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”