UMass Amherst Libraries Announce Winners of Undergraduate Sustainability Award
The UMass Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Undergraduate Sustainability Award.
The Undergraduate Sustainability Award promotes in-depth understanding of sustainability topics, research strategies, and the use of library resources, providing participating students with vital skills they will carry into future academic and vocational endeavors.
The competition was open to all currently enrolled UMass Amherst undergraduates. Five winners were chosen for their outstanding research papers and received $1000 scholarships, thanks to generous donors to the award-winning UMass Amherst Libraries’ Sustainability Fund. The winning papers will be uploaded to ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository.
“These awards truly showcase the range of research being done by our undergraduates,” notes Nandita Mani, Dean of University Libraries. “The UMass Amherst Libraries are delighted to support our students through the Undergraduate Sustainability Research Awards, and to recognize these future leaders, all of whom are working towards a more sustainable future for the benefit of all.”
Winners:
- Ezekiel Cochin ’25: “Resilient Beauty: Exploring the Aesthetics of Landscape Design in Building Sustainable and Robust Ecosystems”
- Nathaly Corella ’24: “Grounded Podcast: Narratives of Sustainable Tourism”
- David Gerard ’24: “Reinforcing Cloud System Security and Sustainability with Rust-based Particle Swarm Optimization Task Scheduling”
- Trevor Melusen ’24: “Standardized Methods for Observing Plant-Microbe Interactions”
- Raul Vera ’25: “The Ongoing Water Crisis in the Horn of Africa”