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The OVPRI and UTSC Library would like to jointly congratulate this year’s winners of the . This prize honours and recognizes the research and creative activities of undergraduate students and their overall contribution to the �������ϲʿ����ӿ�. It also highlights the role of the library in their creative and research processes. 

The selection committee was especially impressed with the quality, innovation, and disciplinary breadth of submissions this year. It is a pleasure to continue to support the rich and exciting work of UTSC’s undergraduate community.

This year’s awardees, and their project descriptions, are spotlighted below:

Winners

Bhavana Akilan (Humanities), “As I reflect on the conversations I've had with women in my community, their words echo in my mind: “Suddenly, the world around me felt like it was falling on me.” These raw sentiments reveal the deep-rooted impact of postpartum depression, a topic that remains taboo within BIPOC communities, including my own, in India. It is this deafening silence surrounding this taboo that encourages me to explore the lesser-known truths and societal influences shaping the sexual experiences of BIPOC postpartum women.”

Tanya Ng Cheong (Creative), “My project, entitled Feast for Three, is a collection of short stories which revolve around food. These stories examine how food brings people together; it can be a love language or a source of nostalgia.”

Mira-Smaktruffa Ola (Sciences), “A stochastic cellular automaton (CA) model is used to describe disease dynamics in a closed, finite population subjected to varying initial infection conditions within a discrete-time system. Building on traditional models which rely on deterministic characterizations to predict disease trajectories, the CA model describes the spatiotemporal evolution of a novel infection as it propagates across a two-dimensional space consisting of susceptible individuals. This project addresses the implications to prediction and control of disease spread, and broadly investigates the ways in which localized, random interactions may give rise to emergent patterns on a population level.”

Brianna Wedderburn (Social Sciences), “My undergraduate thesis, “Neurodiversity in University: A Mixed-Methods Study on Student Experiences and Disability Identity,” recognized the ways in which self-identifying Autistic and ADHD students experience disability and identity within the university environment. I am passionate about accessibility and inclusion, and I hope that the lived experiences shared by participants in her project will help inform a campus that is universally accessible.”

Honourable Mentions

Hannah Klemmensen (Social Sciences), “This undergraduate thesis examines how different development approaches and  political-economic change in Sarajevo from the mid-20thcentury to present has influenced residential neighbourhood development. through a comparative case study of the planning, construction and building of public open spaces (POS) in two residential neighbourhoods across time. Through this case study it is shown that changes have been seen in the planning paradigm across these periods, that has led to markedly different types, amounts and quality of public open spaces. More specifically, contemporary neoliberal development is seen to have resulted in a reduction in the amount and quality of POS, driven by the shift in planning towards a paradigm of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ under the current neoliberal development paradigm.”

Sapolnach Prompiengchai (Sciences), “Treatment outcomes widely vary for individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder, implicating a need for deeper understanding of the biological mechanisms conferring a greater likelihood of response to a particular treatment. Given that biological mechanisms underlying depression involve network-like interactions within our brain, my research project reviews current literature on brain network biomarkers that are predictive of treatment outcomes in depression. The review also examines the obstacles hindering the clinical translation of current brain-based biomarkers, and discusses aspects of study design and analysis worth considering for future biomarker research in depression.”