Congratulations to this year’s student and faculty Winston Award recipients!
Established by Roger (’76, ’79) and Karen Winston (’75), the annual Winston Honors Writing Awards recognize the best essays, research papers and theses written by Honors students, and the Winston Honors Faculty Award recognizes outstanding Honors faculty.
Winston Student Paper Awards
The Winston Student Paper Awards were established in honor of Professor John Portz, the founding director of the General Honors program at UMD. In 2013, Roger, Karen and Emily Winston generously donated funds to support and expand the scope of this award for Honors students. The awards also acknowledge the central role that faculty members play in mentoring Honors College students.
There are three principal categories for these awards: (1) Best Short Essay, (2) Best Research Paper and (3) Best Honors Thesis.
This year’s recipients are:
Short Essay
- Kathryn Grow ’25 (University Honors), “Space Agriculture: Risks vs Rewards”
Research Paper
- Alexandra Kreis ’25 (Honors Humanities), “Ecological Imperialism: The Persistence of Environmental Injustice through African Neo-Colonialism”
- Lynne Regules ’26 (Honors Humanities), “Our Nation’s Most Sacred Shrine: The Function of Arlington National Cemetery in American Public Memory”
- Jacob Shields ’25 (Honors Humanities), “That Which is Most Perfect in All of Nature”: Tracing the Thomistic View of Human Dignity from Aristotle to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”
Honors Thesis
- Emma Behrens ’24 (Honors Humanities, Sociology Departmental Honors), “They’ve Gone Completely Off the Deep End”: Narrativizing and Contextualizing Alt-Right Discourse about Transgender Americans”
- Dalia Chen ’24 (University Honors, Biology Departmental Honors), “The Effect of Increasing Temperatures on the Survival and Transmission of a Naturally Occurring Plant Pathogen”
- Micah Ferguson ’24 (University Honors, Behavioral and Community Health Departmental Honors), “LGBTQ+ Perceptions of Campus Climate”
- Daniel Klimes ’24 (Integrated Life Sciences, Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics Departmental Honors), “Novel Computational Methods for the Comparison of Leishmania Genomes and Transcriptomes”
- Jordan Kreh ’24 (University Honors, Aerospace Engineering Departmental Honors), “Hitting a Moving Target: Autonomous Path Planning Methods For an Evolving Environment”
- Rhiannon Little ’24 (University Honors, Criminology and Criminal Justice Departmental Honors), “Changing the Conversation: The Use of Person-First Language in Criminal Labels”
- Jestina Ricci ’24 (Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Departmental Honors), “Forever and Indefinitely My Baby: #MedicalMoms, Social Media Influencing, and the Denial of Disability Identity Formation”
- Thomas Wolfson ’24 (History Departmental Honors), “The Journey to Ratification: Maryland and the Fifteenth Amendment”
Winston Family Honors Faculty Award
The Winston Family Honors Faculty Award recognizes outstanding faculty advising, mentorship and supervision of University of Maryland Honors students. Nominees must be tenure-track or professional-track faculty members who serve, or have served as Departmental Honors directors and/or undergraduate thesis advisors.
This year’s recipients are:
- Associate Professor Alexandra Bely, Biology
- Professor Michael Brown, Geology
We are grateful to Roger Winston (’76), Karen Winston (’75) and their daughter Emily Winston (’06), whose generous gift provides these merit awards. We deeply appreciate the Winston family’s investment in academic excellence and their commitment to University Honors, the Honors College and the University of Maryland.
Photo credit: Amina Lampkin.
