
  • Investigating Regulation of Nonsense-Mediated Decay During the Inflammatory Response
    Matthew Cattle (Cowell)
  • Protecting Newcastle Disease Vaccine with Intrinsically Disordered Proteins
    James Hahn (Cowell), Andrew Zarzar (Nine), Aren Pageler (Crown), Ikenna Anigbogu (Eight), Jiasui Xu (Nine), Jonah Pierce (Merrill), Liana Shuang Beld (Eight), Preet Kaur (Eight), Marcella Mirabelli (Stevenson), Marcus-Charles Strauss (Cowell), Martina Pedersen (Porter), Melody Azimi (Ten), Rita Ousterhout (Stevenson), Shayan Vahdani (Porter), Varuna Amita Dharasker (Ten), Kaitlyn Myers (Merrill)
  • Sorting an Array Using the Topological Sort of Corresponding Comparison Graph
    Balaram Das Behera (Crown)

Humanities

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • An Intellectual History of Public Discourse in the Post-Civil War Era: Infanticide and Emerging Reproductive Regulations
    Angela L Cortes (Stevenson)
  • One Does Not Simply Define Memes: A Prototypical Theory to Understanding Internet Memes
    Samrawit Tariku Ayele (Nine)
  • Pure Potential
    Irma Yuliana Barbosa (Porter)
Dean’s Award
  • A Pragmatic Account of Singular They
    Clara Agnes Mcmahan (Kresge)
  • A Vice Contrary to Nation: The Emerging Heteronormative Nationalism of the French Revolution
    Bailey Jonathan Troth (Crown)
  • Aristotle’s Politics and The Charge of Egoism
    Cynthia Lissete Gonzalez (Oakes)
  • Goodness without God is Good Enough
    Landon Austin Mitchell (Porter)
  • Properties of Match and Align in Kinyambo
    Max Mason Tarlov (Kresge)
  • The Far Eastern Republic and Historical Memory
    Charles Raymond Wagoner (Kresge)
  • The Grey Area: Rethinking the Problem of the Color Line in Vietnam War-era Korea and Japan
    Farrah Safari (Kresge)

Physical and Biological Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • CONSTRAINING THE RELATION BETWEEN CLUSTER VELOCITY DISPERSION AND RICHNESS USING THE REDMAPPER YEAR 3 CATALOG
    Vernon Robert Wetzell (Stevenson)
  • Structural Studies of a New Class of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor for Cancer Immunotherapy
    Nina Miranda Harpell (Eight)
Dean’s Award
  • A Chandra X-Ray Follow-Up To The Dark Energy Survey Year 3 redMaPPer Catalog
    Lena Sofia Eiger (Nine)
  • An Analysis of Germanium Quantum Dots in conjunction with MAPbI3 Host Perovskites for Hybrid Photovoltaic Materials
    Phoenix Nalu Hakumele Gallagher (Stevenson)
    Shayan Hassanzadeh Zargar (Cowell)
  • Constraints on the Final Fermions of an Exotic Higgs Decay
    Violet Piper (Crown)
  • Manganese Oxide Deposition on Defective Graphene Oxide Nanosheets for Enhanced Antibacterial Activity Under Monochromated Light
    Jasmine Chiayu Liu (Crown)
  • Optimizing Molecular Inversion Probe Assays to Characterize Human-Specific Neurodevelopmental Genes
    Taylor Dolores Real (Porter)
  • The Reducing Capabilities of Diisobutylaluminum Borodhydride
    Madison E Landi (Eight)
  • ANION-DRIVEN CONFORMATIONAL CHANGES IN CK1δ REGULATE CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS
    Alfred Manning Freeberg (Eight)

Social Sciences

Dean’s and Chancellor’s Award
  • A California Case Study on Procedures to Reassemble and Reevaluate Archaeological Artifact Processing
    Allysha Ann Leonard (Eight)
  • Adding New Lenses: Making Health Equity Work in Immigrant Communities Marked By Various Forms of Violence
    Cinthia Cristal Magana Moreno (Porter)
  • Incarceration and Healthcare in the Santa Cruz County
    Priyanka Praveen Kulkarni (Oakes)
Dean’s Award
  • “Agents of Change”: Progressive Democratic ‘Diffusion’ Across U.S. House and State Legislative Elections in 2018
    Margarita Vargas (Porter)
  • Analyzing the Effects of Federal Aid on Partisan Representation in the American States
    Parker James Strohmeyer (Oakes)
  • Comparing Sexual Themes in Rap Music by Female and Male Music Artists: A Qualitative Study
    Jessica Lorraine Walsh (Stevenson)
  • Differential Vulnerability to Climate Related Disasters Among Communities Along the Santa Cruz Coastal Landscape
    John Calvin Mcclure (Crown)
  • Harm, Responsibility, and Ambiguity in Judgements about Sexual Behaviors
    Anjuli Megan Corzine (Cowell)
  • Oakland, California’s Points of Nutritional Hope
    Louis William Garcia (Stevenson)
2019 Winner
Science

Tin Long Sunny Wong (Crown College)
Project: Evolution of Helium Star – White Dwarf Binaries Leading up to Thermonuclear Supernovae
Mentor: Enrico Jorge Ramirez-Ruiz

2018 Winners
Engineering

Joshua Shueng Gu (College Ten)
Project: Exploring Transposable Elements Regulated by ZNF649
Mentor: David Haussler

2017 Winners
Engineering

Edmundo Ismael Perez (College Ten)
Project: Structural Studies to Understand Evasion of an Astrovirus serotype-2 subtype to a Potent Neutralizing Antibody
Mentor: Rebecca DuBois

2016 Winners
Science

Alexandra Marie Houser (College Eight)
Project: Editing of Kinesin Heavy Chain to Elucidate its roles in Neurodegenerative Diseases
Mentor: William M. Saxton

2015 Winners
Arts

Dominic Romano (Porter College)
Project: Bodies of Trauma

2014 Winners
Enginering

Beau Norgeot (Porter College)
Project: Computational Design of ASiP as Drug to Treat Melanoma

Last modified: Aug 08, 2025