13th Annual Student Symposium Winners

December 8, 2024

On Friday, Feb. 16, 2024, dozens of participants ranging from high school students to doctoral students presented their research at the 13th Annual Jackson School of Geosciences Student Research Symposium. Each poster was reviewed by a team of judges, who awarded the following students for their excellent work.

HIGH SCHOOL AWARDS
First Place: Benjamin Blume, Lilly Moore, Elizabeth Kvale, Liam Sweeney: “Onion Creek Water Table Soundings” Second Place: Harsha Samavedam: “Networked Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy and a Random Forest Model for Enhanced Water Contaminant Detection” Third Place: Hoang Thach: “The Stresses on The Colorado River”

UNDERGRADUATE AWARDS
First Place: Madison Fail, Danielle Zaleski, and Mariana Rivas: “Analysis of Microplastics in Sediment: The Effects of Urban Development on Lady Bird Lake, Austin, Texas” Second Place: Jacob Margoshes: “Rapid Incision and Filling of the Mississippi Canyon During the Late Pleistocene in the Northern Gulf of Mexico” Third Place: Madison Callan: “Geochemical study of the Karst Aquifers and Cave Systems of the Eastern Yucatan Peninsula: Implications for Carbonate Weathering”

EARLY CAREER AWARDS
First Place: Berit Hudson Rasmussen: “The Role of Root Zone Storage Dynamics in Mediating Runoff Following Disturbance” Second Place: Sasanka Talukdar: “The Effect of Soil Moisture Feedback on the Intensity of the Heat Dome over Texas” Third Place: Lucia Bellino: “Magmatic Controls on the Climate of Early Mars”

LATE CAREER AWARDS
First Place: Matthew Goldberg: “Ocean State Estimation and Observing System Experiments using Subsea Cable Data” Second Place: Sarah Brooker: “Copper isotope composition of Paraíba tourmaline gemstone” Third Place: Travis Stone: “Extinction-Induced Changes to Moroccan Reef Ecology on the Early Jurassic”