News: 2014, October 23rd

Six selected as 2014 Master’s Thesis Award winners

Six recent Auburn University graduates have been selected as winners of the Graduate School’s 2014 Master’s Thesis Awards.

Award winners are Carmen Chosie, Jessica Godwin and Oscar Sotomayor in the Mathematics/Physical Sciences/Engineering category; and Clinton Crum, Álvaro López Pajares and Julianna Rabeler in the Humanities/Fine Arts category.

The Master’s Thesis Awards recognize the scholarship of master’s students whose theses make an unusually significant contribution to their respective disciplines. Auburn’s colleges and schools nominate students for the awards, and an award committee named by the Graduate School selects the winners for the two categories.

This year’s winning theses were:

• “Investigation on the Kinematics of Entrapped Air Pockets in Stormwater Storage Tunnels” by Carmen Chosie. Her thesis committee consisted of Auburn faculty members Jose Vasconcelos (chair), Prabhakar Clement and Xing Fang. Chosie graduated in December 2013 with a master’s degree in civil engineering and is now a project engineer at Columbia Engineering in Duluth, Georgia.
• “Group Lasso for Functional Logistic Regression” by Jessica Godwin. Her thesis committee consisted of Auburn faculty members Nedret Billor (chair), Dmitry Glotov and Asheber Abebe. Godwin graduated in August 2013 with a master’s degree in statistics and is now enrolled in a doctoral program in statistics at the University of Washington.
• “Numerical Modeling of Random 2D and 3D Structural Foams Using Voronoi Diagrams: A Study of Cell Regularity and Compression Response” by Oscar Sotomayor. His thesis committee consisted of Auburn faculty members Hareesh Tippur (chair), Jeffrey Suhling and James Davidson. Sotomayor graduated in August 2013 with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and now works at EP Petroecuador, the national oil company of Ecuador.
• “Political Patents of Monopoly: Parliamentary and Public Discourse of Economic Policy, 1628-1648” by Clinton Crum (thesis embargoed). His thesis committee consisted of Auburn faculty members Rupali Mishra (chair), Donna Bohanan and Christopher Ferguson. Crum graduated in August 2014 with a master’s degree in history and now works as a project engineer at Cumberland Plastic Solutions.
• “Discursos identitarios en la literatura futbolística” by Álvaro López Pajares (thesis embargoed). His thesis committee consisted of Auburn faculty members Jordi Olivar (chair), Jorge Muñoz and Jana Gutiérrez. López Pajares graduated in May 2014 with a master’s degree in Spanish and is now enrolled in a doctoral program in Hispanic literatures at Indiana University Bloomington.
• “Challenges in the Institution of Peer Tutoring: Dilemmas in Student-Tutor Interaction” by Julianna Rabeler. Her thesis committee consisted of Auburn faculty members Robert R. Agne (chair), Mary Helen Brown and Debra Worthington. Rabeler graduated in August 2014 with a master’s degree in communication and now works at Savannah Bee Co. in Savannah, Georgia.

Award winners receive an honorarium of $250 and a certificate, which is presented at the Graduate School’s annual awards ceremony each spring.

The categories for the Master’s Thesis Awards rotate each year. The Graduate School is now soliciting nominations for the 2015 categories: Life Sciences and Social Sciences/Business/Education.