44 Pitt undergraduates received 2024 Brackenridge Fellowships

Forty-four undergraduates earned a 2024 Brackenridge Fellowship, one of the University of Pittsburgh’s most prestigious awards. Recipients earn funding to conduct independent research, scholarship or creative work under the guidance of a Pitt faculty mentor.

At a kickoff luncheon hosted by Brett Say, director of research at the David C. Frederick Honors College, the summer honors fellows were able to network and discuss their proposed research with one another.

This summer, the Frederick Honors College awarded 90 fellowship and internship awards — including opportunities in community research, creative arts, health sciences research, engineering and public service. Students from across all disciplines can apply by proposing a research topic, finding a faculty sponsor and committing to completing and presenting their research by the end of summer.

Meet this year’s Brackenridge fellows: 

• Zain Adamo, a film and media studies major in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences — “Samira's Choice”
• Donovan Allen, a neuroscience and English literature major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Narratives and Counternarratives: The Place of Black Literature in the American Canon”
• Blayne Becker, a psychology major in the Dietrich School — “The History of the LGBTQ+ Community in Psychology”
• Su bin An, a psychology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Effect of Caregivers’ Stress on Social Stress of Adolescents at High-Risk for Psychosis”
• Adalgisa Butkewitsch, an English literature and marketing major in the Dietrich School — “‘Oventuring’ Into Film: How a Short Film Can Further Unite Pitt’s Young Artists
• Olivia Carson, an environmental science major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Polyploid Population Establishment and Bioremediation Potential in Duckweed”
• Julia Caterino, a media and professional communications major in the College of General Studies and Frederick Honors College — “TikTok’s ‘What I Eat in a Day’: Controlling the Female Body Through Media”
• Katelyn Chen, a biology and Spanish major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Atherosclerosis and apoC3: Investigating Unexpected Triglyceride Output in Absence of apoC3”
• Dev Chopra, a psychology major in the Dietrich School — “Exploring the Associations Between Peer Rejection, Parent Social Support, and Online-Only Friendships in LGBTQ+ Adolescents”
• Angel Cramer, a history major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Italian Fascism and the American Dream: The National Politics of Pittsburgh's Italian American Prominenti, 1918-1941”
• Luciana De Jesus, a classics and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Writing as Recovery and Change in Classical Ballet”
• Yuntian Deng, a psychology major in the Dietrich School — “Exploring the Impact of Rumination on the Efficacy of Self-Affirmation”
• Ryan Dilello, a nursing major in the School of Nursing — “Influence of receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy on post operative pain and opioid use in women undergoing abdominal hysterectomy for advanced gynecologic cancer”
• Laura Dvorkin, a politics and philosophy major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Impacts of Platform Law and Corporate Governance on Free Speech: An Investigation Toward Regulatory Action”
• Hanna Enos, a psychology major in the Dietrich School — “Exploring Parent-Toddler Money Talk During Pretend Grocery Shopping”
• Isabella Falo, a psychology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Investigating the Effect of Victimization on Executive Functioning”
• Claudia Frankfurth, a psychology and economics major in the Dietrich School — “The Impact of Trait Negative Affectivity on Suicidal Ideation Through Quality of Interactions in Romantic Relationships”
• Isaac Gamwo, a psychology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Proportion of Pain Using Painimation”
• Akash Gundagathi, a molecular biology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Temporal Engineering of Embryoid Development”
• Edha Gupta, a neuroscience major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Links between Racial Discrimination and Stress-Control Brain Pathways”
• Jaydep Halder, a microbiology and sociology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Potency of New-Generation Dual Inhibitor Antibiotics Against Antimicrobial-Resistant Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Biofilm”
• Shane Hansen, a chemistry and neurolinguistics major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Understanding the Neurolinguistic Processing of Nonbinary Pronouns in First and Second Languages: A Research Proposal”
• Grace Johnson, an English literature and fiction writing major in the Dietrich School — “Dissecting the Victorian Supernatural: Ghost Stories of the 19th Century”
• Angel Joseph, a film and media studies major in the Dietrich School — “Sex, Love and Bisexuals: Why Hindi Web Series Love Bisexuality”
• Shaoyi Liu, a neuroscience major in the Dietrich School — “Investigating Learning-induced Reshaping in Neuronal and Muscular Activity”
• Campbell Martinez, a psychology and anthropology major in the Dietrich School — “A Qualitative Analysis of Experiences of Suicidal LGBTQ+ Adolescents and Adolescents of Color”
• Chloe Merino, a biochemistry and anthropology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Study of the role of mechanics in neural cell rearrangement in Xenopus laevis”
• Sanjana Murthy, a biology and anthropology major in the Dietrich School — “Menstrual Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices among the Indigenous Tribal Groups of Nagarahole and Bandipur National Parks of Karnataka, India”
• Mrudul Nagapurkar, a neuroscience major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Circadian Variations in Psychomotor Vigilance Performance in Adolescents”
• Al Nie, a neuroscience major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Intranasal Neuropeptide Y Y1 Receptor Agonist for the Treatment of Postsurgical Pain”
• Naiya Patel, a neuroscience major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Race, Preeclampsia, and Cognitive Decline”
• Kayleigh Phillips, a geology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Unraveling Poison Ivy's Response to Climate Change: A Historical Analysis of Toxicity”
• Abhinav Pillai, a neuroscience major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Stereotactic Radiosurgery for Patients with Brain Metastases from NPC Cancers”
• Phillip Santos, a molecular biology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Characterizing the Developmental Mechanism of the Ectoderm and Mesoderm in the HeX-Embryoid Model”
• Abhay Sheeri, a molecular biology major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Novel immunotherapy-radiation (anti-db-PDL1-IL-15) treatment improves response rates in head and neck cancer”
• Felicia Shen, a psychology major in the Dietrich School — “Exploring Parent-Child Conversations about Money in Early Childhood”
• Ethan Simpkins, a physics and mathematics major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Using Machine Learning to Detect Antimatter at Belle II”
• Stacia Subick, a chemical engineering major in the Swanson School of Engineering and Frederick Honors College — “Suppression of the innate immune response in a murine contact hypersensitivity model through controlled release of eATP receptor antagonists”
• Evan Sun, a molecular biology major in the Dietrich School — “Gene Regulation: Flies, Sunshine, and Silencers”
• Joel Turner, an economics and history major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Assessing the Economic Motivations Behind the Implementation of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) of 1974”
• Emma Whittaker, an anthropology and museum studies major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “On the Mend: Reimagining the Responsible Patronage of Gee's Bend Quilts”
• Stephanie Yau, a neuroscience major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “Expansion Microscopy of Schizophrenia Prefrontal Cortex Synapses”
• Casey Yin, a neuroscience and studio arts major in the Dietrich School and Frederick Honors College — “The Distortion of Our Bodies for Beauty”
• Irisin Yu, a computer science major in the School of Computing and Information — “Deciphering Social Perception: Uniting iEEG Data, Computational Modeling, and Machine Learning”