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ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards

The ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards recognize highly accomplished graduate students who have produced exceptional dissertations of outstanding scholarly quality in any field of study.

General Information
Guidelines for Preparing Nominations
Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

The nomination form will be live in early September.

Open or Edit a Nomination

General Information

Eligibility

Nominees must be awarded the doctoral degree during the 2024 calendar year, which includes commencements held in May, August, or December. Students who defended the dissertation in 2023 but received the degree in 2024 are eligible to be nominated.

Students who defend the dissertation in fall 2024 but do not receive the degree until May 2025 are ineligible for the current year, but may be nominated for the 2025 competition. An exception is allowed for students in the dual M.D./Ph.D. Medical Science Training Program who have completed, defended, and submitted the final copy of the dissertation in 2024. These students are eligible to be nominated even though the awarding of the doctoral degree is deferred until completion of the M.D.

Nominations of outstanding women, minorities, and members of other groups historically underrepresented in their disciplines are encouraged.

Number of Awards

Ten awards in the amount of $1,000.

Source of Nominations

Nominations must be submitted by the chair of the student’s department or program, who may submit only one nomination per year.

Selection Process

A faculty committee reviews nominations and selects finalists which are forwarded to the Michigan Society of Fellows. Members of the Society of Fellows make the final selection, including those designated for honorable mention.

Deadline

The nomination deadline is Monday, November 4, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. EST.

For more information contact:

Honors and Awards
Rackham Graduate School
Telephone: (734) 615-0255
Email: [email protected]

Guidelines for Preparing Nominations

A nomination dossier must include:

Cover sheet with contact information
A letter of nomination
Up to three letters of support submitted directly by the letter writers
Dissertation abstract
Academic transcript (unofficial copy)
Curriculum Vitae

Incomplete dossiers cannot be reviewed.

The online nomination dossier may be set up by a faculty or staff member. Others may be given login access to the site as needed. The nomination system may be accessed as often as needed in order to complete the nomination dossier. All materials must be uploaded in Adobe PDF format.

Cover Sheet

Complete the online cover sheet with all information requested for both the nominee and the nominator—not the administrator who may have initiated the dossier—and the contact information for the graduate coordinator.

Letter of Nomination

The nominating letter should include the nominee’s name, department or program, and the title of the dissertation. As committee members represent a range of disciplines and may not be familiar with the nominee’s field, describe the quality and significance of the nominee’s dissertation in a way that conveys its significance to those not acquainted with the field.

The nominating letter may be no longer than 1,350 words and should address the areas below; those that do not will disadvantage the nominee:

A concise description of the dissertation topic
General comments about the nominee, including overall scholarly credentials
The degree of innovation, creativity, and insight shown by the author
The scope and importance of the work to the department and to the field
The effectiveness of the writing (including whether it is reasonably understandable to faculty in related disciplines)

Letters of Support

Up to three additional letters of up to 1,000 words each may be provided by faculty or others who have worked with the nominee and can comment on the merits of the dissertation. The letter writers must submit be instructed to submit letters in PDF format directly to the online nomination dossier. The link for letter writers to submit letters of support will be available when nominations open in early September.

Dissertation Abstract

Provide the nominee’s dissertation abstract.

Academic Transcript

Provide a current unofficial transcript of the nominee’s graduate work.

Curriculum Vitae

Provide the nominee’s current c.v., including full details of all publications and presentations.

Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

2023 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

Maria Ahmed, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, “Generation of Sparse, Combinatorial Wiring for Sensory Coding”
Markus Borsch, Electrical and Computer Engineering, “Theory of Lightwave-Driven Quantum Electronics in Solids”
Salem Elzway, History, “Arms of the State: A History of the Industrial Robot in Postwar America”
Luis Flores, Sociology, “The Regulatory Politics of Home-Based Moneymaking After the American Family Wage”
Alex Kapiamba, Mathematics, “Parabolic Towers and the Asymptotic Geometry of the Mandelbrot Set”
Kayla Kroning, Chemistry, “Engineering Genetically Encoded Fluorescent Integrators for G-Protein-Coupled Receptor Agonist Detection”
Graham Liddell, Comparative Literature, “Narrative Wayfinding: Author-izing Arab and Afghan Migration Across Morphing Borderscapes”
Kevin Napier, Physics, “Novel Methods of Detecting and Characterizing Solar System Objects”
Evan Radeen, English Language and Literature, “Imagining World Order: International Law and Literature in Britain, 1876-1907”
Lulu Shang, Biostatistics, “Statistical Methods and Computational Tools for Genetics and Genomics Data”

2022 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

Harsh Agarwal, Chemical Engineering, “Charge Transfer of Transitional Metal Ions for Flow Battery Applications”
Freida Blostein, Epidemiologic Science, “Salivary Omics Measurements as Biomarkers in Epidemiological Analyses”
Tyler Gardner, Astronomy and Astrophysics, “Probing Unique Regimes of Exoplanet Science with Long Baseline Interferometry”
Robert Graham, Biomedical Engineering, “Mechanisms of Action and Sources of Variability in Neurostimulation for Chronic Pain”
Youngrim Kim, Communication and Media, “Pandemic Data Publics: Surveillance Culture and Civic Action in Times of Public Health Emergencies”
Özge Korkmaz, Anthropology, “Politics, Ethics, and Complicity in Turkey’s Kurdistan: Anxieties of an Era”
Vincent Longo, Film, Television, and Media, “A Hard Act to Follow: Live Performance in the Age of the Hollywood Studio System (1920-1950)”
Andrew McInnerney, Linguistics, “The Argument/Adjunct Distinction and the Structure of Prepositional Phrases”
Weijing Tang, Statistics, “Statistical Learning for Large-Scale and Complex-Structured Data”
Weichao Zhang, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, “Mechanisms of Lysosome Biogenesis and Regulation”

2021 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

Mikel Haggadone, Immunology, “Mechanistic Insights into Regulation of Vesicular SOCS3 Secretion by Alveolar Macrophages: Interplay Between Cell Stress and Metabolic Remodeling “
Yinqiu He, Statistics, “High-Dimensional Statistical Inference: Phase Transition, Power Enhancement, and Sampling”
Eshita Khera, Chemical Engineering, “Engineering Tumor Distribution of Antibody-Drug Conjugates”
Cindy Lin Kaiying, Information, “Afterlives of Authority: An Ethnography of Fire Prediction, Social Order, and Technocracy in Indonesia”
Rebecca Marks, Educations and Psychology, “From Talkers to Readers: Neural and Behavioral Foundations of Emerging Literacy”
Michelle May-Curry, American Culture, “Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor: Black Womanhood and the Visual Politics of Mixed Race Family Albums, 1918 to 2020″
Zhijie Qu, Astronomy, “The Warm-Hot Circumgalactic Medium and Its Co-Evolution with the Galaxy Disk”
Akshitha Sriraman, Computer Science and Engineering, “Enabling Hyperscale Web Services”
Mei Ling Meilina Tsui, Music Composition, “Nomadic Trails for Chamber Orchestra”
Erica Twardzik, Movement Science, “Optimizing Post-Stroke Functioning: Using Mixed Methods to Understand the Role of Built and Social Environments for Physical Activity, Quality of Life, and Lived Experience”

2020 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

Devika Bagchi, Molecular and Integrative Physiology, “Investigating the Roles of Wnt Signaling in Mature Adipocyte Function”
Molly Brookfield, History and Women’s and Gender Studies, “Watching the Girls Go By: Sexual Harassment in the American Street, 1850-1980”
Lu Chen, Physics, “Study of Thermal and Magnetic Properties in Strongly Correlated Materials”
Adrian Deoancă, Anthropology, “End of the Line: State Infrastructure, Material Ruin, and Precarious Labor Along Romanian Railroads”
Adi Foord, Astronomy and Astrophysics, “Discovering the Missing Population of AGN Pairs with Chandra”
Kathryn Holihan, Germanic Languages and Literatures, “Staging the Hygienic Subject: Anatomy, Bodies, and the Public Health Exhibition in Germany, 1911-1931”
Dominic Liao-McPherson, Aerospace Engineering and Scientific Computing, “Variational and Time-Distributed Methods for Real-time Model Predictive Control”
Christina May, Neuroscience, “How Sweet It Is: The Role of Taste Perception in Diet-Induced Obesity”
Anne Menefee, Environmental Engineering, “Carbon Mineralization in Fractured Basalt”
Vivian Truong, American Culture, “‘Whose City? Our City!’: Asian American and Multiracial Movements Against Police Violence in New York”

2019 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

Yassel Acosta Matutes, Applied Physics, Spatially-Resolved Fluorescence-Detected Two-Dimensional Electronic Spectroscopy to Probe Excitonic Structure in Purple Photosynthetic Bacteria
Juliette Becker, Astronomy, Emergent Properties in Exoplanetary Systems
Kaitlin Cassady, Psychology, Age-Related Neural De-Differentiation in the Sensorimotor System
Christina Cross, Public Policy and Sociology, The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance
Joseph Gamble, English and Women’s Studies, Sex Before Sex Ed: Sexual Practice, Pedagogy, and Affect in Early Modern England
Ximena Gomez, History of Art, Nuestra Señora:Confraternal Art and Identity in Early Colonial Lima
Crystal Green, Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences, Automated Deformable Mapping Methods to Relate Corresponding Lesions in 3D X-ray and 3D Ultrasound Breast Images
Nicole Michmerhuizen, Pharmacology, Examining Mechanisms of Sensitivity and Resistance to Phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase Inhibitors in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma
Olivia Palmer, Biomedical Engineering, Non-Invasive Venous Thrombus Composition and Therapeutic Response by Multiparametric MRI
Andrew Schwartz, Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Hepcidin/ferroportin/HIF-2α regulation of iron metabolism at the systems and cellular level