Presenter Awards

The Office of Student Engagement and Experiential Learning is excited to be able to offer a monetary award to students with exceptional presentations due to the generosity of a donor. Students receiving awards will also have the opportunity for their poster to be published in the CURE Proceedings in Huskies Commons, NIU’s repository for scholarly work.

Two judges will be assigned to each presentation and will use the judge rubric (DOCX) to determine ratings.

Students ranked in the top of their respective award category will receive a monetary award. Prizes will be in the following disciplines and subjects:

• Social and behavioral sciences
• Biological and chemical sciences
• Environmental and physical sciences
• Education
• Humanities
• Health and human sciences
• Arts, design and performing arts
• Interdisciplinary studies
• Engineering
• Math and computational sciences
• Business and entrepreneurship

Additionally, students ranked in the top of the following categories will also be eligible for a monetary award:

• Civic engagement
• Community-based research
• Diversity, equity and inclusion

Faculty Mentor of the Year

CURE participants have an opportunity to nominate their mentor for the Faculty Mentor of the Year award. Nominees are evaluated on their ability to foster student participation in research and artistry activities, the balance between advisee and nurturing critical thinking, and the ability to develop a mentoring relationship that exudes genuine care in the student and their learning. Nominate your faculty mentor.

Congratulations to the 2023 recipients:

• Katja Wiemer, associate professor, Cognitive and Instructional Psychology
• Jennifer Koop, assistant professor, Biological Sciences

2023 CURE Award Winners

Social and Behavioral Sciences

• 1^st place: Katilyn Pitt and Jade King, REFUGE: A United Front Against Domestic Violence
  Faculty mentor: Patty Wallace
• 2^nd place: Blake Atterbury, Cognitive Processing Styles in Semantic Memory Organization
  Faculty mentor: Katja Weimer
• 3^rd place: Nathan Campbell, Strides in the dark: Effects of arena size on open field behavior
  Faculty mentor: Doug Wallace

Biological and Chemical Sciences

• 1^st place: Laurita Uribe Aristizabal, Hacking Cancer Cell Metabolism
  Faculty mentor: Linda S. Yasui
• 2^nd place: Amarachi Nwawueze, Food or Fungus: An Examination of House Fly Response to Different Concentrations of a Fungal Biopesticide
  Faculty mentor: Bethia King
• 3^rd place: Merveille Muyizere, Response of Different Body parts of House Flies, Musca domestica, to Sucrose and Water
  Faculty mentor: Bethia King
• 3^rd place: Yosuf Khan, Molecular detection of bacterial pathogen, Clostridium perfringens, in Bison
  Faculty mentor: Pallavi Singh

Environmental and Physical Sciences

• 1st place: Jennifer Schaumberg, Indonesian Women's Perceptive on Partner's Smoking
  Faculty mentor: Tomoyuki Shibata

• 2^nd place: Yi Shen, Landslide Forecast in Taiwan Based on Machine Learning in the GIS Field
  Faculty mentor: Wei Luo
• 3^rd place: Mingda Wu, Pixel-Wise Machine Learning and Deep Learning Methods Implementation on Multi-Class Wildfire Mapping
  Faculty mentor: Wei Luo

Education

• 1^st place: Hannah Lamarca, Multilingualism and Augmentative Alternative Communication: A Review of the Literature
  Faculty mentor: Natalie Andzik
• 2^nd place: Lana Samuel, How do Educators Support the Communication Access for Children with Multiple Cognitive Disabilities and Who Are Blind?
  Faculty mentor: Natalie Andzik

Humanities

• 1^st place: Desiree Griffin, The Lao Diaspora: Cultural Identity in America
  Faculty mentor: Trude Jacobson-Gidaszewski
• 2^nd place: Ashley Montano, Introducing Gender Neutral Pronouns to Second Language French Learners
  Faculty mentor: Shannon Becker
• 3^rd place: Brenna Bretzinger, Feminist Retellings of Homer's The Odyssey, 2005-2022
  Faculty mentor: Timothy Crowley

Health and Human Services

• 1^st place: Christina Annerino, Gender Differences in Administration of tPA in Treatment of Ischemic Stroke
  Faculty mentor: Anitha Saravanan
• 2^nd place: Margi Patel, Fear of Falling is Associated with Reduced Lower-Extremity Function in Older Adults
  Faculty mentor: Emerson Sebastiao
• 3^rd place: Isiah Bryant, Revitalizing Memories through Melody: Utilizing Music as a Form of Memory Therapy for individuals with varying levels of Dementia, A Single Case Study
  Faculty mentor: Jamie Mayer

Arts, Design and Performing Arts

• 1^st place: Alia Moran, How to: Museums (Americans in Burma: The Art of Collecting and Local Visions II)
  Faculty mentor: Catherine Raymond

Interdisciplinary Studies

• 1^st place: Ally Mikos, Thrifting Your Way to the Bank: How student consumption of recycled clothing impacts financial stability
  Faculty mentor: Alicia Schatteman
• 2^nd place: Minhaz Patel, Should Academia Thrive for Research Citation in Policy: A Case Study on Five Universities
  Faculty mentor: Hamed Alhoori
• 3rd place: Cameron Racelis, Municipal Madness: An Analysis of Metropolitan Industrialization in British Burma 1870-1920
  Faculty mentor: Trude Jacobson-Gidaszewski

Engineering

• 1st place: Mikayla Dirksen, 3D Simulation of Blood Flow
  Faculty mentor: Jifu Tan
• 2^nd place: Joshua Lewicki and Christopher Roeder, Bi-directional in Situ Visualization and Analysis of Blood Flow Simulation
  Faculty mentor: Jifu Tan
• 3^rd place: Ryan Kilpatrick, In Pursuit of the Promise of Microfluidic Artificial Lungs
  Faculty mentor: Alisha Diggs

Math and Computational Sciences

• 1^st place: Joseph Wasiqui, Investigating the Variance of Distances from an Interior Point to the Edges of a Triangle
  Faculty mentor: Alastair Fletcher
• 2^nd place: Alejandro Trujillo Graciano, Predicting Solid Waste Generation: An Analysis of Socio-Economic Factors and Their Impact on Waste Management
  Faculty mentor: Mahdi Vaezi
• 3^rd place: Hannah Havel, Bifurcation Levels of the Integral Manifolds of the Newtonian N-Body Problem
  Faculty mentor: Chris McCord

Business and Entrepreneurship

• 1^st place: Vilaya Sirivong, Coaching and Mentoring Programs Ensuring Equal Opportunities to Higher Education for Laotian Students
  Faculty mentor: James Burton
• 2^nd place: Jessica Linley, B The Change: Why and How B-Corporations are Entering Our Economy
  Faculty mentor: Alicia Schatteman
• 3^rd place: Ayanna Johnson, Complexity of Perfection in the Art Industry
  Faculty mentor: Barton Sharp