February 8th, 2023 // 5:00 PM CST>
The Graduate Dean's Distinguished Thesis Prize are awarded to thesis-based Master's students exhibiting outstanding performance. Students are nominated for the award. Award areas are comprised of three three academic specialties: science and engineering, social sciences, education and the professions, and the humanities and fine arts.
Sally is a first year Sociology Ph.D student studying crime and gender. In her short time since arriving at OU in 2020, Sally has accomplished many tasks including founding a graduate student organization with the purpose of encouraging camaraderie and support amongst sociology graduate students and obtaining her Master of Arts in Sociology with a 4.0 GPA (2022). In addition to winning the Graduate Dean’s Distinguished Thesis Prize (2023), she was also a finalist in the 2022 Three-Minute Thesis competition and recipient of a 2022 Grasmick-Riddle Summer Research Fellowship. In her spare time, Sally volunteers for The Welcoming Project, a nonprofit aimed to encourage businesses, healthcare providers, and schools to display LGBTQ+ welcoming signs, and raises her newborn daughter.
Caden C. Testa earned his Master of Arts from OU’s Department of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in 2021. His research interests include the politics of Lamarckian evolutionary theory, French public health and hygiene, and the role of the biological sciences in social reform efforts. Caden has presented his research at the Midwest Junto (2021) and the Columbia History of Science Group Friday Harbor Conference (2021), and his paper “Species Transformation and Social Reform: The Role of the Will in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Transformist Theory” is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Biology (Vol. 56, no. 1). In addition, he serves as a Graduate Research Assistant (2021–) for the IsisCB, a bibliography and open access discovery service for the history of science, and is an Editorial Assistant on the upcoming IsisCB special issue on pandemics in history. He also serves as a Graduate Research Assistant on Evolution in Victorian Britain, a primary source collection forthcoming from Routledge and edited by Piers J. Hale and Meegan Kennedy.
Andrea Tavera Paredes first came to OU as an exchange student in 2018, and she was able to develop such strong relationships with professors and students, that she decided to come back to get her Master’s in 2019. She said of course, those relationships where only the cherry on top of how amazing OU is as a University; the people, the events, the campus, the opportunities, the student associations, the squirrels... there’s just nothing quite like it anywhere else.
While getting her Master’s, she built new amazing relationships with her coworkers, other students, her professors, particularly with her thesis committee members, and it’s because of the things that she learned from them that she is who she is today. She thanked all of those people for helping her get to where she is today, working for a top engineering company in the U.S. She said 18-year-old Andrea in Colombia would have never believed such things were possible.
