Presenting the 2024 HSS Student Prizewinners
The Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to present the prize recipients for the 2023–2024 academic year.
The Mary A. Earl McKinney Prize in Literature, established in 1946 by Samuel P. McKinney, promotes proficiency in writing and is awarded for the best original poetry and fiction. The humanities faculty selected senior Joseph H. Kim (BS '24, Computation and Neural Systems and English) for his fiction piece, "Dear Goose," and junior Domani Sharkey for her poem, "The Angel."
The Gordon McClure Memorial Communications Prizes reward undergraduates for their academic writing in three categories: English, history, and philosophy. The winners this year are senior Heidi Redmond (BS '24, Chemical Engineering - Process Systems) (English, "The Woman Who Waits No More"), junior Emeka Nkurumeh (History, "Qital and Jihad: The Faces of Holy War in Islam"), and junior Sarah Yuan Ni Liaw (Philosophy, "The Paradox of Authentic Happiness and Existential Suffering").
Since 1997, the Hallett Smith Prize has recognized students who write the best essays on English literature. Sophomore Shrishti Pankaj Kulkarni received the 2024 prize for their paper, "Beowulf and the Moral Dilemma Between Kingship and Heroism," which was originally written for Professor of English Jennifer Jahner's Hum/En 21 course Monsters and Marvels in spring 2023.
The Eleanor Searle Prize, which was established in 1999 to honor the late Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of History, recognizes an undergraduate or graduate student whose work in history or the social sciences exemplifies Searle's interests in the use of power, government, and law. This year's prize went to senior Sarah Hashash (BS '24, Computer Science and Economics), after being nominated by Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science Michael Alvarez. Alvarez and Hashash worked together on two research projects, one of which took on the important problem of detecting and mitigating attacks on election officials in the United States. The resulting paper was presented at the American Political Science Association conference in 2023 and is currently under review at a peer-reviewed political science journal.
The social sciences faculty awarded the David M. Grether Prize in Social Science to junior Alec Sandroni (who is pursuing Economics as a double major). The prize rewards outstanding performance and creativity by a Caltech undergraduate who completes one of the social science options. Professor of Economics Kota Saito nominated Sandroni citing their collaborations over the last two summers through the summer undergraduate research program. The outcome of summer 2023 was a paper titled "Axiomatization of Random Utility Model with Unobservable Alternatives," which Sandroni and Saito went on to present at esteemed international conferences in economics and computer science.
To learn more about each HSS prize and see a list of recent winners, click here.