Announcing the 2024 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 2024 winners, as well as the honorable mentions.

Winners (Pictured above, from top left.)

• Emily Coccia, English and Women’s and Gender Studies
• Alisher Duspayev, Physics
• Noam Gannot, Oral Health Sciences and Biologic and Materials Sciences
• Felicia Hardi, Psychology
• Subha Maity, Statistics
• Darian Santana, Microbiology and Immunology
• Alejo Stark, Romance Languages and Literatures
• Rodrigo Tinoco Figueroa, Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Jennifer Triplett, Sociology
• Emily Wearing, Chemistry

Honorable Mentions

• Audrey Drotos, Neuroscience
• Chongxing Fan, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
• Julian Grey, Musicology
• Jessica Conrad Hammer, Mathematics
• Matthew Hershey, History
• Kate Kazmer, Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Jeffrey Knupp, Cellular and Molecular Biology
• Alex Lu, Information
• Hossein Moghimianavval, Mechanical Engineering
• Emily Na, American Culture

Read the event program for for details on the awardee’s research.