Announcing the 2020 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

The ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Awards (DDA) recognize exceptional work produced by doctoral students for the high caliber of their scholarship and the significance and interest of their findings.

Each year, Rackham invites faculty to nominate outstanding dissertations produced in their programs. The nomination dossiers are read and discussed by a review panel of faculty members who identify the finalists. Then, members of the Michigan Society of Fellows read the finalists’ dissertations, review their merits, and select the winners.

Rackham is continually grateful to ProQuest for their generous and longstanding support of the DDA program.

Below is the list of 2020 winners, as well as the honorable mentions.

Winners (pictured above, clockwise from top left)

• Kathryn Holihan, Germanic Languages and Literatures
• Christina May, Neuroscience
• Vivian Truong, American Culture
• Adrian Deoancă, Anthropology
• Molly Brookfield, History and Women’s and Gender Studies
• Adi Foord, Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Lu Chen, Physics
• Devika Bagchi, Molecular and Integrative Physiology
• Dominic Liao-McPherson, Aerospace Engineering and Scientific Computing
• Anne Menefee, Environmental Engineering

Honorable Mentions

• Geoffrey Burns, Kinesiology
• Jessica Gillooly, Public Policy and Sociology
• Yugi Gu, Statistics
• Ka Ip, Psychology
• Kwangnam Kim, Mechanical Engineering
• Layti Lausch, Film, Television, and Media
• Charles Lu, Biomedical Engineering
• Eduardo Martinez, Philosophy
• Stephen Taller, Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences
• Sara Wong, Cellular and Molecular Biology

Read the event program for details on the awardees’ research.