Graduate Symposium
2018 Winners
The Division of Graduate Studies and academic divisions congratulate the 2018 winners of the Graduate Research Symposium!
Staff also thank Quentin Williams, vice chancellor for research in the Office of Research, for officially opening the symposium; Anna Sher, assistant director for assessment, Institutional Research, Assessment, and Policy Studies, for updating the judging rubric, making it available online to our judges, and shepherding the judges and judging process; and our judges, representing the UCSC Foundation trustees, administrators, faculty, staff, post-doctoral scholars, and alumni (see below).
Bringing the symposium back to Alumni Weekend brought many alumni, both undergraduate and graduate, to the event, and most remained for the festive award reception, where Vice Provost and Dean Tyrus Miller announced the winners and which featured live music by Nelsen Hutchison, current graduate student, and Alex Ullman, graduate student alumnus.
Best Presentation of the Symposium, $500
Michael Lavell
Engineering, Statistics and Applied Mathematics
The Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability with Unknown Magnetic Field Topology
Runner-Up Best Presentation, $250
Anna Lowe, Physical and Biological Sciences, Ocean Sciences
Do they stay or do they go? The journey of kelp rockfish larvae off the central California coast
Arts Division Dean’s Award, $100 Bay Tree Bookstore gift certificate
Mitchell Winter, Visual Studies
Optics of American Empire: James Ricalton and Stereoscopic Ethnography in Early Twentieth Century India, 1888–1907
Baskin School of Engineering Dean’s Award, $100 Bay Tree Bookstore gift certificate
John Selberg, Electrical Engineering
A Non-Enzymatic Glucose Sensor Actuated by Electronic pH Modulation
Humanities Division Dean’s Award, $100 Bay Tree Bookstore gift certificate
Ka-eul Yoo, Literature
Hansen’s Disease Patient’s Body as an Arena of the Cold War: The Case of Korean Poet Han Ha-Wun
Physical and Biological Sciences Division Dean’s Award, $100 Bay Tree Bookstore gift certificate
David Coulter, Astronomy and Astrophysics
Discovery of the First Electromagnetic Counterpart to a Gravitational Wave Source
Social Sciences Division Dean’s Award, $100 Bay Tree Bookstore gift certificate
Tiffany Lockett, Psychology
School and neighborhood factors influencing low-income, male adolescents’ criminalization outcomes
2018 Symposium Judges
Brandon Allgood, Ph.D. physics ’05, UCSC Foundation trustee, CTO and cofounder of Numerate, Inc.
Kevin Bell, research fellow, Rachel Carson College
Natalie Benamou, B.A. philosophy ’14, founder and CEO of Art2EDU
Gwynn Benner, assistant vice provost of Student Success
Tim Bensch, director of development, Physical and Biological Sciences
Christy Caldwell, science librarian
Stephanie Casher, department manager, Literature Department
Alan Christy, provost, Cowell College, and associate professor of history
Theodore Codding, assistant dean, Planning and Resource Management
Andrea Cohen, special projects manager, Chancellor’s and EVC’s Office
Rachel Deblinger, director, Digital Scholarship Commons, McHenry Library
Suzana Djurcilov, Ph.D. scientific visualization ’01, instructor at BSOE, data visualization engineer at SGI
Kendra Dority, Ph.D. literature ’17, assistant director of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning
Olof Einarsdottir, professor of chemistry
Becky George, assistant vice provost of Global Engagement
Carrie Haber, assistant dean, Planning and Academic Programs, Physical and Biological Sciences Division
David Hansen, senior healthcare consultant, Health Industry Consulting, Inc.
Kamil Hasan, UCSC Foundation vice chair and trustee, general partner of Granite Hill India Opportunities and Inovus Capital Partners
Scott Hernandez-Jason, director, News and Media Relations, University Relations
Andrea Hesse, director, Academic Computing
Zia Isola, director, CBSE Research Mentoring Institute
Leslie Kern, director, Faculty Instructional Technology Center
John Koster, M.S. ocean sciences ’17, researcher in Ocean Sciences Department
Carolyn Lagattuta, assistant and photographer, Communications and Marketing, University Relations
Matthew Mednick, director, Academic Senate
Taraneh Mojaverian, institutional research analyst, Institutional Research, Assessment, and Policy Studies
Lisa Nielsen, director, Marketing and Communications, University Relations
Richelle Noroyan, community relations representative, University Relations, council member of Santa Cruz City Council
Monica Parikh, director, Summer Sessions
Irena Polic, managing director, The Humanities Institute
Jen Quick-Cleveland, post-doctoral scholar
Virginia Rivera, senior director, Gift Planning
Vikram Sahai, UCSC Foundation trustee, independent technology advisor
Linda Scholz, campus diversity officer, Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Steven Stein, assistant vice chancellor of Human Resources
Michael Tassio, analyst, Academic Affairs
Shirley Truong, principal analyst, Institutional Research, Asssessment, and Policy Studies
Randolph Wedding, UCSC Foundation trustee, retired senior managing director of Office of the CIO UC Regents
Aaron Zachmeier, instructional designer, Learning Technologies
Poster Presentations
| Name | Division | Program | Title |
| Thomas Banghart | Social Sciences | Anthropology | From shore to mountain: a comparison of prey selection and processing at two Middle Period (c. 2800–900 BP) sites from Santa Cruz County, California |
| Jennifer Bellik | Humanities | Linguistics | Vowels in Turkish onset clusters: Mind or matter? |
| Jessica Calvanico | Humanities | Feminist Studies | New Orleans’s Girl Problems: The House of the Good Shepherd and the Origins of Juvenile Justice |
| Charles Cole | Engineering | Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics | Tn5Prime, a Tn5-based 5′ capture method for single-cell RNA-seq |
| Kathryn Dahlgren | Engineering | Computer Science | Towards Not Re-Inventing the Wheel: Managing Data Management Tools |
| Katherine Dale | Physical & Biological Sciences | Ecology & Evolutionary Biology | The Secret Life of Larval Fish: A Geocaching Adventure |
| Kiran Garcha | Humanities | History | Bringing the Vanguard Home: The Role of Children, Home, and Family in the Black Panther Party |
| Justin Gilmore | Humanities | History of Consciousness | Contesting the Idea of Productivity in the Workers’ Movement |
| Brian Giraldo | Engineering | Electrical Engineering | Atomic layer deposition of non-conformal low dimensional ZnO thin films |
| Rebekkah Gross | Social Sciences | Psychology | Situational features influence college students’ evaluations about helping |
| Amy Hart | Humanities | History | Creating a Socialist, Feminist Utopia in 1840’s Ohio: A Case Study of the Nineteenth-Century Intentional Community Movement |
| Matthew Heiner | Engineering | Statistics & Applied Mathematics | Bayesian Model Selection for Markov Chains using Sparse Probability Vectors |
| Donald Hickey | Humanities | History | Ambrose Bierce: Bedeviled Reconciliation |
| Salvador Huitzilopochtli | Social Sciences | Education | Student Appropriation of Teacher Talk Moves and Mathematical Tools in a Discursively Based Classroom |
| Manping Jia | Engineering | Electrical Engineering | Proton Conductivity of Biomaterials |
| Daniel Joesten | Humanities | History | “By the Accident of Birth”: British Subjects, Free State Citizens, and the Irish Diaspora in Britain, 1922–1950 |
| Ana Kareh | Physical & Biological Sciences | Chemistry & Biochemistry | Isostructural lanthanide metal-organic frameworks based on biphenyldicarboxylic acid |
| Giselle Laiduc | Social Sciences | Psychology | Culturally Relevant Growth Messages Unexpectedly Undermine Women’s Help Seeking in STEM |
| Michael Lavell & Youngjun Lee | Engineering | Statistics & Applied Mathematics | The Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability with Unknown Magnetic Field Topology |
| Tiffany Lockett | Social Sciences | Psychology | School and neighborhood factors influencing low-income, male adolescents’ criminalization outcomes |
| Muiris MacGiollabui | Humanities | History | Global Exile: The Diaspora of the United Irishmen, 1791-1827 |
| Allyson Makuch | Social Sciences | Environmental Studies | Barriers and Flows: Epistemological and Cartographical Challenges to “Seeing” the Landscape of California Cannabis |
| Paloma Medina | Engineering | Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics | Estimating the Prevalence of Wolbachia in Arthropod and Nematode Taxa |
| Alexey Munishkin | Engineering | Computer Engineering | Scalable Markov chain approximation for a safe intercept navigation in the presence of multiple vehicles |
| Yuki Obayashi | Humanities | Literature | Remembering to Forget: The Hiroshima Maidens Project |
| Sarah Papazoglakis | Humanities | Literature | Doing Good, Behaving Badly: Fictions of American Philanthropy |
| K. Aysha Peterson | Social Sciences | Environmental Studies | Root-mediated soil fertility and carbon sequestration in agroecosystems |
| Deniz Rudin | Humanities | Linguistics | Rising Imperatives |
| John Selberg | Engineering | Electrical Engineering | A Non-Enzymatic Glucose Sensor Actuated by Electronic pH Modulation |
| Sutirtha Sengupta | Engineering | Statistics & Applied Mathematics | Effect of rotation on fingering convection in stellar and planetary interiors |
| Eaindar Soe | Physical & Biological Sciences | Chemistry & Biochemistry | Synthesis and Characterization of Cationic Silver Quinoxaline Coordination Polymers |
| Ofir Stefanson | Physical & Biological Sciences | Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology | Novel Method of Plasmid Delivery to Mouse Bladder Urothelium |
| Ibette Valle | Social Sciences | Psychology | “You Never Become Fully Independent”: Family Roles and Independence in First-Generation College Students |
| Nicole VanderMeer | Humanities | History | Pervasive Species: The Mongoose, Visualities, and Empire (1869–1936) |
| Atesh Worthington & Taylor McCann | Physical & Biological Sciences | Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology | The Role of IL7ra in Innate Immune Cell Development |
| Ka-eul Yoo | Humanities | Literature | Hansen’s Disease Body as an Arena of Cold War: The Case of Korean Poet Han Ha-Wun |
Talk Presentations
| Name | Division | Program | Title |
| Rakshit Agrawal | Engineering | Computer Science | Learning User Intent from Action Sequences on Interactive Systems |
| John Armstrong | Social Sciences | Environmental Studies | Climate Change Policymaking: Local Control and Transformation of the Electricity System |
| Erik Bernardino | Humanities | History | Creating Morals, Erasing Workers: U.S. Immigration Laws and Women Migrants in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands |
| Carver Bierson | Physical & Biological Sciences | Earth Sciences | Understanding the effect of Venus’s sulfuric acid clouds on atmospheric chemistry |
| Bristol Cave-LaCoste | Humanities | History | “Living Openly and Notoriously”: The Sexual Policing of Migrant Women |
| David Coulter | Physical & Biological Sciences | Astronomy & Astrophysics | Discovery of the First Electromagnetic Counterpart to a Gravitational Wave Source |
| Jennifer Day | Social Sciences | Psychology | Applying Theories of Face Identity and Expression to Digital Face Representations |
| Luz de Wit | Physical & Biological Sciences | Ecology & Evolutionary Biology | Potential public health benefits from cat eradications on islands |
| Keegan Farrell | Arts | Digital Arts & New Media | WHITENESS: Exploring how mixed-race individuals who appear to be white bear witness to persistent racism in a “post-racial” society |
| Julianne Foxworthy | Social Sciences | Education | Investigating Teacher Follow-Up Moves in Whole Class Mathematics Discussions |
| Elizabeth Goldman | Social Sciences | Psychology | Once Helpful, Always Helpful? Infants’ Expectations about Helping and Hindering Behavior across Scenarios |
| Sharmistha Guha | Engineering | Statistics & Applied Mathematics | Understanding Human Creativity with Brain Networks |
| Szilard Gyalay | Physical & Biological Sciences | Earth Sciences | What Lies under the Shells of Saturn’s Icy Moons? |
| Suraiya Jetha | Social Sciences | Anthropology | Friendship and Nation in Norway |
| John Karnes | Physical & Biological Sciences | Chemistry & Biochemistry | Zooming in on the Oil-Water Interface with Computer Simulations |
| Kylie Kenner | Social Sciences | Education | A Community College Intervention Program: The Affordances and Challenges of an Educational Space of Resistance |
| Grant Koch | Physical & Biological Sciences | Chemistry & Biochemistry | Property-Based Selection of Membrane Permeable Macrocyclic Scaffolds in a DNA-Encoded Library |
| Benjamin Lehmann | Physical & Biological Sciences | Physics | Can electrons bump into dark matter? |
| Anna Lowe | Physical & Biological Sciences | Ocean Sciences | Do they stay or do they go? The journey of kelp rockfish larvae off the central California coast |
| Saugher Nojan & Shimul Chowdhury | Social Sciences | Sociology | Muslim Students Capture Campus Climate: A Photovoice Project |
| Yohei Rosen | Engineering | Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics | Fast computational methods to describe genetic alleles, loci and haplotypes |
| Nedda Saremi | Engineering | Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics | A Puma is a Mountain Lion is a Cougar is a Mountain Screamer |
| Alison Tang | Engineering | Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics | Full-length characterization of isoforms to investigate cancer-associated mutations |
| Andrei Tcacenco | Humanities | History | Communist Morality and National Upheaval in the U.S.S.R.: 1985–1991 |
| Cynthia Tibbetts | Humanities | Philosophy | Can We Care Better?: Exploring the limits of our capacity to care for others |
| Cara Vennari | Physical & Biological Sciences | Earth Sciences | Mineral Physics: How we Understand the Structure of the Deep Earth |
| Roger Volden | Engineering | Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics | R2C2: Increasing the Accuracy of MinION Sequencing Reads |
| Mitchell Winter | Arts | Visual Studies | Optics of American Empire: James Ricalton and Stereoscopic Ethnography in Early Twentieth Century India, 1888–1907 |
| Rachel Zuercher | Physical & Biological Sciences | Ecology & Evolutionary Biology | Coastal marine ecosystem connectivity: pelagic to kelp forest subsidies |
Multimedia Presentations
| Kavi Duvvoori | Arts | Digital Art & New Media | Exploring Algorithmically Mediated Language Games |
| Taylor Kirsch | Humanities | History | Chinese Roots Amidst the Saguaros: Public Memory and Community Identity in Chinese Tucson |
| Priscilla Martinez | Humanities | History | Chinese Roots Amidst the Saguaros: Public Memory and Community Identity in Chinese Tucson |
| Stephen Richter with Elijah Bloom, Alex Smirnov, & Alexander Garcialuna | Humanities | Literature | Harry Potter and the Heretics of W.O.Z.: Translation, Transmission, and the Transposition of J.K. Rowling’s 7-book series into multimedia performance, to explore the power and price of magic in our world |
| Michael Saccone | Physical & Biological Sciences | Physics | Finding Monopoles in Artificial Spin Ice |
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