The College of Arts and Sciences hosted Research Day on Tuesday, June 4 to celebrate the diverse scholarly activity taking place across our college.
Each year, we come together to celebrate our community's research into topics spanning the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. This year's program included 20 oral presentations and over 70 posters from tenured, tenure-track, teaching and research faculty; postdoctoral fellows; graduate and undergraduate students; and research trainees and staff.
Dean David Brown presented the Research Day awards, judged by a panel of faculty members representing nearly all the college's 13 departments, to recognize some of the standout presentations.
The Best Talk Award for Faculty and Research Staff was presented to Jannah Moussaoui, a research coordinator in the WELL Center, for her presentation Digital Phenotypes of Self-Injurious Urges (Jannah R. Moussaoui, BS, April R. Smith, PhD, and Elizabeth A. Velkoff, PhD). The runner up was Xiaorui Huang, PhD, assistant professor of Sociology, for Harness the Co-Benefit and Avoid the Trade-off: The Complex Relationship between Income Inequality and Carbon Dioxide Emissions.
The Best Talk Award for Students was presented to Alexandra Kelly, a PhD student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, for her presentation What do we know about emotions? (Alexandra Kelly and Evangelia G. Chrysikou, PhD). Tied for runner up were Beth Kern, biology PhD student, for Elucidating the mechanisms governing Drosophila germ cell tumorigenesis (Beth Kern and Kari Lenhart, PhD) and Ross Sonnenblick, psychology PhD student, for Engaging men in psychotherapy for eating disorders: A mixed-methods study (Ross Sonnenblick, BA, and Adrienne Juarascio, PhD).
The Best Poster Award was presented to Huiruo Zeng, a PhD student in the Department of Biology, for her poster Chemosensory Neural Basis of Anopheles Mosquito Oviposition (Huiruo Zeng and Ali Afify, PhD). The runner up was David Braun, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, for A personalized approach to studying the subjective experience of spontaneous thoughts using PCA and hierarchical clustering (David Braun, Lotus Shareef-Trudeau, Swetha Rao and Aaron Kucyi, PhD).
For the first time this year, the college also welcomed alumni judges Ken Huang, BS Biology '14 and Tammy Mai, BS Biology '22 to judge the inaugural Alumni Best Poster Award. The award was presented to undergraduate biology major Bijaya Manandhar for the poster Small-molecule Tip60 HAT Activator as a Potential AD Therapeutic (Bijaya Manandhar and Felice Elefant, PhD). The runner up was biology major Jessica Merzy for Novel ACSS2 Inhibitors Funciton as Radiation Sensitizers in Killing Breast Cancer Brain Metastatic Cells ex vivo (Jessica Merzy and Mauricio Reginato, PhD).