Fifteen Clark Honors College graduating seniors were selected as the 2023 Thesis Award winners for the current academic year.

The winners were nominated by CHC faculty and selected by a committee for the awards. Topics ranged from Black American feminist literature to tracking the health of salt marshes to the effects of the labor market on light rail transportation.

Faculty nominated 86 theses to the committee for consideration. The award categories, student winners and thesis titles are:

Aaron Novick Award: Sarah Beaudoin, “Investigation of Non-Platinum Group Metal Catalysts for Pure-Water Anion Exchange Membrane Electrolysis.”

Barbara Corrado Pope Award: Lauryn Cole, “Fat and Fabulous: The Power of Contemporary Romance as a Site of Anti-Oppression Work.”

Creative Thesis Award: Fausto Corral, “The Love De Una Madre; A Play on Bilingualism in American Theatre.”

Robert D. Clark Service Award with a special commendation for the quality of the thesis: Devan McClain, “Information Sources and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Adults with Disabilities.”

Social Justice Thesis Award: Ava Minu-Sepehr, “Counter-Mapping the Coos Bay Estuaries: Amplifying Indigenous and Environmental Histories.”

Social Sciences Thesis Award: Eli Molloy, “Labor Market Effects of Light Rail Transit: A Case Study of the Orange MAX Line.”

International Thesis Award: Laurel O'Brien, “A Place to Be: Ibasho and Spaces of Community Comfort in the TV Series Midnight Diner.”

Interdisciplinary Thesis Award: Cedar O'Konski, “Intelligibility of American Sign Language Dialogue in Popular Media.”

President's Award: Kennedy Parish, “The River to Paradise: Vanishing and Transforming Memories in Black American Feminist Utopian Novels.”

Scientific Frontiers Award: Gabriel Peery, “Vision Transformers under Data Poisoning Attacks.”

Aaron Novick Award: Carmen Resnick, “Mapping the Sequence-Function Landscape for Antibiotic Resistance in the DHFR Family.”

Creative Thesis Award: Isabella Senatori, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: An Artistic Inquiry.”

Henry Melton Alley Literary Thesis Award: Jacob Smith, “Reclaiming through Retelling: Theorizing Caribbean Cultural Identity through 20th-century Caribbean Retellings of Western Literary Classics.”

Applied Research Award: Sophia Somerscales, “Snitching on Ditches: Tracking Salt Marsh Health Using Transfer Learning.”

Robert D. Clark Award: Micah Woods, “Exploring Biological Agency and Embodiment to Overcome the Limitations of Gene-Centric Perspectives and Relationalize Biological Inquiry.”