In this year's SESAPS annual meeting at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, we had an unprecedented number of undergraduate talks, 40, and posters, 78, to evaluate. Judges were impressed by the high quality of all presentations, which made their task quite challenging but enjoyable. In the end, several students were honored in the best poster and talk competition. Congratulations to all awarded students with first- and second-place prizes and honorable mentions. Thank you for your hard work, dedication, passion, and perseverance. Rest assured, this is just the beginning of a bright and thriving future :)!
Special thanks go also to all volunteered judges for their thorough assessment of this tremendous number of excellent contributions; it couldn't have been done without your help.
Best Undergraduate Oral Presentation:
1st Place:
Kieran Wall, University of Virginia
Hunting for Dark Matter with the LDMX Experiment
2nd Place:
Kaden Tro, Vanderbilt University
Vertex Model of Wound Healing Mechanics in Drosophila Epithelia
Honorary Mention:
- Christopher Anderson, Southeastern Louisiana University
Physics behind fracture of solids based on a field theory
- Christian Guinto-Brody, University of Virginia
Refining the Quality Assurance and Quality Control of Detector Modules for the Barrel Timing Layer of CMS
- Casey Hampson, Kennesaw State University
New Mechanisms for Asymmetric Leptoquark Pair Production at Hadron Colliders
Best Undergraduate Poster:
1st Place:
Alexander Thornton, Boston University
Performance Study of the Scattering Neutrino Detector at the Large Hadron Collider
2nd Place:
* Noah Koch, Berry College
The Effects of Thumb Position on Backhand Disc Golf Throws of a Mid-Range Disc
* Olivia Ziemer, University of Tennessee - Chattanooga
Short-term plasticity characterization in droplet interface bilayers is impacted by the oil environment
Honorary Mention:
Analytically Modeling the Gravitational Radiation Generated from a Quasistar System
- Emma Krebs, Tennessee Technological University
The Intersection of Biology and Nuclear Physics: How Detectors Can Tease Apart Microbial Ecosystems
- MacKenzie Partsch, Presbyterian College
Utilization of Magnetically Induced Jamming in a Universal Gripper
- Katherine Strader, Berry College
Effects of Deposition Time on Electrochemical Growth of InSb Thin Films
- Johnathan Strickland, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
Investigating the Influence of Polar Jet Streaks on the Morphologies of Local-Scale Dust Storms Near Mars's North Polar Ice Cap
- Preston White, University of South Carolina
Simulation of a KLong-Muon Detector (KLM) for the U.S. Electron Ion Collider