10 Award-Winning Dissertations from the University of Michigan
From Asian American movements against police violence to the study of thermal and magnetic properties in strongly correlated materials, the insights published by this year’s ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award winners are poised to make major impacts
Editor’s note: this is a modified version of an article originally published on the Rackham Graduate School’s website.
The 2020 Distinguished Dissertation Awards program, sponsored by ProQuest, recognizes exceptional work produced by doctoral students at the University of Michigan for the high caliber of their scholarship and the significance and interest of their findings.
Each year, Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School invites faculty to nominate outstanding dissertations produced in their programs. The nomination dossiers are read and discussed by a review panel of faculty members who identify the finalists. Then, members of the Michigan Society of Fellows read the finalists’ dissertations, review their merits, and select the winners.
Here's a full list of winners of the 2020 Distinguished Dissertation Awards. Winners are pictured clockwise from the top left. Read the event program for details on the awardees’ research.
- Kathryn Holihan, Germanic Languages and Literatures: Staging the Hygienic Subject: Anatomy, Bodies, and the Public Health Exhibition in Germany, 1911-1931
- Christina May, Neuroscience: How Sweet It Is: The Role of Taste Perception in Diet-Induced Obesity
- Vivian Truong, American Culture: “Whose City? Our City!”: Asian American and Multiracial Movements Against Police Violence in New York
- Adrian Deoancă, Anthropology: End of the Line: State Infrastructure, Material Ruin, and Precarious Labor Along Romanian Railroads
- Molly Brookfield, History and Women’s and Gender Studies: Watching the Girls Go By: Sexual Harassment in the American Street, 1850-1980
- Adi Foord, Astronomy and Astrophysics: Discovering the Missing Population of AGN Pairs with Chandra
- Lu Chen, Physics: Study of Thermal and Magnetic Properties in Strongly Correlated Materials
- Devika Bagchi, Molecular and Integrative Physiology: Investigating the Roles of Wnt Signaling in Mature Adipocyte Function
- Dominic Liao-McPherson, Aerospace Engineering and Scientific Computing: Variational and Time-Distributed Methods for Real-time Model Predictive Control
- Anne Menefee, Environmental Engineering: Carbon Mineralization in Fractured Basalt
Honorable mentions include:
- Geoffrey Burns, Kinesiology: Runners as Biomechanical Systems: New Approaches with the Spring-Mass Model
- Jessica Gillooly, Public Policy and Sociology: "911, Is This an Emergency?": How 911 Call-Takers Extract, Interpret, and Classify Caller Information
- Yugi Gu, Statistics
- Ka Ip, Psychology: Emotion Regulation in Three Cultures: A Multi-Contextual and Multi-Level Study of Preschool-Age Children in the United States, China and Japan
- Kwangnam Kim, Mechanical Engineering: Computational Discovery of Solid Electrolytes for Batteries: Interfacial Phenomena and Ion Mobility
- Layti Lausch, Film, Television, and Media
- Charles Lu, Biomedical Engineering
- Eduardo Martinez, Philosophy: Democratic Evaluation and Improvement: A Set of Standards for Citizens and Democratic Institutions
- Stephen Taller, Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences: The Role of Damage Rate on Cavity Nucleation with Co-injected Helium in Dual Ion Irradiated T91 Steel
- Sara Wong, Cellular and Molecular Biology: Mechanisms that Regulate the Termination of Myosin V Mediated Transport