Award for Artistic Excellence
Margaret Mertz (Global Studies) and Naomi Shimada (Creative Writing), “Psyche and Parfum: Deconstructing Representation and Diversifying the Film Industry”
Lumi Barron, and Michelle Janco (Art), “Rolling Sheep – Stop Motion Animation”
Amanda Jolley (Art), “Scapes”
Michelle Ma (Science and Arts), “The Clinic”
Christine Shen (Mathematical Sciences and Arts), “Word Play”
The Boeing Blue Skies Award
First prize: “Game Changer” — Bharadwaj Ramachandran (Computer Science), “Building a Privacy-Aware Stack for the Internet of Things”
Second prize: “Most Creative” — Homer Baker (Electrical & Computer Engineering) and Andrew Ye (Physics), “Vision Augmented localization using Vector maps (VALV)”
Third prize – Carolina Zarate (Computer Science), “Using Machine Learning for Malvertising Detection”
CIT Honors Research Poster Competition
First Place: Rinko Maeshima (Chemical Engineering) “Generation and Evaluation of Porcine Liver Extracellular Matrix as a Tool for Culturing Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (iPSC)-Derived Hepatocytes”
Second Place: Zachary Blonder (Chemical Engineering) “Enantiomeric Separation with Chiral Molecules Accelerated by Gold Nanoparticles”
Third Place: Lauren Relyea (Chemical Engineering) “Heat and mass transfer past slender bodies via a generalized reciprocal theorem”
Dietrich Humanities Prize
Paloma Sierra (Creative Writing and Drama), “COCKTAIL: Tasting Three Different Perspectives about Puerto Rican National Identity through Poetry”
Kristina Wagner (Technical Writing and Communication), “How a research-based system can facilitate citizens solving wicked problems more efficiently, with the refugee crisis as a case study”
Karen Nguyen (Professional Writing), “The Importance of Untold Stories: Coming of Age as a Vienamese Woman”
Blaine Cole (Economics and Statistics), “Why do People Retweet, an Analysis of the Effect of Sentiment and Rhetorical Devices on Retweeting”
Ariel Hoffmaier (Creative Writing), “Networking: Stories of Queer Lives”
Mathematics Poster Competition
First prize: Samuel Zbarsky (Mathematical Sciences), “Energy Decay in a Fluid with a Free Boundary”
Second prize: Ananya Kumar (Computer Science), “Streaming Algorithms for Approximate Convex Hulls”
Runners up:
Timothy Li (Mathematical Sciences), “L1 Regularization for Compact Support”
Liuyu Jin (Mathematics), “Existence, Uniqueness and Asymptotic Behavior of Solutions to a Linear System of PDEs with Weak Viscoelastic Damping”
Manuel Fernandez (Computer Science), “Online Purchasing of Minimal Spanning Trees”
The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Award
First prize: Amal Nanavati (Computer Science), “Strategies for Robot Handoffs When Guiding Bling Travelers”
Runners up:
Heather Bowman (Materials Science & Engineerig), “How Can Gardenia Flowers Help Treat Strokes?”
Kyuin Lee and Shihan Wang (Electrical & Computer Engineering), “Preventing Epidemics Via Sensing and Learning Mosquito Behaviors”
Asawari Kanitkar, Divya Mohan, and Kathryn Williams (Information Systems), “Biometrics Web Application”
Edward Healy (Chemical Engineering), “A Look at the Standard Electrocardiogram: Is it Possible to Measure the His Signal Noninvasively?”
Caoxin Tang (Chemistry), “Glycosaminoglycan and graphene oxide crosslinking network for cartilage tissue repair”
Robert Esposito and Seong Yeun Kim (Architecture), “Plastic Pavilion”
Psychology Department Competition
Poster Competition
First prize: Kimberly Hochstedler (Statistics), “Meta-Analytic Review of Pronoun Use and Health and Relationship Outcomes”
Oral Competition
First prize: Isabel Bleimeister (Psychology), “Effects of Chronic Unpredictable Stress on Anxiety, Cognition, and Neuroinflammation in Rats Subjected to Experimental Brain Trauma”
Sigma Xi Poster Competition
First Prize: Tiffany Lau (Biological Sciences), “Investigating how an Altered Drosophila Melanogaster Microbiome Affects Alcohol Dehydrogenase Expression and Associated Physiology”
Second Prize: Turga Ganapathy (Mechanical Engineering), “Near-Field Thermal Radiation and Gas Conduction in a Nanostructured Gap Measured by Frequency Domain Thermoreflectance (FDTR)”
Third Prize: Robert Buarque de Macedo (Physics), “Generation of Granular Objects by Curvature Optimization”
Inspiring Future Research Prize: Tiffaney Hsia (Chemical Engineering), “Effects of Genipin Eluting Coils in in Vitro Aneurysm Models”
Statistics Oral Presentation Competition
First place: Angelina Sheremet (Statistics), “Interactive Model-Based Clustering”
Second place: Blaine Cole (Economics and Statistics), “Why do People Retweet? An Analysis of the Effect of Sentiment and Rhetorical Devices on Retweeting”
Statistics Poster Presentation Competition
First place: Kimberly Hochstedler (Statistics), “Meta-Analytic Review of Pronoun Use and Health and Relationship Outcomes”
Second place: Benjamin Teo (Mathematical Sciences), “Determining the Structure of a Population of Neurons”
Third place: Yu Liu (Statistics and Machine Learning), “Towards Synthetic Ecosystems of Disease Vectors”
Honorable mentions:
Isaac Haberman, LeShaun Jones, Grace Lee (Statistics), and Yuan Liang (Statistics and Machine Learning), “Statistical Approaches for Augmenting Synthetic Ecosystems with Agent Activities: An Application of the American Time Use Survey”
Andrew Bryan and Shichen Yang (Economics and Statistics); Apoorva Havanur, Emily Helfer, and Naveen Shankar (Statistics and Machine Learning), “Identifying Donor Trends for the Pittsburgh Civil Light Opera”
Harit Agrawala and Jack Kroger (Economics and Statistics), Sameer Dhavalikar (Statistics and Machine Learning), Megan Fu (Business Administration), and Barbara Samaniego (Economics), “Post-Consumer Food Waste”
Young Researcher Awards:
Jeffrey Phillips (Mathematical Sciences), “An Extension of the Kelly Criterion for Scenarios with Discrete Bet Amounts”
Emma Flickinger (Creative Writing), “Galaxy Morphology and Environment Density: Detecting a Relationship”
Undergraduate Environmental Research Award
First prize: Robert Esposito and Seong Yeun Kim (Architecture), “Plastic Pavilion”
Runners up:
Alexander Frazier, Ningjun Gao, and Meghana Valluri (Information Systems), “Handprinter: Quantifying Our Positive Environmental Impact”
George Harter and Hunter Hartshorne (Mechanical Engineering), “Hillside Hydro-Portable Hydroelectric Generator”