Each year, the Clark Honors College (CHC) recognizes exceptional theses with Thesis Awards. Prize-winning theses evoke comments from advisors such as “a model for future students,” “deserves to be published as a scholarly article,” “comparable to doctoral work,” and “stunning.”  Students who win these prizes maintained a strong academic record, while independently designing and executing research projects. They not only wrote flawless theses, but performed at the highest level in the oral thesis defense. 

We strongly encourage the primary thesis advisors of students who have completed exemplary work to nominate the thesis for an award. Nomination forms are emailed to primary thesis advisors following the oral defense. Primary thesis advisors with questions regarding how to nominate a student should contact Academic Thesis and Programs Manager Miriam Jordan (mjordan@uoregon.edu).

The President's Award

The President’s Award is the oldest and most prestigious CHC commencement award. It recognizes an outstanding scholastic record at the University of Oregon and completion of a thesis of especially distinguished quality.

• Eden McCall (2024), Nature Next Door: A Multimedia Science Story
• Kennedy Parish (2023), The River to Paradise: Vanishing and Transforming Memories in Black American Feminist Utopian Novels
• Raimy Khalife-Hamdan (2022), Al ‘Aysh Mushtarak, Al ‘Aysh Wahid: Interreligious Coexistence and Cross-Religious Engagement Among Young Adults in Southern Lebanon
• Alina Salagean (2021), Defining the Roles of Conserved DNA Repair Complexes in Caenorhabditis elegans Meiotic Genome Integrity
• Hillary Brooke Ellman (2020), A Thousand and One Thresholds of Ardor: A Critical Analysis of Female Madness in 21st Century Western Literature
• Nelly Merveille Nouboussi Nkenfack (2020), Glomerular Signals Underlying Olfactory Navigation
• Joshua Joseph Pearman (2020), What Types of Status Matter? Consensus, Accuracy, and Personality Antecedents of a Two-Component Model of Status

The Aaron Novick Award

The Aaron Novick Award, named in honor of the world-renowned scientist and founding head of the UO Institute of Molecular Biology, recognizes a student or students who have conducted especially distinguished research in the field of science.

• Eli Rheingold (2024), Moisture Controlled Triboelectrification during Coffee Grinding
• Lena Wehn (2024), Developing Chlorogenic Acid as a Coffee Metric
• Sarah Beaudoin (2023), Investigation of Non-Platinum Group Metal Catalysts for Pure-Water Anion Exchange Membrane Electrolysis
• Carmen Resnick (2023), Mapping the Sequence-Function Landscape for Antibiotic Resistance in the DHFR Family
• Karly Fear (2022), Modeling and Characterizing BMP-2 Protein Binders for Fracture Regeneration
• Erica Waldron (2022), Exploring the Effect of Social Media Popularity Metrics on Curiosity
• Emmalyn Leonard (2021), Exploring the Neural Basis of Visual Processing in the Freely Moving Mouse
• Daria Wonderlick (2021), What Can a Small RNA Molecule Teach Us About Molecular Switches? Distinguishing Contact and Ensemble Epistasis in the Adenine Riboswitch
• Natalie Beatie (2020), Exploring Depth Estimation from Motion Parallax in a Mouse Model
• Rennie M. Kendrick (2020), The Effect of Learning Condition on Memory for and Integration of Related Information
• Nelson Perez-Catalan (2020), Jack of All Trades, The Role of Astrocytes in Circuit Formation and Plasticity

The Robert D. Clark Award

The Robert D. Clark Award commemorates our college’s founder and recognizes a commitment to the liberal arts as well as an impressive thesis.

• Kyle Trefny (2024), Youth Preferences for Wildfire Resilience Involvement:  Piloting a Stated Choice Experiment in Oregon and California
• Micah Woods (2023), Exploring Biological Agency and Embodiment to Overcome the Limitations of Gene-Centric Perspectives and Relationalize Biological Inquiry
• Jakob Hollenbeck (2022), “The Specter of Psychological Abuse”: The Disregard for Emotional Harms in Oregon Juvenile Dependency Courts
• Oscar Bernat (2021), Towards A New Doctor-Patient Relationship: Complementing Medical Principalism with an Ethics of Care
• Jacob Bromham (2021), Fact or Folk: Evaluating Common Theories of Private Interests as the Cause of the Iraq War
• Makenna Lorraine Pennel (2020), Assessing the Role of Monomer Flux and Oleic Acid Concentration in a Continuous Growth, Nanocrystal Synthesis
• Miriam Rose Thielman (2020), “You Shall not Oppress a Resident Alien:” The Conception of Immigrants in the Hebrew Bible

Barbara Corrado Pope Award

The Barbara Corrado Pope Award, named in honor of a former director of the Clark Honors College and head of the UO Women's Studies Department, recognizes a distinguished thesis in the area of diversity, including gender and ethnic studies.

• Hannah Lesti (2024), The Social Meanings of Gold in India: Women, Inheritance, and the Failure of Financialization
• Lauryn Cole (2023), Fat and Fabulous: The Power of Contemporary Romance as a Site of Anti-Oppression Work
• Alayna Neher (2022), The Red Thread: Adoptee Formations of Kinship and Queer Diasporic Traditions in Chinese America
• Morning Glory Ritchie (2022), Hidden and Unremembered: The Misattributions of the Seventeenth-Century Works by Judith Leyster, Clara Peeters, and Rachel Ruysch
• Isabel Crabtree (2021), The Role of Listener Ideology in Perception of Non-Native Speech Volume
• Adrianna Vaca-Navarro (2021), Border Imperialism and Agricultural Servitude in the Lives of Mexican Immigrants
• Simone C. Hally (2020), Implementation Analysis of Campus Sexual Violence Prevention Programming
• Jordan Kalani Harden (2020), Understanding Native Hawaiian Land Relations through Kanaka Maoli Literature
• Ashley Meghan Kim (2020), Thao: Expanding the Horizons of the Food Justice Movement Through Storytelling

Henry Melton Alley Literary Thesis Award

The Henry Melton Alley Literary Thesis Award, named in honor of a Clark Honors College emeritus professor with a strong commitment to the development of writing skills, recognizes a distinguished thesis and thesis defense in the area of literary criticism or creative writing.

• Eric Lane (2024), Violence, Language, and Embodiment: Reimagining Identity through Writing in Twenty-First Century Asian American Poetry
• Jacob Smith (2023), Reclaiming through Retelling: Theorizing Caribbean Cultural Identity through 20th-century Caribbean Retellings of Western Literary Classics
• Mariah Botkin (2022), The Body Speaks: Somatic Eruption in Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Autotheoretical Reflections
• Rose Gibian (2021), Negative Space: Portfolio Investigation on the Intersection of Superhero Comics and Ambiguous Loss
• Madeleine Nichole Monkewicz (2020), Women Breaking Bad: A Portfolio Investigation Into Prose and Comic Storytelling
• Andrew James Tesoriero (2020), The Passing of Time: A Novel and How to Advertise One

Scientific Frontiers Award

The Scientific Frontiers Award recognizes distinguished theses that demonstrate innovative scientific techniques or novel trans-disciplinary approaches to solving problems on the leading edge of scientific research.

• Ethan Dinh (2024), Leveraging Machine Learning to Identify Proteomic Biomarkers of Tibial Bone Stress Reinjury
• Gabriel Peery (2023), Vision Transformers under Data Poisoning Attacks
• Henry Hochstatter (2022), Discovery of Affinity Binding Partners for Controlled Protein Delivery
• Jacob Evarts (2021), Putative Prion State Dynamics in RNA-Modifying Enzymes
• Jenna Rudolph (2021), Investigating the Possible Benefits of Maternal Thiamine Supplementation for Enhancing Social Alertness in Infants at Risk for Thiamine Deficiency
• Sage Evan Albright (2020), Quantifying the Extent of Culturing Bias in Prokaryotic Taxonomies
• Madelyn Nicole Scott (2020), Quantifying the Spatial Morphology of Organic Films through Polarization-dependent Imaging
• Abbey Lee Ward (2020), Language Dominance and Lexical-Semantic Processing in Bilingual Toddlers

Creative Thesis Award

The Creative Thesis Award recognizes a distinguished thesis of a creative nature.

• Chloe Lee (2024), Spaces Between: Navigating Time and Memory through Comic Paneling
• Fausto Corral (2023), The Love De Una Madre; A Play on Bilingualism in American Theatre
• Isabella Senatori (2023), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: An Artistic Inquiry
• Audra McNamee (2022), Welcome to Computer Science: Designing a Comic Tour of Computers and Computing
• Josephine Evans (2021), An Exploration of My American Dream Story Through Kente Cloth
• Noah Jordan (2021), Across the Threshold: Comparing Aesthetic Experience on the Street and in the Gallery
• Hyacinth Schukis (2020), AFTERLIVES (Gender) Queer Photographic Self-Representation and Reenactment
• Sophia M. Wentlandt (2020), The Springfield (OR) Public Library

The Interdisciplinary Thesis Award

The Interdisciplinary Thesis Award recognizes a thesis that crosses the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.

• Lily SlatonBarker (2024), Somatics through Suzuki
• Rigel Wakil (2024), Measuring Human Emotional Response to Architectural Materials in Daylighting Conditions
• Cedar O'Konski (2023), Intelligibility of American Sign Language Dialogue in Popular Media
• Ryan Laws (2022), Reimagining National Parks: The Case for Hetch Hetchy Valley, Yosemite National Park, as a Place for Environmental Justice and Restoration
• Katie Jensen (2021), The PMRC’s Filthy Fifteen: A Censorship Battle For 1980s Cultural Control
• Nicole Mowery (2021), Even Objects Revolt Against Regimentation: Art and Censorship in Post-WWI Germany and the Rise of Dadaism. A Thesis and Film
• Julia W. Liu (2020), Quantifying Diabetes Disparities Related to American Indian and Alaskan Native Residency on Reservations
• Julia Roselynn Mueller (2020), Guidelines for the Representation of Women in Written News
• Peregrine Daniel Painter (2020), Induction of Histone H3K27 Methylation by Non-native Telomere Repeats in Neurospora crassa

International Thesis Award

The International Thesis Award goes to goes to a distinguished thesis that focuses on culture and/or society outside the United States.

• Lierta Nako (2024), Getting to the Root: Preventing Violence against Women in Guatemala through Interventions with Men
• Laurel O'Brien (2023), A Place to Be: Ibasho and Spaces of Community Comfort in the TV Series Midnight Diner
• Rebecca Vance (2022), North Korean Defector Flows Across Multinational Boundaries: Vulnerabilities and Failures of International Human Rights Mechanisms
• Brenna Barton (2021), Dear Comrades: Analyzing Letter to La Pirenaica as Migrant Narrative
• Ally Shaw (2021), Translation and Discussion of Choi Sung-Guk’s “Labor Interrogation”
• Nikos David Jordan (2020), Sámi and the Climate Crisis: The Colonial Anthropocene
• Alex Aaron Mentzel (2020), Rehearsing the Revolution: Franz Kafka's Minor Literature and the “Other” Bertolt Brecht in an Original Translation and Anti-Authoritarian Adaptation of Kafka's “The Trial.”

Applied Research Thesis Award

The Applied Research Award recognizes distinguished theses that implement novel scientific research approaches for real-world applications.

• Sanjana Basak (2024), OptiDicer Reduces Long CUG RNA Accumulation in Corneal Endothelial Cells from Patients with Fuchs' Dystrophy
• Sophia Somerscales (2023), Snitching on Ditches: Tracking Salt Marsh Health Using Transfer Learning
• Charlotte Klein (2022), Evaluating the Extent and Sources of Zinc Contamination within Eugene-Springfield Waterways
• Alejandro Bechtle (2021), Accessible Lighting Design in the Workplace: Reducing the Negative Impact of Photosensitivity and Migraines
• Noah Carey Mifsud (2020), Going the Distance: Increasing Aerodynamic Efficiency in Electric Motorcycles with the Addition of a Rear Fairing
• Kayla Jane Walker (2020), The Role of Semantic Predictability in Adaptation to Nonnative-Accented Speech

Social Justice Thesis Award

The Social Justice Thesis Award recognizes a thesis that demonstrates a strong commitment to social and political causes for the betterment of society.

• Beatriz Cabrera (2024), Mexican-Origin Children in Mixed-Status Families: Well-being and Public School Support
• Ava Minu-Sepehr (2023), Counter-Mapping the Coos Bay Estuaries: Amplifying Indigenous and Environmental Histories
• Blake Hardin (2022), Identifying COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Motivators for People who Inject Drugs in Lane County
• Aaron Lewis (2022), “They Just Want the Eyesore Gone”: Evictions and Belonging in Eugene’s Washington Jefferson Park Houseless Encampment
• Caley Anne Thao Carlson (2021), Forever Foreign: International Adoptees and Semi-Citizenship in America
• Aysa Klocke (2021), Evaluating the Success of Oregon's Norwegian-Inspired Prison Reform
• Jed Myron Moody (2020), Incorporating Exceptions: Re-Linking Environmental and Accessible Design in Practice
• Momo Wilms-Crowe (2020), "Desde Abajo, Como Semilla": Puerto Rican Food Sovereignty as Embodied Decolonial Resistance

Social Sciences Thesis Award

The Social Sciences Thesis Award recognizes a distinguished thesis in the Social Sciences broadly conceived.

• Sarah Wittmann (2024), The PSU Student Strike: A Legacy of Collaboration and Nonviolent Protest
• Eli Molloy (2023), Labor Market Effects of Light Rail Transit: A Case Study of the Orange MAX Line

Solutions Thesis Award

The Solutions Thesis Award recognizes real-world solutions to issues and problems in the public and private sectors proposed in distinguished theses that emphasize application and engage a practitioner audience.

• Caroline DeBruine (2024), Parking Paradigm Shift: An Evaluation of Land Use Efficiency and Parking Policy in Eugene, Oregon
• Megan Tuleya (2024), Healthcare for All Immigrants: A Case Study of Healthier Oregon's Implementation

The Robert D. Clark Service Award

The Robert D. Clark Service Award is awarded when a graduating senior has made remarkable contributions to the CHC community. 

2024: Neha Pandit
2023: Devan McClain
2022: Alexis Han
2021: Jyhreh Johnson
2020: Sophie Marie Bange