Announcing the 2022 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 2022 winners, as well as the honorable mentions.

Winners (Pictured above, clockwise from top left.)

• Harsh Agarwal, Chemical Engineering
• Freida Blostein, Epidemiology
• Tyler Gardner, Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Robert Graham, Biomedical Engineering
• Youngrim Kim, Communication and Media
• Özgecan Korkmaz, Anthropology
• Vincent Longo, Film, Television, and Media
• Andrew McInnerney, Linguistics
• Weijing Tang, Statistics
• Weichao Zhang, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Honorable Mentions

• Sara Abelson, Health Behavior and Health Education
• Maris Arthurs, Physics
• Justin Barney, Classical Studies
• Anna-Lisa Lawrence, Microbiology and Immunology
• Christiana Mavroyiakoumou, Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics
• Anna Michmerhuizen, Cellular and Molecular Biology
• Amin Reihani, Mechanical Engineering
• Lydia Wileden, Sociology
• Yi Zhu, Civil and Environmental Engineering

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