Honors Students Awarded Crown/Wise Funding for Capstone Projects

Tanya Niesvizky-Kogan at her exhibition, Advertising’s Harmonic Vault: The Evolution of Sound Design in Commercials

From determining the toxicity of certain chemicals in Onondaga Lake to the architecture of learning environments to a film about cross-cultural adoption, students in the Renée Crown Honors Program are going deep into their fields for their capstone projects and exploring their curiosity.

To help them go further, many of them were selected to receive a Crown Award, Lynne Parker Award or Wise-Marcus 50-Year Friendship Award.

Each year approximately 20 projects are selected to receive up to $5,000 per project. The funding provides reimbursement for research materials, supplies and expenses; research travel; and other expenses. In some cases, students are awarded summer expenses to work on the project.

The award winners are chosen by a selection committee including Melissa Chessher, professor and chair of the magazine department in the Newhouse School of Public Communications; Chris Johnson, professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering and Computer Science; and Chris Kyle, associate professor of history in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

“Undergraduates at Syracuse University are doing an incredible amount of high-quality scholarship in areas ranging from studio and performing arts to science and engineering,” Johnson says. “The Crown-Wise award winners represent a cohort of students who seek to take their scholarly projects beyond what can normally be done in a traditional research project.”

Funding can make additional research opportunities, materials or travel available to students, helping them produce an even more impressive final project.

“The breadth and creativity of the applications we reviewed is astonishing. They tend to be very adventurous as well; often these projects involve travel to conduct on-site research,” Johnson says. “It is exciting to support undergraduate scholarship that is creative, clever and potentially high-impact.”

Julia Jones, whose project is Sustainable Urban Alternatives: Rethinking Informality in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas

The process also helps students gain experience with creating budget and arguing on behalf of a project that can help prepare them for future grant writing and application processes.

The following is a list of student award winners, their majors and their topics from this spring and last fall:

Crown, Lynne Parker Scholar, Wise-Marcus 50-Year Friendship Awards Spring 2016

• Farrell Greenwald Brenner, women’s and gender studies and citizenship and civic engagement: The Aryan-Passing Women and Girl Couriers of the Jewish Resistance Movement in Nazi-Occupied Poland (Advisor, Dana Olwan)
• Snigdha Chatterjee, biotechnology and biophysical science: JMJ7, an Arabidopsis Histone Demethylase Negatively Regulates Cell Death, Drought, and Defense Against Pseudomonas Syringae (Advisor, Ramesh Raina), Lynne Parker Scholar
• Makayla Dearborn, biology and policy studies: Characterization of Genes Affecting Drosophila Sperm Phenotypes through Genetic Manipulation (Advisor, Steve Dorus)
• Katharine Eng, biology: Male-Based Retrogenes in Drosophila Melanogaster: Integration of Novel Genes into Pathways Governing Sperm Axoneme Development (Advisor Steve Dorus)
• Kathryn Ferentchak, film and psychology: “Osiris”: A Short Science Fiction Film (Advisor, Alex Mendez)
• Max Jakubowski, marketing and newspaper and online journalism: “An Evolving Marketing Strategy Landscape: Why B2B Businesses are implementing B2C Marketing Strategies” (Advisor, Scott Lathrop)
• Amanda Lieu, medicinal chemistry/forensic science: Synthesis of Substituted Tetrahydropyrans Using Metal-Catalyzed Coupling Reactions (Advisor, Nancy Totah)
• Chirag Manohar, musical theater: Le Diable Amoureux: A Dramatic Ballet (Advisor, Celia Madeoy)
• José Marrero Rosado, biochemistry and anthropology: Determining Toxicity of PTE and PXE, Two Chemicals from Onondaga Lake (Advisor, Katharine Lewis)
• Christina McDonagh, film: “A Day to Remember,” a short film (Advisor, Miso Suchy)
• Nigel Miller, biomedical engineering and Biochemistry: Metal-Citrate Transport in Kineococcus Radiotolerans (Advisor, Robert P. Doyle)
• Jessica Toothaker, biology: The Effects of Aromatase Deficiency on Oocyte Survival and Follicle Formation in Mice (Advisor, Melissa Pepling), Lynne Parker Scholar
• Geoffrey Vaartstra, mechanical engineering: Hydrophobic/Hydrophilic Nanoscale Patterns for Pool Boiling Enhancement (Advisor, Shalabh Maroo)
• Soleil Young, anthropology, biology and women’s and gender studies: A Molecular Examination of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis in the Smithsonian’s Huntington Collection (Advisor, Shannon Novak / Anthony Garza)
• Zhaowei Jiang, biochemistry: Retrogene Function in Drosophila Melanogaster Spermatogenesis (Advisor, Steve Dorus)

Crown, Wise-Marcus 50-Year Friendship Awards Fall 2015

• Lisa Chan, architecture: Power Places: A Conflation of Practices Architecturizing Fable and Game (Advisor, Benjamin Farnsworth)
• Elizabeth Daly, nutrition: Decolonizing Diets: The Health and History of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) (Advisor, Sudha Raj)
• Alyson Forman, public health: Dental Health Education Outreach in Syracuse, New York (Advisor, Lisa Olson-Gugerty)
• Leah Garlock, communications design: Defining I: Reflections on Adoption and Identity (Advisor, Jeff Glendenning)
• Julia Jones, international relations: Sustainable Urban Alternatives: Rethinking Informality in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas (Advisor, John Burdick)
• Terry Jones, film: Gathered Places: An Indian Documentary Film (Advisor Owen Jay Shapiro)
• Eric Merrell, biology: Defining the Pathway for Misfolded Protein Degradation in Retinitis Pigmentosa Caused by the Rhodopsin-P23H Mutation (Advisor, Barry Knox)
• Tanya Niesvizky-Kogan, psychology, advertising: Advertising’s Harmonic Vault: The Evolution of Sound Design in Commercials (Advisor, Douglas Quin)
• Anthony Schramm, biochemistry: Substrate Length-Dependency and Inhibition Analyses of Human Ghrelin O-Acyltransferase (Advisor, Jimmy Hougland)
• Summer Schneider, advertising: Affecting Nicaraguan “Vegetable” Literacy with Social Change Advertising (Advisor, Brian Sheehan)
• Hannah Seigel, architecture: Elementary Environments: Cultivating a Connection with the Outdoors (Advisors, Terrance Goode and Susan Henderson)
• Andreacarola Urso, biology: The Ets Protein Pointed prevents both premature differentiation and dedifferentiation of Drosophila intermediate neural progenitors (Advisor, Sijun Zhu)
• Maria Whitcomb, vocal performance: Escape from Amherst: Emily Dickinson’s Life of Freedom (Advisor, Kathleen Roland-Silverstein)
• Jason Zheng, biology: Determining the Toxicity of 1-phenyl-1-(2,4-xylyl)-ethane (PXE), a Chemical Isolated from Onondaga Lake (Advisor, Katherine Lewis)

Students were honored at a reception at the Chancellor’s House in March.