2023 Annual Honors Conference
The annual Honors Conference was held on Saturday, March 25th in the Maeser building, and featured presentations from your fellow Honors students on their theses, Great Questions essays, and other exemplary work. (See a synopsis of the conference with highlights from the speakers here.)
“We anticipate having a total of 45 Honors presenters with a wide variety of topics,” said Dallyn McCracken, HSLC vice president and coordinator of the event ahead of the conference. “It is an opportunity to come and see what our amazing Honors colleagues have done with their time in Honors, and to see your own potential. This year’s theme is ‘The Power of Inquiry.’”
You may find inspiration for your own culminating Honors experiences as you hear from student presenters. The morning begins with a light continental breakfast and a keynote speaker, Dr. Jennifer Nielson from the Chemistry department, one of our own Honors faculty fellows who team-teaches an Unexpected Connections course with Dr. Rex Nielson. She’ll jump right into exploring the Power of Inquiry! Following the opening session, participants will get to choose from a variety of presentations during three 45-minute breakout sessions, with three presenters in each Maeser classroom. After a couple of rewarding hours of inspiration and discussion, the conference will conclude with an Olive Garden catered lunch. Each attendee will also receive an Honors swag bag!
Here's the list of presentations to look forward to:
Great Question Essays
Emma Kratz-Bailey: Space Within, and Space Without
Emma Fox: You People and Your Empathy
Lydia Hall: Trauma Material: A Self Portrait
Sydney Reil: The Beauty of the Caterpillar
Luka Romney: How Fierce Our Claws Must Be!
Madsyn Selph: Radioactive Tree Frogs
Allie Smith: What’s in a Label?
Kylie Fox Soug: Treasure Goodness
Lane Welch: Five Carats of Glass
Collin Zoeller: Mirrors
Kayla LaFroth: Am I Worth Less?
Honors Theses
Allison Pickens: Identifying And Knocking Out Deep Brain Photoreceptors In The Larval Zebrafish Optic Tectum
Katie Bahr: Racial empathy gap in the workplace: The existence of and consequences for racial workplace disparity through lack of empathy
Adam Johnson: A quantitative and qualitative analysis of EPA communication regarding climate change
Natalie Tonks : Women and Gender in Mountaineering and Climbing
Andrew Jenkins: Investigating Bacterial Behavior Through Genetic Screens
Ellen Wight: Comparison of Log-Rank and Prentice-modified Wilcoxon Methods with Left-Truncated Data
Jarom Hickenlooper: A Case Study to Understand Discrepancies between Routine Outcome Monitoring and Client Lived Experience through Narrative Interviewing
Dallyn McCracken: Creating The Listener Language, Infusing Language with Intense Systematic Intonation
Kaden Makechnie-Hardy: Side-channel Attacking AES Cryptography Cores on FPGAs
Elisha Fernandez: Off The Books: Making A Space For BIPOC Representation In Young Adult Publishing
Katrina Lantz: Isothiocyanates as NRF2 upregulators in the prevention of neural tube defects in chick embryos
Ashley DiPenti: The War On Gender Equality: A Comparative Study Between Feminism And Anti-Feminism Within South Korea And The United States
Gabrielle Shiozawa: Extra, Extra, Read All About It: An Analysis Of News Platform Preferences
Diana Gonzales: The Impacts of Information on Political Affiliation and Views
Morgan Chase: Semantic Memory and Decision Making: an fMRI Study looking at COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation
Chad Hyer: Characterizing Protein Folding Stability in the Human Serum Proteome in Order to Understand Hereditary Amyloidosis
Sam Lucas: Strategy in Action - The Inception of Speed Marketing
Seneca Heilesen: Investigations into u’-band Photometry of the Haumea System
Lauren Smith: The Effectiveness of Mindfulness Instruction in ESL Classrooms
Madeleine Meldrum: What's Gonna Happen to Us? How Social Networks Change after Marriage
Kelly Dickson: Empowering the Heroes of Tomorrow: A Literary Analysis of Portrayals of Protagonists' Agency in Award-Winning Fantasy Novels and its Educational Implications
Bronwyn Meldrum: Creating Habitat Suitability Models for Restoration of Sesbania tomentosa and Chenopodium oahuense on Molokai, Hawaii
Benji Stubbles: Adapting the Auxin Inducible Degradation System to Zebrafish
Emily Peterson: Vanguards of Change in the ‘Georgia of the North’: Youth Activism in the New Jersey Civil Rights Movement, 1935-1955
David Chandler: A Linguistic Analysis of Pronominal Adverbs in Legal Language
Louisa Eastley: Bound and Found: Medieval Treasures From the Vault
Lindsey Meza : “Mujeres Latinas en Acción: Latina Pragmatism, Feminism, and Grassroots Activism in Chicago.”
Madsyn Selph: The Criminalization of Female Genital Mutilation in Ohio: A Political and Social Analysis
Emma Wheeler Volz: Qosqo
Paul Guajardo: Atrapado por el Pasado: Considerations in Spanish Language Translations
Brooke Woolley Williams: Turn Towards Each Other: Emotional Connection as a Catalyst for Marital Satisfaction, Especially During Times of Conflict
Candace Brown: A Catholic Reads the Book of Mormon: Folk Carvings of Roman Śledź
William Martindale: Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary China
Samuel Benson: Conceptualizing Emigrant Motives of British Latter-Day Saints, 1840-60
Bryan Habashi: What Are Our Unenumerated Rights as Americans? An Analysis of the Ninth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges and Immunities Clause Using Original Intent Originalism