Award-Winning Graduate Students
Each year departments present Graduate Achievement Awards at Honors Day.
Meghna Bhattacharya, PhD Physics 21
With her internationally recognized work on the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), “Meghna Bhattacharya has been a …Read more...
Zach Redding, PhD Psychology 21
For his master’s project, Redding studied pharmacological approaches for reducing attentional lapses in rats. This work was presented at the …Read more...
Jemar Tisby, PhD History 21
Author of the New York Times bestseller The Color of Compromise, president and cofounder of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, and cohost of the podcast …Read more...
Martha Grace Mize,
MA Anthropology & Southern Studies 21
“My research, focused on rural economic development efforts in the Alabama Black Belt, has only added to my plans to work with and for local communities in the …
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Allison M. Serraes, PhD English 20
Serraes’ work with UM’s Prison-to-College Pipeline Program serving incarcerated students shaped her research and future plans. She received a …Read more...
Sayontani Sinha Roy,
PhD Chemistry & Biochemistry 21
“Finding cleaner alternative energy sources is the need of the hour. It is especially important for countries where the persistent energy crisis is the bottleneck of …
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Christian Leus, MA Southern Studies 21
2021 Graduate Achievement Award recipient As a student on the documentary track, Leus studies film and culture in the South. Her MA thesis, “What Remains: Telling the Story of Irene Taylor’s Murder,” is a six-part podcast accompanying a written paper examining a 1939 murder in her hometown of...
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Allison M. Serraes, PhD English 20
2020 Graduate Achievement Award recipient Serraes’ work with UM’s Prison-to-College Pipeline Program serving incarcerated students shaped her research and future plans. She received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for her study of African American women’s literature in response to...
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Naga Arjun Sakthivel, PhD Chemistry 20
2020 Graduate Achievement Award recipient Sakthivel joined Professor Amala Dass “to discover how many atoms of gold would make it metallic, as it increases from few atoms to bulk. We’ve discovered the smallest metallic gold nanoparticle with 279 gold atoms and 84 ligands. It is also the largest gold...
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Jeffery Michael Pavlacic, PhD Clinical Psychology 23
2020 Graduate Achievement Award recipient Pavlacic plans for a career conducting research and treating individuals suffering from PTSD and co-occurring disorders. He provides psychological assessments and interventions to adolescents and adults with a variety of psychological difficulties at...
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Kevin Yi-Wei Lin, PhD Physics 20
2020 Graduate Achievement Award recipient When not drumming for UM’s Collegians and Mississippian Jazz Ensemble, serving as Taiwanese Student Association president, or helping with department outreach, Lin helped devise an acoustic method to detect deterioration in a dry storage cask of spent...
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