UCSC’s graduate students put in long hours studying their chosen topics, including social movements, population distribution, weather patterns, computer game innovations, the shape of planets, and elephant seal behavior.
Most of these labors take place in libraries, laboratories, and offices, or out in the field. The 7th annual Graduate Research Symposium on Friday, May 6, gave these researchers a chance to show off in public for a while, highlighting their achievements before a large group of faculty, staff, friends, and colleagues at the University Center.
A panel of judges awarded prizes for outstanding oral presentations, interactive media, and research poster displays that boiled complex projects down to key paragraphs and striking visuals.
One of the judges was Professor Tyrus Miller, vice provost and dean of Graduate Studies, who presented the awards this year.
Miller said the judges valued clarity, vividness, and relevance. They expected participants to distill complex concepts and present them in a clear and lucid way that non-experts can understand.
“They need to convey the importance of the project – the ‘so what’ element,” Miller said. “They need to communicate specialized information to an educated and informed but non-expert audience.”
Among the winners was Jennifer Maresh, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology. Even the title of her project sounds fantastically complicated: "The Economics of Movement in 3 Dimensions: the At-Sea Biomechanics and Energetic Costs of Swimming in a Marine Top Predator."
But Maresh summarized her project in a concise and elegant way: She is studying the effects of disturbances on elephant seals as they try to forage for fish and squid.
"How do these disturbances, including human impact, affect their swimming behavior, their movements, and their ability to make a living from foraging?” Maresh said. “How resilient are they in terms of responding to disturbances?"
Here is the complete list of award winners from this year’s symposium:
Chancellor’s Award
($500): Elaine Gan, Digital Arts & New Media: CONSIDERING RICE: VISUAL EXPERIMENTS IN MAPPING WORLDS OTHERWISE (Media)
Graduate Dean’s Award
($250): Jennifer Maresh, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology: THE ECONOMICS OF MOVEMENT IN 3 DIMENSIONS: THE AT-SEA BIOMECHANICS AND ENERGETIC COSTS OF SWIMMING IN A MARINE TOP PREDATOR (Media)
Alumni Association Awards
($150 UCSC Bookstore gift certificate):
Division of the Arts
Fabiola Hanna, Digital Arts & New Media: WE ARE HISTORY: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF LEBANON (Poster)
Jack Baskin School of Engineering
Tela Favaloro, Electrical Engineering: NANOSTRUCTURING THERMOELECTRIC MATERIALS FOR WASTE ENERGY RECOVERY AND POWER GENERATION (Poster)
Evan Paull, Biomolecular Engineering & Bioinformatics: THE UCSC BIOMOLECULAR ENTITIES AND SETS TOOLS (BEAST) IS AN INTERACTIVE WEB APPLICATION THAT ALLOWS BIOLOGISTS TO SEARCH, DEFINE AND FILTER SETS OF MOLECULAR ENTITIES SUCH AS GENES, PROTEINS, SMALL MOLECULE DRUGS, AND mRNAS (Poster)
Division of Physical & Biological Sciences
Viranga Perera, Earth & Planetary Sciences: WHY IS THE MOON ASYMMETRIC? (Oral presentation)
Tiffany Wise-West, Environmental Studies: MOBILIZATION OF THE SANTA CRUZ WHARF COASTAL ENERGY RESEARCH FACILITY (Oral presentation)
Dean’s Awards:
($100 UCSC Bookstore gift certificate):
Division of the Arts
Emily Martinez, Digital Arts & New Media: MAPPING ASTHMA RESEARCH FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING AIR QUALITY (Poster)
Division of Humanities
Nathan Arnett, Linguistics: ENCODING AND RETRIEVING SUBJECTS DURING SENTENCE PROCESSING (Poster)
Division of Physical & Biological Sciences
Matthew Krauel, Mathematics VERTEX OPERATOR ALGEBRAS AND JACOBI FORMS (Oral presentation)
Division of Social Sciences
Yiwei Wang, Environmental Studies: INFERRING BEHAVIOR IN WILD MOUNTAIN LIONS USING A THREE-DIMENSIONAL ACCELEROMETER (Oral presentation)
Jack Baskin School of Engineering
Priyam Chatterjee, Electrical Engineering: PATCH-BASED LOCALLY OPTIMAL DENOISING(Poster)
