Graduate Symposium 2019
Winners
Steck Family Prize for Graduate Research Excellence, $1000
Tie, $1000 to each:
Benjamin Lehmann, Physics, Catching black holes in the lab (talk presentation)
Benjamin Lehmann tied with Bhishek Manek (see below) for best overall, the Steck Family Prize for Graduate Research Excellence. He could not remain for the announcement of the winners and the presentation of prize certificates so received his certificate from VPDGS Lori Kletzer outside Kerr Hall on May 1, 2019 (photo left).
Bhishek Manek receives his Steck Family Prize for Graduate Research Excellence certificate from Lori Kletzer, vice provost and dean of the Division of Graduate Studies.Bhishek Manek, Applied Mathematics, Solar Hemispheric Helicity Selection Rules: A New Theory Explaining Recent Solar Observations (poster presentation)
Best in Arts Division, $250
Kathleen Deck, Digital Arts and New Media, Enviro-Envision (alternative media presentation)
Best in Baskin School of Engineering, $250
Tie, $250 to each:
Sara Nasab, Applied Mathematics, The effect of particle inertia in particle-laden flows (poster presentation)
Thomas Ng, Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics, PedFac: factor-graph based Bayesian pedigree inference (alternative media presentation)
Best in Humanities Division, $250 
Radhika Prasad, Literature, Language and Transnationalism in the Works of Nirmal Verma (poster presentation)
Best in Physical and Biological Sciences Division, $250
Rachel Harbeitner, Ocean Sciences, Strong, highly resolved vertical gradients of diversity and distributions of bacteria in the oceanic water column (talk presentation)
Best in Social Sciences Division, $250
Yiluan Song, Environmental Studies, Are plants keeping up with the climate? (talk presentation)
POSTER PRESENTATIONS
| Name | Division | Program | Title |
| Chessa Adsit-Morris | Social Sciences | Education | Graduate Training in Pedagogy: Strategies, Practices and Small Teaching Techniques |
| Christian Alvarado | Humanities | History of Consciousness | “Custodians of Tradition”: Education, Pedagogy, and Culture in (Anti)Colonial Kenya |
| Md Nafiz Amin | Baskin School of Engineering | Electrical Engineering | Free space excitation in optofluidic platforms for detection of single particles |
| Danielle Crawford | Humanities | Literature | Storms, Bombs, and Ecologies of Destruction: The Intimacies of Weather Disasters and U.S. Militarization in the Pacific |
| Brynna Downey | Physical and Biological Sciences | Earth Science | Orbital Inclination Damping on Titan and Callisto |
| Vahid Ganjalizadeh | Baskin School of Engineering | Electrical Engineering | Single Particle Detection Enhancement with Wavelet-based Signal Processing Technique |
| Steven Green | Humanities | History | Noshing in the Hawkeye State: Food and Foodways in the Construction of Iowa’s Jewish Communities, 1890–1940 |
| Yizhou Guo | Humanities | Feminist Studies | Understanding Film Propaganda/Censorship from the Audience Side: Postsocialist Youth and Online Film Discussion in China |
| Kyuhyun Han | Humanities | History | Rethinking Mao China’s Environmental Policies: Forestry Management, Wildlife Conservation, and Center-Periphery Relations in Northeast China, 1949–1965 |
| Amy Hart | Humanities | History | Wisconsin in the 1840s: The Frontier of Women’s Rights |
| Steven Haug | Humanities | Philosophy | Art and Community |
| Emily Hentschke | Social Sciences | Psychology | Maximizing Student Volunteer Impact with Unhoused Populations |
| Donald Thomas Hickey | Humanities | History | Bedeviled Reconciliation: Ambrose Bierce and the American Civil War |
| Manping Jia with Sushmita Joardar |
Baskin School of Engineering | Electrical Engineering | Spaciotemporal control of ion delivery for tissue patterning |
| Daniel Joesten | Humanities | History | “Our Domiciles are in England”: Irish Deportees and Claims for British Civic Identity 1922–1925 |
| Alirio Karina | Humanities | History of Consciousness | Witchcraft, Medicine and Magic in Livingstone, Zambia |
| Daniel Kirsner | Baskin School of Engineering | Statistics and Applied Mathematics | Multi-Scale Shotgun Stochastic Search for Large Spatial Datasets |
| Giselle Laiduc | Social Sciences | Psychology | Perceptions of Help-Seeking, Resource Use, and College Adjustment Among UCSC Undergraduates |
| Azucena Lucatero | Social Sciences | Environmental Studies | Campus garden groups and sense of belonging in college students of color |
| Muiris MacGiollabhui | Humanities | History | Sons of Exile: The Transnational History of the United Irishmen, 1791–1830 |
| Bhishek Manek | Baskin School of Engineering | Statistics and Applied Mathematics | Solar Hemispheric Helicity Selection Rules : A New Theory Explaining Recent Solar Observations |
| Priscilla Martinez | Humanities | History | Re(membering) the Borderlands: Negotiating Belonging and Building Community in Chinese Tucson |
| Sara Nasab | Baskin School of Engineering | Statistics and Applied Mathematics | The effect of particle inertia in particle-laden flows |
| Radhika Prasad | Humanities | Literature | Language and Transnationalism in the Works of Nirmal Verma |
| Tyler Sano | Baskin School of Engineering | Electrical Engineering | Optofluidic Distributed Feedback Dye Laser Using Corrugated Sidewall Structure |
|
John Selberg |
Baskin School of Engineering | Electrical Engineering | A Bioelectronic Ion Pump Array for Control of Cell Membrane Potential |
| Karen Tanner | Physical and Biological Sciences | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Testing novel science-based strategies to improve salt marsh restoration success |
| Brad Thompson | Baskin School of Engineering | Computer Engineering | Immersive Virtualization of Guided Inquiry |
| Bruno Tomasini | Humanities | History | Segregation by Hook or by Crook: Segregationist Women and the Little Rock Crisis |
| Claire Urbanski | Humanities | Feminist Studies | The Afterlife of Settler Colonial Occupation: Archeological Excavation as Militarization in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands |
| Delio Vasquez | Humanities | History of Consciousness | Michel Foucault’s Lost Theory of Resistance: From Political Crime to Popular Illegalisms |
Talk Presentations
| Name | Division | Program | Title |
| Jacob Abrahams | Physical and Biological Sciences | Earth Science | Iron Volcanism on Metallic Asteroids |
| Rakshit Agrawal | Baskin School of Engineering | Computer Science | Learning Edge Properties in Graphs from Path Aggregations |
| Erik Bernardino | Humanities | History | What is Labor? A Historical Perspective in the California Borderlands |
| Carver Bierson | Physical and Biological Sciences | Earth Science | Exploration at the edge of the solar system: First results from the New Year 2019 flyby of MU69 |
| Faeze Brahman | Baskin School of Engineering | Computer Science | Interactive Story Generation Using Content-Introducing Approaches |
| Charley Brooks | Social Sciences | Education | Unmasking Neutrality: Surfacing White Logics in the Teaching of the Civil Rights Movement |
| Amanda Carbajal | Physical and Biological Sciences | Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology | What prion proteins found across species can tell us about evolution |
| Bristol Cave-LaCoste | Humanities | History | Chy Lung: Lewd Women, States’ Rights, and California Immigration Control |
| Shimul Chowdhury | Arts | Digital Arts and New Media | Stitching Solidarity: Belonging as a Muslim in the U.S. |
| Joseph Cutler | Physical and Biological Sciences | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology | Dam, Dam, Dam - Balancing Biodiversity Conservation and Hydropower Production in Gabon |
| Akhil Dixit | Baskin School of Engineering | Computer Science | CAvSAT: A System for Query Answering over Inconsistent Databases |
| Alberto Ganis | Social Sciences | Politics | Sub-State Nationalism and the Other(s): Mediated Identity in Friuli |
| Huazhi Ge | Physical and Biological Sciences | Earth Science | Minerva++: A New Planetary Atmospheric Model to Simulate the Tropospheric Dynamics of Jupiter |
| Szilard Gyalay | Physical and Biological Sciences | Earth Science |
A Survey of Saturnian Satellites’ Sub-Surfaces |
| Rachel Harbeitner | Physical and Biological Sciences | Ocean Sciences |
Strong, highly resolved vertical gradients of diversity and distributions of bacteria in the oceanic water column |
| Eduardo Hirata-Miyasaki | Baskin School of Engineering | Electrical Engineering |
25 Plane Multifocus Microscopy with Camera Array |
| Lisa Jackson | Humanities | History | “A Free Man on Sundays”: Physical Culture and the Making of British Communist Bodies |
| Nickolas Knightly | Humanities | Philosophy | Visionary LoveWisdom: Notes Toward a Relational Way of Knowing |
| Natalia Koulinka | Humanities | History of Consciousness | Social Change and Democratic Participation in the Soviet Union and Beyond |
| Alina Larson | Social Sciences | Psychology | Do The Robot! Keeping the Beat with Humans and Machines – Which Do We Prefer? |
| Benjamin Lehmann | Physical and Biological Sciences | Physics | Catching black holes in the lab |
| Sarah Neuhaus | Physical and Biological Sciences | Earth Science | Timing of recent grounding line advance of the Whillans Ice Plain, Antarctica |
| Jason Ott | Physical and Biological Sciences | Earth Science | Tremolite Under Pressure: Understanding the High Pressure Behavior of Hydrated Amphibole Minerals in Subduction Zones |
| Darrin Schultz | Baskin School of Engineering | Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics | Genomes of Deep-Sea Bioluminescent Jellies |
| Jaclyn Schultz | Humanities | History | Learning the Values of a Dollar: Childhood and Cultures of Economy in the U.S., 1820–1900 |
| Yiluan Song | Social Sciences | Environmental Studies | Are plants keeping up with the climate? |
| Niky Taylor | Physical and Biological Sciences | Ocean Sciences | Using Optics to See Where the Ocean is Toxic |
| Abigail Walsh | Social Sciences | Psychology | The Effects of Watching Nonbinary Television Characters |
| Bin Yao | Physical and Biological Sciences | Chemistry and Biochemistry | 3D Printing Boosts the Record of Capacitance for Supercapacitors |
| Chao Zhao | Baskin School of Engineering | Computer Science | Unsupervised opinion summarization from online product reviews |
Alternative Media Presentations
| Name | Division | Program | Title |
| Kathleen Deck | Arts | Digital Arts and New Media | Enviro-Envision |
| Taylor Kirsch | Humanities | History | “The Way Narrow That Leadeth Unto Life”: Legacies of New England’s Indigenous Praying Towns |
| Thomas Ng | Baskin School of Engineering | Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics | PedFac: factor-graph based Bayesian pedigree inference |
Scenes from the 2019 Graduate Research Symposium
VPDGS Lori Kletzer and Chancellor George Blumenthal open the 15th annual Graduate Research Symposium in the Information Commons South and kick off the judging.
Alirio Karina of the History of Consciousness program presents a poster titled Witchcraft, Medicine and Magic in Livingstone, Zambia (left). Delio Vasquez, also of the History of Consciousness program, presents a poster titled Michel Foucault’s Lost Theory of Resistance: From Political Crime to Popular Illegalisms (right).
Members of the public, including graduate student alumni, browse presentations at the 15th annual Graduate Research Symposium (left). Thomas Ng of the Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics program gives his alternative media presentation titled PedFac: factor-graph based Bayesian pedigree inference to Rachel Neuman, director of graduate student life and manager of the Graduate Student Commons with the Division of Graduate Studies.
Symposium attendees enjoyed the award reception after the close of judging at 3:30 p.m.
