NSM Faculty/Staff Newsletter

From the Office of the Dean

Two NSM Graduate Students Recognized in UH Best Dissertation Award Competition

Jamie M. Karthein (Ph.D. ’21) from the Department of Physics won the UH Best Dissertation in Physical Sciences Award for 2022 for the dissertation “Equation of State and Net-charge Fluctuations for Strongly-interacting Matter.” Her mentor was Claudia Ratti. Karthein was the Fall 2021 recipient of NSM’s Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award.

Ya Zhuo (Ph.D. ’21) from the Department of Chemistry received honorable mention recognition for the dissertation “Developing Rare-Earth Substituted Inorganic Phosphors Through Machine Learning.” Her mentor was Jakoah Brgoch. Zhuo was the Spring 2021 recipient of NSM’s Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award.

The UH Outstanding Dissertation Award is given to an eligible graduate student who submits an outstanding dissertation representing “original work that makes an unusually significant contribution to the discipline.” Awards are given in the following four broad fields in rotating years:

  • Mathematics, Physical Sciences, and Engineering
  • Social Sciences
  • Biological Sciences
  • Humanities and Fine Art

Two $1,000 awards are given per year, one in each of the eligible fields.

For the 2022 competition, the two eligible fields were Mathematics, Physical Sciences, and Engineering, and Social Sciences.