2015 Award Winners
Alcoa Undergraduate Research Awards
Korey Haug (Mechanical Engineering, Engineering & Public Policy), “Modular Manufacturing Snake Robot Deployment System”
Eric Myers (Mechanical Engineering), “Rheological Characterization of Powders for Use in Selective Laser and Electron Beam Additive Manufacturing Technologies”
Esteban Pacheco (Mechanical Engineering) & Matthew Powell-Palm (Mechanical Engineering), “Transient Hot Wire Measurement of Diamondoid Thermal Conductivity”
Award for Artistic Excellence
Rene Cuenca (Humanities and Arts), “Sustainability in Architecture: ‘Developing’ Solutions for the Developed World”
Kevin Karol (Computer Science and Arts), “The Consultants”
Alexander Petti (Science and Arts), “Guts: A New Musical”
Veda Sun (Art), “Mixing Genres; The New Landscape”
Crystal Yip (Art), “The Princess Puppet Theater: Feast”
The Boeing Blue Skies Award
First Prize:
Korey Haug (Mechanical Engineering, Engineering & Public Policy), “Modular Manufacturing Snake Robot Deployment System”
Second Prize:
Annika Peterson (Computer Science), “Formal Verification of a Controlled Flight Between Two Robots: A Case Study”
CIT Honors Poster Competition
First Prize:
Jeffrey Cole (Mechanical Engineering), “An Investigation of the Wear of Plycrystalline Diamond Compact Cutters and Hard Rock Surfaces”
Second Prize:
Korey Haug (Mechanical Engineering, Engineering & Public Policy), “Modular Manufacturing Snake Robot Deployment System”
Third Prize:
Darwin Yang (Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering), “Enantiomeric Separation of Chiral Drugs Using Tetrahexahedral Gold Nanoparticles”
Dietrich Humanities Award
Laura Berry (English), “Translucently, the Orange Sleeps Again”
Braden Kelner (English), “What Keeps Us Going: An Exploration of Experiences at the East End Cooperative Ministry”
Rubini Naidu (Psychology), “Examination of Cultural Diversity and Progression Through Photographs of Tamil Nadu, India”
Veda Sun (Art), “The Princess Puppet Theater: Feast”
Jasmine Xie (English, Philosophy), “Developing and Deconstructing Gender: Nonbinary Individuals and Their Search for Identity”
Johnson & Johnson Undergraduate Research Awards
Vijay Viswanathan (Mathematical Sciences), “Modeling the Relationship Between Queries and Questions in Biomedical Text”
Shahana Ganesharajah (Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering), Adriana Garcia (Design), Stowe Hammarberg (Design), Meghan Kaffine (Electrical & Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering), “External Unit for Retinal Prosthesis”
Mathematics Competition
First Prize:
Philip Garrison (Computer Science, Mathematical Sciences), “Good Graph Hunting”
Honorable Mention:
David Mehrle (Mathematical Sciences) & Tomer Reiter (Mathematical Sciences), “Newman’s Conjecture in Function Fields”
Honorable Mention:
Jeremy Meza (Science and Humanities Scholars), “Explicit Bounds for the Pseudospectra of Matrices and Operators”
Honorable Mention:
Nick Takaki (Science and Humanities Scholars, Mathematical Sciences), “Image Segmentation with Dynamic Artifacts Detection and Bias Correction”
Psychology Department Competition
First Prize:
John Ra (Biology and Psychology), “Volunteerism and Health in Older Adults”
Sigma Xi Poster Competition
First Prize:
Preethy Sridharan (Biological Sciences), “The Effects of Chronic Morphine on the Rate of Mu-Opioid Receptor (MOR) Trafficking
First Prize:
Darwin Yang (Chemical Engineering), “Enantiomeric Separation of Chiral Drugs using Tetrahexahedral Gold Nanoparticles”
Second Prize:
Yongshan Ding (Physics), “Analysis of Reconstructed J/Meson Candidates in Pronto Anti-Proton Collisions
SRC-URO Poster Competition
Adam Costanza (Mechanical Engineering), “Hybrid Control of a Parallel Robot”
Patricia Xu (Materials Science & Engineering), “Performance of Nanocomposite Soft Magnetic Materials in Electric Motors”
Vishal Ahuja (Chemical Engineering) and Anna Zhang (Chemical Engineering), “Investigation of Fruit-Derived Permeation Enhancers for Transepithelial Drug Delivery”
Statistics Competition
Oral Presentations:
First Prize:
Julian Zhou (Statistics), “Identifying Schizophrenia Risk Genes and Sub-Networks Using Dawn Framework”
Second Prize:
Joseph Pane (Statistics), “Hitting the Wall: Mixture Models of Long Distance Running Trajectories”
Poster Presentations:
First Prize:
Eric Alpert (Mathematical Sciences, Statistics) & Ronald Yurko (Statistics), “Classifying Kepler Objects of Interest”
Second Prize:
Elizabeth Chang (Statistics, English), Izaia Haynes (Statistics), Elissa Maercklein (Business Administration, Statistics), Henry Nealse (Dietrich College Interdisciplinary, Business Administration), Tias Sen (Statistics), “CMU Freshmen Meal Plan Satisfaction”
Third Prize:
Stephanie Rifai (Statistics, Social & Decision Sciences), “Self-Esteem, Brand Loyalty, and Consumer Willingness to Pay: An Examination of ‘Average Women’ Campaigning”
Undergraduate Economics Award
Brent Heard (Economics, Philosophy), “An Econometric Estimation of Deadweight Loss in Pennsylvania’s Water Market”
Undergraduate Environmental Award
First Prize:
Kathryn Bradford (Civil & Environmental Engineering, Engineering & Public Policy) and Miriam Hegglin (Civil & Environmental Engineering, Engineering & Public Policy), “A Heat Vulnerability Index and Adaptation Solutions for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania”
Runner-Up:
Manali Banerjee (Materials Science & Engineering, Chemistry), “Electrochemical Carbon Dioxide Reduction Using Nanocarbons”
Runner-Up:
Blair Graham (Materials Science Engineering), “Renewable Resource Polymer Nanocomposite Materials”
Runner-Up:
Esteban Pacheco (Mechanical Engineering) & Matthew Powell-Palm (Mechanical Engineering), “Transient Hot Wire Measurement of Diamondoid Thermal Conductivity”
Yahoo! Undergraduate Research Award
First Prize:
Jacob Buckman (Computer Science, Language Technologies Institute), “A Scone-Based Semantic Parser”
Runner-Up:
Jong Hyuk Park (Chemistry, Computer Science), “Active Sampling for Estimating Gaussian Graphical Models”
Andy Choi (ECE), “Providing New Business Analytics Through Geotagged Social Media Data”