Laurels and Accolades Celeste Campos-Castillo (Sociology) and Linnea Laestadius (Zilber School of Public Health) received a 12-month grant in the amount of $79,747 from the Technology and Adolescent Mental Wellness program. They will conduct a nationally representative survey experiment to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced adolescents’ willingness to alert parents/ guardians about a friend who posted on social media that they’re struggling with mental health. Parent coach Tia Fagan will partner with them to disseminate findings to parents in the Milwaukee community. Kimberly Blaeser (English and American Indian Studies) was one of 19 nationally recognized women poets to have work commissioned by the Academy of American Poets for the New York Philharmonic “Project 19.” Her poem, “A Quest for Universal Suffrage,” appears in a folio of work that celebrates and questions what it means to be an Kimberly Blaeser American woman writing today with the century-old legacy of the suffrage movement behind them. Blaeser also received two first place awards in the Council for Wisconsin Writers’ annual competition. She was awarded the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award for her 2019 poetry collection, “Copper Yearning” and the Zona Gale Short Fiction Award for her story, “Vision Confidence Score.” The short story previously received an honorable mention from the “Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts” in the Rick Demarinis Short Story Contest. Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies (JAMS) students won three national Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Mark of Excellence Awards, more than any university in the upper Midwest. The contest is among the most competitive in the country. UWM joined winners from Northwestern, Harvard, Yale, University of Missouri, and Arizona State University. The student journalists also garnered 12 awards from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. https://bit.ly/3cmeovI Rachel Bloom-Pojar (English) was selected as a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellow for her work with the promotores de salud and Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. The fellowship supports a residency at the organization and public humanities programming for the following year.
Konstantin Sobolev, Nikolai Kouklin, Michael Nosonovsky (Engineering), and David Frick (Chemistry and Biochemistry) received a $198,326 National Science Foundation COVID-19 RAPID grant to design and test coatings that could be applied to surfaces to both repel and deactivate virus-laden droplets. https://bit.ly/3dBKdBV
Several students from the College of Letters & Science were named Outstanding Presentation Award winners at the 2020 UWM Virtual Undergraduate Research Symposium:
David Frick
–Noah Graff, “Generative Adversarial Networks: Ultrasound Image Translation,” mentor: Istvan Lauko and Adam Honts, Mathematical Sciences –Gabriel Heller de Messer and Chantel Jenrette, “Kelp Gametophyte Culturing and Genetic Analysis Techniques for Conservation and Breeding,” mentors: Filipe Alberto, Gabriel Montecinos, and Rachael Wade, Biological Sciences –Nathan Kohls, “Deep Learning Applications in Wastewater Treatment,” mentor: Rudi Strickler, Biological Sciences –Aleia Olson, “Sex Differences in Immediate Early
Genes in Retrosplenial Cortex Following Context Fear Learning,” mentor: James Moyer, Hanna Yousuf, and
Chad Smies, Psychology –Claire Piehowski, “Differences in Approaches to
Feeding Children as a Function of Parent Marital Status,” mentor: Hobart Davies and Paulina Lim,
Psychology –Madeline Rech, “Nail Biting and Nail Picking: A Comparison of Related Behaviors,” mentors: Han Joo Lee and Abel S. Mathew, Psychology –Emily Ruder and Jacob Rankin, “Small-Scale Sustainable Charcoal Production in Kenya,” mentor: Mai Phillips, Conservation and Environmental Science –Giorgio Sarro, “An Investigation of Post-Transition
Extremes for Extratropically Transitioning Tropical Cyclones,” mentor: Clark Evans, Atmospheric Sciences
College of Letters & Science • UW–Milwaukee • 13
