2025 Award Winners

Award for Artistic Excellence

Matthew Blankley: Bears, Bears, Bears (Advisor: TJ Young)

Sarah Kang: Past Days (Advisor: Carrie Hagan)

Rebecca Kim: Insectevo: Kinetic Sculptures of Insect Evolution in Motion (Advisor: Carrie Hagan)

Sapna Tayal: Creating Furniture-Scale Deployable Objects with a Computer-Controlled Sewing Machine(Advisor: Jim McCann and Scott Hudson)

Lillian van Veen: The Clothes Make the Man (Advisor: Carrie Hagan)

Dietrich Humanities Prize

Rachel Wilson: How University Students Trace Non-English Code (Advisor: Therese Tardio)

Alison Zheng: Unraveling the Decline of Pittsburgh’s Chinatown in a Post-Steel Society (Advisor: Jeffrey Williams)

Kayla Lee: The Search for Dr. Chen Wen-chen (Advisor: Steven Schlossman)

Sarah Kang: Past Days (Advisor: Carrie Hagan)

Simone Rothstein: Reimagining Jewish Nationhood in the Diaspora (Advisor: Michael Friedman)

Promising Scholar Award

Shienka Martinez: Saints, Sin and Salvation: Catholicism in Latin American Comics (Advisor: Felipe Gomez)

Moore Family Fund for Underwriting Creativity, Knowledge, Experimentation, Research and Yumminess

Cassidy Diamond: Love Languages: Reimagining English Syntax as a Turing Complete Language (Advisor: Christina Bjorndahl)

Psychology Award

Sara Christie: Quantifying UncertAInty: Testing the Accuracy of LLMs’ Confidence Judgements Using Private Datasets (Advisors: Trent Cash and Danny Oppenheimer)

Noelia Flores: The Role of Response Confidence in Feedback Uptake in Child and Adult Participants(Advisor: Erik Thiessen)

Evren Konuk: The Role of Staggered Color Perception in Visual Learning (Advisor: Margaret Henderson)

Sigma Xi Poster Competition

First Place: Arini Bhargava: Optimizing Deep Brain Stimulation for Parkinson’s Disease: Enhancing Outcomes with Burst Stimulation and Targeted Electrode Placement (Advisor: Aryn Gittis)

Second Place: Yuktha Vemula: Comparative Analysis of KATRIN Rear Wall Measurements (Advisor: Diana Parno)

Third Place: Michael Rapp: Electric Field Effects on the Thermal Conductivity of Sodium Superoxide (NaO2) (Advisor: Alen McGaughey)

Statistics Competition

Best Oral Presentation: Eric Shau, A Pipeline for Move-Step Analysis (Advisor: Alex Reinhart)

1st Place Poster Presentation: Anahita Hassan, Predictive Modeling for Injury Risk and Recovery Time for WNBA Athletes (Advisor: Ron Yurko)

2nd Place Poster Presentation: Ekin Ozince, Ruonan Sun, Vivian Sui, Trends in Children's Book Reviews: Language and Sentiments (Advisor: Zach Branson)

3rd Place Poster Presentation: Anahita Hassan, Anika Joshi, Elizabeth Szeto, Prina Doshi, Predicting Homicide Rates from Census Tracts in Brazil (Advisor: Gonzalo Mena)

Undergraduate Environmental Award

Winner: Camden Johnson: Aqua Lab Adventures: STEM Education for Environmental Justice (Advisors: Deanna Matthews & Ian Smith of Watersmith Guild)

Runner-Up:
Katie Eisenman: Investigation of Photochemical Properties and Varied Cooling Rates on Eutectic WO3-TiO2 Composite (Advisor: Elizabeth Dickey)