Deans' Awards are granted to 50 undergraduate projects, 10 from each of the academic divisions. Submissions are an outstanding senior thesis or project completed during the current academic year. Each winning project will receive a $100 cash award, and is considered for a Chancellor’s Award. Chancellor's Award winning projects receive a $500 cash award, and are considered for the Steck Award. The names of the winners will be announced at college commencement ceremonies.

2017 AWARD RECIPIENTS

Each student or student team worked on a senior research or milestone project and is mentored by a faculty member (noted in parentheses below). A committee in each division selects the Deans’ Award recipients. Winners of the Chancellor’s Awards (noted in bold and by an *asterisk below) are selected from recipients of Deans’ Awards. 

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Division of the Arts

*Stephanie Howe, "Blasting Through the City: Combating Feminicide Through Public Art in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico" (Stacy Kamehiro)

*Aubrey Isaacman, Hesiquio Mendez Alejo, Grace Ko, Nathan Lie, Linda Nguyen, "Trash Toss" (Tamara Ball)

*Janet Sanchez Noguera, "Bachelor of Music Senior Recital, Guitar" (William Coulter)

Alex Escobedo, "BOUQUET" (Norman Locks and Brian Quan)

Lucy Ashton, " Ghost, Copper, and Flies: Sammy Bali's Reconciliation with the Past" (Rachel Pusateri)

Sophia Dimatteo, "Performing the Everyday: The Postmodern Aesthetics of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A" (Jordan Reznick Renner)

Benjamin Judkins, "Marshall" (Lawrence Andrews)

Emilio Kobak, "Ola" (Cameron Archer)

Hesiquio Mendez Alejo, "Immigration Game" (Elizabeth Swensen)

Roan Bontempo, "Reconciliation" (Normal Locks)

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Jack Baskin School of Engineering

*Aviv Elor, Project Star Catcher: Virtual Reality Game for Upper Limb Exercises Based on Constraint Induced Therapy" (Mircea Teodorescu and Sri Kurniawan)

*Henry Hinton, "UCSC iGem 2016 Individual Thesis" (David Bernick and Kevin Karplus)

*Edmundo Perez, "Structural Studies to Understand Evasion of an Astrovirus serotype-2 subtype to a Potent Neutralizing Antibody" (Rebecca Dubois)

Matthew Carberry, Eric Wells, Eric Ortega, Matthew Moranda, Marcel Tress, Navneet Kaur, "SlugSat" (Stephen Petersen)

Joseph Carlos, Andrew Mikhail, Michael Bissani, Patrick Lee, Xiang He, "Nautilus Senior Desgin Project" (Patrick Mantey)

Jamielynne Batugo, Marco Carmona, Conrad Christensen, Jake Lee, Kevin Lee, Brian Nichols, Jesus Soto, August Valera, Jeffrey Zheng, "Home Assistance Help Alert Senior Design Project" (Patrick Mantey and Stephen Petersen)

Mark Harrington, "Real Time Peak Detection for Translocation, Control, and Analysis in Solid State Nanopores" (Holger Schmidt)

Vrindavan Harrison, "Creating and Characterizing a Diverse Corpus of Sarcasm in Dialogue" (Marilyn Walker)

Maximillain Marin, "High-throughout Functional Screen of Skipped Exons Contributing to Lung Cancer Development" (Angela Brooks)

Alexander Martin-Ginold, "Nanocell: Simple Nanopore Sensor with Smartphone Interface" (Kevin Karplus)

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Division of Humanities

*Miguel Giron, "Prostitution at the Border Towns: Moral Reform and Abolition along the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1903-1920" (Grace Peña Delgado and Lisbeth Haas)

*Hannah Higgins, "The Art of Living Archives: Heartographies in Queer/Feminist Historiography" (Bettina Aptheker)

*Cori Ann Hoover, "Deir el Bahri Project: The Lineage of Royal Legitimization" (Elaine A. Sullivan)

Martin Dietz, "The Contrast Between Moral Interaction and Amoral Conduct in the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Greg O'Malley)

Marcus Dovigi, "Language and the Law: A Comparison of the American and Islamic Legal Systems" (Juan C. Gómez-Rivas)

Arash Ehya, "From ‘Oriental Despotism’ to the Obshchina: The Place of Asia and the Asiatic Mode of Production in the Works of Marx and Engels" (Juned Noor Shaikh)

Sydney Kasahara, "Shaping the Terrain: Racing the Movies 2011-2015" (Susan Gillman)

Mariel Paul, "The Hijra Community of Bangladesh" (Marcia Ochoa and Madhavi Murty)

Serene Tseng, "Male Homosexuality in German Cinema: The Lurid Ride Through the West and the Discrete Cruise Through the East" (Edward H. Kehler)

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Division of Physical & Biological Sciences

*Alexander Infanger, "The Existence of Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes that Paralyze RHESSI" (David Smith)

*Derek Popple, "Removal of Oxoanion Pollutants via Silver Bipyridine Acetate" (Scott Oliver)

*Ian Weaver, "Modelling Accretion Stream and Disk Evolution in Wasp-12/b" (Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz)

Alejandro Anaya, "Single Cell Knock-out of the Fragile X Mental Retardation 1 Gene in the Mice Cortex" (Yi Zuo)

Nicolas Blanc, "A vibrational study of Fe2P2O7 and Cr2P2O7 under high-pressures: Structural implications for novel phosphate materials" (Quentin Williams)

Katharine Bunch, "Determination of the Structural Mechanism of the CDK4-Cyclin D1-p27 Complex" (Seth Rubin)

Quincy Okobi, "The Role of Pds1 in Cell Size Control in Budding Yeast Cells" (Doug Kellogg)

Gregory Rischbleter, "Potential of Industrial Sapphire Sensors for Use in ILC Calorimetry" (Bruce Schumm and Vitally Fadyev)

Krystal Ruiz-Rocha, "Events in the Life of a Globular Cluster" (Enrico Ramirez Ruiz)

John Shin, "Kondo-Ising and Tight-Binding Models for TmB4" (Zach Schlesinger and B. Sriram Shastry)

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Division of Social Sciences

*Rosemary Applen, "Flooding and Sustainable Flood Management in the UK" (Anna L. Tsing and Kristine Nichole Lawson)

*Joanna Beltrán Girón, "Popular Liberation in the Midst of a Peaceful War" (Sarah-Hope Parmeter and Regina D. Langhout)

*Madeleine Keller, "Can the Heartland Be Healed?: Challenges to Community Organizing in Poor White Rural America" (Mary Beth Pudup)

Darshani Alahan, "Growing up as a Second-Generation White American Hindu: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to an Ethnographic Study" (Ben D. Crow)

Alec Apodaca, "An Eco-Archaeological Study of Indigenous Clam Bed Management at Colonial Period Toms Point (CA-MRN-202), Tomales Bay, California" (Tsim D. Schneider)

Molly Rose Jacobsen, "Bats in the Agricultural Matrix: The Effects of Agricultural Intensification on Bat Community Composition" (Elissa Michelle Olimpi and Stacy M. Philpott)

Celia Willson Ringstrom, "Transitioning from Ego to Eco-Focused Cognition: Altruistic Intelligence and the Momentum of Social Justice Engagement" (Lisa B. Rofel)