Category: Winners

Nadya’s Nomination

I met Nadya through the exhibition she installed at the GMU Art School where she displayed her paintings created during her residency in Iceland. I thought that the artwork was not only beautiful and inspiring to look at, but that it was also very meaningful and educational. It brought light to an important environmental topic and taught viewers about everyday life in another country. Nadya’s OSCAR project was unique and required lots of perseverance and a strong artistic vision to achieve.

Autumn’s Nomination

On top of Autumn’s recent publication on the mitogenome of the Saharan striped polecat, she is now continuing her work and looking at the historical and modern samples of the polecat and zorilla. With this, she hopes to see how evolution and population genetics shaped these two species.

Dr. Changwoo Ahn’s Nomination

Nathalia Peixoto’s Nomination

Lindsay’s Nomination

Dr. Kabbani’s Nomination

Dr. Joel Martin Nomination

Dr. Lee’s Nomination

Dr. Woolsey’s Nomination

Renee’s Nomination

I strongly nominate Renee McCauley for the OSCAR Excellence Award. I met Renee in February of 2022 through the Undergraduate Psychology Honors Program. I agreed to mentor her project on, “The Intersection of Accent, Ethnicity, and Gender in Job Interviews”. I have been thoroughly impressed with her motivation to excel on the project beyond the honors course requirements, including aspirations to publish the project in a top tier I-O journal and present the work at a national conference. With this mindset, Renee has taken advantage of many opportunities to enhance her skillset. For example, I enrolled her as a user in my graduate level research methods course and she took advantage of absorbing all of the information through videos, learning resources, exercises, and even attending weekly live office hours. Renee continues to learn about the field by attending our weekly learning series, as an undergraduate student. She has been selected twice for GMU’s Undergraduate Research Scholars Program (USRP) and once for a Mason Impact MINI grant. Renee has immersed herself in research by working in Dr. Stephen Zaccaro’s lab and closely working with Steven Zhou, resulting in one publication and a few projects in progress.

The culminations of these experiences have led to several observations. First, she exhibits incredibly strong writing skills. Her thesis proposal received an “A+” and was noted by all faculty, including Dr. Jennifer Brielmaier, Dr. HoKwan Cheung, and myself, as demonstrating high writing quality. She also has three successful grant submissions under her belt, including funding from the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program for the Spring and Summer terms, as well as the Mason Impact MINI grant. During the Fall 2023 term, I invited her to contribute to an IOP commentary (with a two week turn-around time) and was impressed with her contributions and offered co-authorship. Second, Renee exhibits high levels of critical thinking skills. As a researcher, I am blown away by her attention to detail. She is working to ensure that results are not skewed due to a confound variable, whether it be length of time the candidate speaks or a particular accent being less understandable. In order to thoroughly explore the interaction of variables in her research topic, she is pursuing an ambitious 18-condition study with strong justifications for each condition! Third, Renee is an independent and hard worker. We meet weekly and I may give some direction during this time, but she follows through and produces near-finished products. Fourth, Renee is incredibly professional. She carefully drafts correspondence to a variety of audiences, including scholars in our field as well as outside of the field. While working on the IOP commentary, colleagues (a program director from another institution) noted Renee’s professionalism and how her contribution to the project was more in the scope of a collaborator vs. a student contribution.

Over time, Renee has become more certain about her educational and career goals. In a short timeframe, she decided to apply to the doctoral program and take her GREs. She has performed extremely well in coursework, the honors project, research lab, on the GREs, and more. She was one of the few selected into our prestigious doctoral program and she will continue on this trajectory of contributing to the Mason community and broader field of I-O psychology.

Please give this talented candidate your best consideration.

Cicely’s Nomination

I would like to nominate Cicely Motamedi for an OSCAR Student Excellence Award. Under the auspices of an URSP award, she began research with me in the Summer 2022. She used a pair of atomic magnetometers, to measure both the absolute orientation and polarization (linear, circular, elliptical) of radio-frequency magnetic fields. The project involved lasers and fiber coupling, electronics and field coils, the use of a phase-sensitive radio-frequency spectrometer, and beta-version atomic magnetometers from Twinleaf. Cicely quickly mastered all elements, overcoming several equipment failures, and had taken the bulk of her data by the end of the summer. She clearly has the makings of a great experimentalist, and is in the top 5% of undergraduates who have worked with me.

During the fall 2022, Cicely, wrote up a journal publication on her summer work, which has recently been submitted to Physical Review Applied. She is a skilled writer with a clear voice and an organized way of thinking. Not only did she work on writing this semester, but she mastered the more theoretical aspects of her research, modifying the Bloch equations for her particular experimental parameters and mapping that on to the complex analysis required for her data. Cicely also wrote her own data analysis code, encompassing both time-domain and frequency-domain data, for the research.

In conclusion, Cicely Motamedi, through her hard work, creativity, and superb reasoning, exemplifies a student participating in research.

Piper’s Nomination

I would like to nominate Piper Thacher for the OSCAR student excellence award for her excellence and dedication to her research. Piper has always been excited to participate in research, especially in the field of conservation. She has worked on two major research projects which include fecal transplants to improve the microbiomes of two-toed sloths and analyzing the progesterone levels in four fin whales. In these two projects, she has learned how to conduct DNA extraction and sequencing along with immunoassays. Her fecal transplant research was originally a 5-week placement, but Piper was passionate and was able to continue the project and even publish her findings in Zoo Biology. She wanted to broaden her horizons so she decided to participate in an OSCAR project where she would have to take on a new field, endocrinology. She now spends every Friday in the lab running immunoassays. She hopes to get all her samples done for progesterone so she can look into a different hormone. She is an outstanding researcher due to her determination and passion for researching new topics.