Winston Awards history

Winston Awards history

2024 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Kathryn Grow, “Space Agriculture: Risks vs Rewards”

Research Paper

  • Alexandra Kreis, “Ecological Imperialism: The Persistence of Environmental Injustice through African Neo-Colonialism”
  • Lynne Regules, “Our Nation’s Most Sacred Shrine: The Function of Arlington National Cemetery in American Public Memory”
  • Jacob Shields, “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”

Thesis

  • Emma Behrens, “They’ve Gone Completely Off the Deep End”: Narrativizing and Contextualizing Alt-Right Discourse about Transgender Americans”
  • Dalia Chen, “The Effect of Increasing Temperatures on the Survival and Transmission of a Naturally Occurring Plant Pathogen”
  • Micah Ferguson, “LGBTQ+ Perceptions of Campus Climate”
  • Daniel Klimes, “Novel Computational Methods for the Comparison of Leishmania Genomes and Transcriptomes”
  • Jordan Kreh, “Hitting a Moving Target: Autonomous Path Planning Methods For an Evolving Environment”
  • Rhiannon Little, “Changing the Conversation: The Use of Person-First Language in Criminal Labels”
  • Jestina Ricci, “Forever and Indefinitely My Baby: #MedicalMoms, Social Media Influencing, and the Denial of Disability Identity Formation”
  • Thomas Wolfson, “The Journey to Ratification: Maryland and the Fifteenth Amendment”

Faculty Awards

  • Alexandra Bely, Department of Biology
  • Michael Brown, Department of Geology

2023 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Sophia Winner, “States and Elections”

Research Paper

  • Mya Blagmon, “The Manifestation and Effect of Misogynoir in Slasher Films”

Thesis

  • Kassidy Jacobs, “Toxic Legacies: Baltimore’s History of Lead Poisoning and its Impact on Educational Disparities”
  • Sophia Guan, “Functional analyses of PIF3 in the regulation of axillary meristem developmental fate in Fragaria vesca”
  • Allison Godsey, “It’s About Time: Parent-Child Turn-Taking in Early Stuttering”
  • Sriya Potluri, “Age of Infection Modeling for Managing Emerging Epidemics with Limited Testing Resources”
  • Nessia Ferneau, “Barriers to Help-Seeking among Orthodox Jewish Victims of Intimate Partner Violence”
  • Julia Grafstein, “Alienation and Alliances: Transgender Coalition-Building from the 1970s through the 1990s”
  • Sadia Nourin, “Measuring and Evading Turkmenistan’s Internet Censorship”
  • Grant Yang, “Synthesis of Novel 2′-Fluoro-Arabino Nucleic Acid Aptamers Against SARS-CoV-2”

Faculty Awards

  • Bianca Bersani, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice
  • Karen O’Brien, Department of Psychology

2022 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Gabriella Alfano, “ Racism, Capitalism, and the Black Panther Party”
  • Damiana Colley, “Understanding Violence in Homewood, PA”
  • Olivia Mezzullo, “Violence Against Women in Movies, Reclamation and Revenge Through the Female Gaze, and What Makes a Productive Female Revenge Film”
  • Miriam Park, “The Structures in Our Environments”

Research Paper

  • Urvi Chowdhury, “Eliminating Racial Bias from the 2021 CKD-EPI Creatinine eGFR Algorithm “
  • Elli Nikolopoulos, “The Arab Uprisings and the Black Lives Matter Movement: Public Opinion and the Media”

Thesis

  • Kelly Barnes, “Progesterone’s Influence on Vascular Angiogenesis: Effect on Tube Formation and VEGF Release”
  • Eunice Braimoh, “The After-Images of Homeland: A Biomythicritical Self-Interrogation Within Black Diaspora”
  • Madelyn Harris, “Black Grief Matters: Disenfranchisement, Social Support, and Coping Among Black College Students Grieving the Deaths of Black Americans by Police Brutality”
  • Erfan Jabari, “Modeling Osteoclast-directed Bone Formation in 2D Culture Systems”
  • Jessica Lee, “Decontextualized Language Predicts Disfluency in Children Who Do and Do Not Stutter”
  • Jackie Liu, “Ambivalent Fatphobia: The Perpetration of Weight-Based Discrimination by Healthcare Providers and its Implications for Medical Practice”
  • Lois Richman, “An Evaluation of State-Level Trauma-Informed Care in the Juvenile Justice System”
  • Jasmin Pineda, “‘They Don’t Know I am Central American Not Mexican’: Making Central American Identity on Twitter and TikTok”

Faculty Award

  • Kim Stroka, Department of Bioengineering

2021 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Ethan Heidtman, “Has Carroll County, Maryland Contained Its Violence?”
  • Ethan Selko, “Violence in Park Heights, Maryland”

Research Paper

  • Debbie Adam, “Health Literacy Initiatives to Combat The COVID-19 Misinfodemic”
  • Carol Wang, “One Hairy Situation: An Overview of Fur in Fashion”

Thesis

  • Mark Cerasoli, “Characterizing the Role of Endophilin-A2 in Plasma Membrane Repair”
  • Stephanie Lizzo, “Examining the Impact of Rebel Leadership Dynamics on External Support in Intra-State Conflicts”
  • M Pease, “ Gender Minority Young Adult Mental Health: Anti-Transgender Prejudice, Mediators, and Implication in the COVID-19 Era”
  • Parick Peralta, “ Dictatorship of the Vengeful: The Rise of Civic Authoritarianism in Rodrigo Dutert’s Philippines”
  • William Wong, “Imprisoned by Orthodoxy: Religion in Dune”

Faculty Award

  • William O. Lamp, Department of Entomology

2020 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Gabriel Cohen, “Tethered”
  • Jackson Devadas, “Collective Responsibility in the Era of Perpetual Crisis”
  • Tayla Gordon, “The Power of Political Theater”
  • Christine Roviera, “We Choose to Go to the Moon” How President Kennedy’s Rice University Speech Convinced the American Public to Support the Apollo Program”

Research Paper

  • Lynn Martin, “Enlightenment at the Hand of God”
  • Russell Schwartz, “Robust Multi-Agent Task Assignment in Failure-Prone and Adversarial Environments”
  • Alyson Trager, “Boycotts versus Litigation: How NGOs are Challenging the Notorious ExxonMobil”

Thesis

  • Corelyn deBettencourt, “Perinatal Exposure to Fentanyl Decreases Auditory Discrimination and Task Engagement in Mice”
  • Francis Marcellino, “ Evolution and Intellectual History of the Frauchiger-Renner Argument”

Faculty Award

  • Lindsey Anderson, Department of Communication

2019 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Mario Sto. Domingo, “The Case for the Minimum Wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit”
  • Christine Johnson, “The Effects of Climate Change on Infectious Disease”
  • Joy Xu, “Laboring Little Women: A Case for Feminine Work”

Research Paper

  • Emelia Gold, “It Stops Now: A Protest Playlist for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women”
  • Amelia Jarecke, “Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: How to Redeem the Men of God Who Failed His Children”
  • Sarah Mantus, “The JUUL: A Problem or A Solution?”

Thesis

  • George Hughey, “unCaptcha: A Low-Resource Defeat of reCaptcha’s Audio Challenge”
  • Rianna Jha, “Ladylike Legislation: A Study of Women-Centric Co-sponsorship in the 115th Congress”
  • Katherine Kim, “Assessment of Circulating Angiogenic Cell Function in Endurance-Trained Individuals Before, During, and After an Ultramarathon”

Faculty Award

  • Kerry M. Green, Department of Behavioral Health

2018 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Jisue Gonzales, “Environmental Racism: Industrial Dumping in Low-Income Communities 
  • Alex Kahn, “Love the Bomb” 
  • Samantha (Haley) Stuart, “The Water Man” 
  • Daniel Zheng, “Butler Library in New York: The New Tower of Babel”

Research Paper

  • Madison Kunkel, “The Internet of Things: The Progression of Interconnectivity that Shifts Power Away from the Masses”
  • Brendan Sheehy, “Computer-Assisted Learning in the Developing World: Technical Considerations for Early Education”

Thesis

  • Daniel Callow, “Effects of Acute Exercise Intensity on Neural Efficiency Using Semantic Memory Task Activation in Younger Adults: An fMRI Study”
  • Mallory N. Haselberger, “Transcending the Ordinary: Artistic Transmission and Artemisia Gentileschi’s Penitent Magdalen” 
  • Caroline Johnson, “The Rise of the Iron Ladies: Female Leadership in Democracies (1960-2015)”

2017 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Dougal Forrest, “When the Time Comes” 
  • Jillian Kunze, “Solar Cells in Outer Space”

Research Paper

  • Cavan Morley, “Gentrification and Race: Examining the Impact of Gentrification on Minority Populations” 
  • Chika Okusogu, “Affirmative Action for African-Americans: Social Justice or Discrimination in Higher Education?” 
  • Olivia Turner, “Encryption Regulation: A Privacy Disaster or a Security Breakthrough?”

Thesis

  • Adam G. Berger, “Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy Sensors For Detection of Drugs and Small Molecules: Towards Real-World Applications”
  • Natalia Sampaio Moura, “Disrupting Toxin and Anti-Toxin Interaction in Mycobacterium tuberculosis through a High Throughput Drug Screen” 
  • Carolina Siqueira Paranhos Velloso, “‘What Have I to Do With Politicks?’ Public Women’s Intellectual Spaces in Early America”

2016 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Justin Buck, “Thinking Outside the Cell: Rehabilitating America’s Youth”
  • Bryce Hammond, “Rhetorical Rivalry: An Analysis of Shannon Watts’s Effectiveness in ‘Did gun law loopholes enable Charleston and Chattanooga?’”

Research Paper

  • Eric Jeney, “The Failure of Password Expiration”
  • Geneva Kropper, “‘Sizzling With Advocacy’: The Political Life of Barbara Mikulski”
  • Jacob Magid, “Hyphenated-Israelism”

Thesis

  • Shane Falcinelli, “Toxicology and Drug Delivery Applications of Acyclic Cucurbit[n]uril-Type Molecular Containers”
  • Jessica Liu, “Is China Really Consistent? Empirical Analyses of China’s Behavior in the United Nations Security Council”
  • Eric Zhou, “Identification and Characterization of Small Molecule Allosteric Inhibitors of Alg44 Binding to Cyclic di-GMP in Pseudomonas aeruginosa”

2015 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Allison Giza, “Modern Movie Magic”
  • Lizbeth Hu, “Lost Girls in a New York Neverland”
  • Rachel Zemel, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Columbus’s Dynamic Perspectives Resulting from Power and Religion”

Research Paper

  • Elliot Frank, “The Shadow of Hollywood, the Aftershock of Watts: Divergent Political Thought Within the L.A. Rebellion School”
  • Vishnupriya Kareddy, “Scriptural Authority and Competing Goods in the Wake of Rorty”
  • Susan Lubejko, “The Evolution and Health Consequences of Bats as Virus Reservoirs”

Thesis

  • Stephen Randall, “The Structure of Superforms”
  • Hannah Spooner, “Methods of Quantifying Leading Edge Vortex Burst on Rotating Wings”

2014 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Sarah Blumberg, “Kids These Days: The Troublesome Sexuality of the Child”
  • Brandon Hurn, “So a Frog is Driving a Car: A Psycholinguistic Foray into Joke/Riddle Production”

Research Paper

  • Shimon Epstein, “Drone Strikes in the War on Terror”
  • Priya Krishnan, “The Art of ‘Inter-Being’: Discovering Unity in Diversity in the Spiritual Traditions of the World”
  • Briana Kyne, “HIV-1 Latency: Potential Therapy Regimens and Implications of Reactivation”
  • Jessica Liu, “A Sliding Scale: Nuclear Proliferation Among States”

Thesis

  • Allison Arai, “β-adrenergic Receptors Regulate Mitral Cell Excitability in the Main Olfactory Bulb”
  • Esther Louisa Robinson, “The Free Riders of Realism: Why Different Levels of American Government Have Divergent Attitudes Towards Chinese Investment in the United States”
  • Kelsey E. Woods, “Parent-Child Interaction Therapy-Emotion Development for Preschoolers with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)”

2013 Recipients

Short Essay

  • Dani Dredger and Tacy Lambiase, “Properties, Wealth, and Losing Yourself in Jane Austen Monopoly”
  • Cara Hamel, “Using Intelligence to Trump Violence”
  • Kai-li Liang, “The Polio Experience”

Research Paper

  • John Daristotle, “Formulating Policy on Cell Phone Radiation”
  • Benjamin Kramer, “Power and Pragmatism: Lyndon B. Johnson: Hill Country Politico to Congressman, 1908-1941”
  • Amanda Ward, “Unforeseen Consequences: The Effects of the Development of Adaptive Immunity on the Evolution of Innate Immunity”

Thesis

  • Alexandra Houston-Ludlam, “The Effects of Gene Knockout of the Vesicular Monoamine Transporter (VMAT2; SLC18A2) and the Dopamine Transporter (DAT; SLC3A6) on Ethanol Consumption and Escalation in Mice”
  • Janina Aldona Vaitkus, “Effects of Inflammation and Substrate Stiffness on Human Mesenchymal Stem Cell Interactions with the Vascular Endothelium”