2003 Recipients of The Deans' Award for Academic Accomplishment

Maya Adam found a way to combine her passion for dance and keen interest in medicine in her honors thesis research. She was curious about how dancers perform under stressful physical conditions.

Maya spent the past two summers returning to her home in Dresden, Germany and the professional Dresden ballet company with whom she used to dance. She videotaped conversations with former colleagues about the pressures placed on dancers to continue performing under conditions of debilitating injuries.

Simultaneously, she worked with clinical psychologist Dr. Glenn Brassington (Center for Disease Prevention at the Stanford Medical Center) to develop the study behind the video. It is entitled “Psychological and Social Factors Associated with Performance-Limiting Injuries in Professional Ballet Dancers.”

Her footage was edited into a concise, emotionally moving story. In combination with her paper, it won her the Student Research Award at the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science Meetings in Fall 2002. The video was seen by a PBS executive producer who requested permission to use it as part of a program being aired in 2003.

Brilliant but modest Tom Do left his mark in the field of genomics and on those who have had the pleasure of working with him.

Working on Professor Serafim Batzoglou’s comparative genomics project in the computer science department, Tom developed a multiple alignment system for genomic sequences. He applied this system to the genome comparison of the entire human, mouse and rat genomes. He is currently working on implementing a new version of the system. It will push the frontier of alignment research further by developing a statistically sound method for comparing multiple genomic sequences related by a given phylogeny.

His research resulted in two papers in the prestigious journal Genome Research; several more are under preparation.

Tom’s skills aren’t just limited to mathematics. He’s an outstanding computer hacker, routinely placing in the top ten in the TopCoder Society. He knows biology at the level of a biology graduate student and his writing skills rival those of an experienced faculty member.

Jennifer Herbert worked with School of Education Dean Deborah Stipek. Jenny was initially hired to help code data and check for errors in previously coded data on a complicated longitudinal multisite study.

The study involved data collection from parents, children, teachers, principals, and school and district records in three different states with one hundred different school districts. She became the data-set primary manager, working with the team at Stanford and faculty and graduate students at Harvard and Boston College who analyze the data.

While working at the level of a third-year doctoral student, Jenny took some of the data and analyzed it for her honors thesis. That analysis proved interesting in and of itself. With Dean Stipek’s encouragement, Jenny submitted a proposal to the American Education Research Organization.

The proposal was accepted in a blind and competitive review process and Jenny presented her work at their annual meeting in 2003. Jenny also presented the findings of her work at the Stanford Symposium of Undergraduate Research in Progress in the Fall of 2003.

Among his many contributions at Stanford, Orlando Lara has had a lasting impact on the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA). His work bridges theory and practice in exploring how activist commitment to use arts for social change can function alongside scholarship in the academy.

While researching his honors thesis (“Arte, Tierra y Libertad: Site-Specific Collaborative Art and Transnational Citizenship”), he helped people who live in a border settlement community.

Working with a population of 8,000 displaced Mexican nationals in Maclovio Rojas in Tijuana, Mexico, Orlando spent the summer conducting research within the community.

At the same time, he helped them create their Digital Media Art Center. He was instrumental in the success of the center; he set up computers, installed software and taught computer classes to future instructors at the center.

Orlando also played a large role in the production of Ollin. This choreopoem  (by visiting artist, world-renowned musician, composer, actor and producer Daniel Valdez) was produced under the auspices of the IDA.

Going well beyond his role as teaching assistant for Valdez, Orlando conducted extensive independent research on one of the historical figures in the play. As a result of his findings, a pivotal scene in the play was rewritten. It will have a lasting presence within Valdez’s work as he continues to develop the piece for the professional stage.

Working with Professor of Chemical Engineering James R. Swartz, Mark Miller sought to investigate one of the most fundamental concepts in biology. He investigated the relationship between concentration of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and rate of protein synthesis. With his characteristic resourcefulness, insight, determination and attention to detail, Mark set out to understand what other students before him had been unable to expose.

Mark ran many experiments, each of which was complicated and required hundreds of assays. Not only did he measure the rate of protein synthesis but also ensured that the ATP concentration was constant and was the factor limiting protein synthesis.

Mark was able to produce a set of results that models a relationship consistent with the traditional Michaelis-Menton enzymatic rate model and is fully reproducible. His work will be submitted to one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, either Cell or Science.

As a member of the Stanford/NASA Biocomputational Center team, Amrit Rao was part of a group engaged in developing imaging and viewing protocols using micro-CT scanning techniques to produce high-resolution voxel models of dental and human anatomy. Within three months of joining the team he had written a publishable paper; by December 2002 another two papers had been accepted for publication and presentation at the prestigious international conference on Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (CARS). His current work with Dr. Sabine Girod (Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Stanford Medical Center) has made important medical as well as computer
science contributions.

Amrit is a volunteer participant in Doctors Without Borders and traveled to India in the summer of 2003 (funded by a Chappell-Lougee grant) to explore using data sets from the pharmaceutical industry and the World Bank the relationship between price controls on AIDS drugs and access to treatment.

Amrit also won the Boothe Prize for excellence in writing during his freshman year and played a key leadership role in the birth of a new campus publication, the Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal.

A student of medieval history, Eva found her scholarly passion working with medieval manuscripts. Having studied both Arabic and Western culture as well as French, Spanish, Arabic and Latin, Eva brings together the tools of several disciplines. She used these in her analysis of Arabic philosopher Algazel’s work (Abu Hamid Ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Shafi'i al-Ghazali) and his impact on early Western psychology.

Building on the work of Professor Charles Lohr SJ  (prominent scholar of medieval theology at the University of Freiburg), Eva collected, transcribed and collated six manuscripts. She then prepared a brief critical edition of the chapter on psychology from Algazel’s Physics. She described for scholars the strengths and weaknesses of Reverend Muckle’s edition of Algazel, the standard edition in use today.

Eva’s publishable edition will most likely become required reading for medievalists who have to rely on Muckle. Eva prefaced her edition with a historical introduction explaining how this treatise helped provide a rationale for the mass hysteria for medieval scientific thinkers, such as Roger Bacon.

Eva did an outstanding job working with the medieval manuscripts and then she created a web-based tutorial program. She used clever web programming to illustrate some of the analytical practices involved in the study of manuscripts. Her work is an excellent example of applying web technologies to furthering humanities research, a feat for which her site won an award in website design.

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