Award-Winning Graduate Students
Each year departments present Graduate Achievement Awards at Honors Day.
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...
Read MoreAllison 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...
Read MoreNaga 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...
Read MoreJeffery 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...
Read MoreKevin 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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