UC San Diego Undergraduate Library Research Prize

Honorable Mention 2024 Special Collections & Archives Category, nominated by Ameeth Vijay (Department of Literature)

The United States of America in the 1960s was characterized by big changes in the socio-political scenario, owing to the rapidly changing view of technology, science, and cultural art,marking the advent of the counterculture. With the Civil Rights Movement at its climax, there was a heavy division of race and among the people who remained conservative in the rising popularity of liberalism. This gave way to new movements in art, with localized artistic styles and innovations gaining popularity through close-knit, academically, and artistically associated groups of poets, painters, philosophers, etc. Larry Eigner, being one of them, linked to the Black Mountain school of poets, focused his poetry during this time mainly on literary-historical topics with special attention to the placement of words on the page and the creation of an environment through his words and style. This paper will explore the nuances of violence and peace in Eigner’s individual poetry and artistic partnership with Ian Tyson, and how this is reflective of the alternations and coexistence of violence and peace in the world around him. This will also include broader changes in the cultural and social environment at the time and how Eigner’s poetry can be read with that under consideration.

Winner 2024 Data & GIS Category, nominated by Professor Colin Jemmott (Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute)

Although the amount of resources available on the internet seems to be growing daily, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to navigate the sea of information. While one might expect the influx of articles to make it easier to answer questions, the information accessible is often written well after the historical events have concluded, reflecting modern perspectives and interpretations. When answering historical questions, people often tend to rely on a simple Google search, which leads to websites such as Wikipedia. These sites can be problematic due to the unreliability of sources and the tendency to project 21st-century viewpoints onto historical information. These tools provide users with a surface-level summary that lacks the historical nuance and contextualization that is needed for a thorough understanding of the matter at hand. This project aims to address this gap in relevant and credible information retrieval. This project accomplishes these goals through Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which is a combination of a search algorithm andLarge Language Models (LLMs) to answer user queries. Retrieval Augmented Generation avoids the limitations of traditional search functions, which can struggle with large amounts of data, causing inaccurate or oversimplified results. A user can ask a question about historical events, and our model will search, retrieve, and synthesize data, ultimately responding to the user’s questions using a diverse array of historical news sources.

Winner 2024 Life & Health Sciences Category, nominated by Weg M. Ongkeko (Department of Surgery)

Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC) is a cancer of the mucosal epithelium in the oral cavity, larynx, and pharynx. It is the 6th most common cancer worldwide and is typically diagnosed at later stages, resulting in lower survival rates compared to other major cancers. Current diagnostic methods include tissue biopsy, lymph node biopsy, ultrasound, immunochemistry, CT, MRI, and PET. The goal of this project is to develop a blood-based diagnostic test for HNSCC less invasive and more cost-effective than current methods. The test utilizes the microbiome and genomics to effectively diagnose patients in early stages. The blood microbiome showed many species to be differentially abundant between cancer and normal samples, with significant overlap between blood and tissue microbiomes. The microbiome shows promising potential as a diagnostic tool in blood samples for HNSCC detection, with potential expansion to include additional markers.

Winner 2024 Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Category, nominated by Weijing Lu (Department of History)

This research delves into legal consciousness and women’s agency during the early 1930s in China. In 1931, the Nationalist government implemented the Civil Code of the Republic of China, which granted women important legal rights, such as expanded property ownership and marriage autonomy. Notably, the Code unprecedentedly allowed individuals to be granted divorce by the courts on the grounds of intolerable domestic abuse. While existing literature have suggested an increase in divorce litigations initiated by abused women, indicating a rise in their legal awareness, there has been limited discussion on how abused women leveraged available resources to resist abuse and oppressive sociopolitical conditions prior to taking formal legal action. How did women experiencing domestic abuse navigate their situations in the years following the 1931 Civil Code? Through archival research and in-depth qualitative analysis of legal inquiries made by individuals to three periodicals -- Ling Long, The China Times, and Sin Wan Pao -- from 1932 to 1935, this study reveals how some women analyzed their circumstances and strategically leveraged their familial and social networks and free legal consultation to subtly resist and alter their historical conditions. By contextualizing the findings within the sociopolitical and legal contexts, this research provides insights into the complexities of Chinese women’s history, challenging traditional narratives of women being passive victims of oppression by illustrating their active agency in navigating their situations. Also, it sheds light on the life experiences of ordinary women in Chinese history, which have frequently been overlooked, suggesting valuable untapped primary sources for future studies.

Winner 2024 Special Collections & Archives Category, nominated by Ameeth Vijay (Department of Literature).

Analysis of Susan Howe's poem, "The Midnight," which considers the history of the poet's mother and Howe's use of dialetheism.

Honorable Mention 2024 Data & GIS Category, nominated by Weg M. Ongkeko (Department of Surgery).

Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is a common cancer in which the role of transf RNA derived fragments (tRFs), a relatively novel class of small non-coding RNA, has yet be widely explored. It has been proposed that tRFs influence cancer proliferation by binding to mRNA transcripts and inducing their degradation through the recruitment of cleaving proteins. This study aims to characterize the expression of tRFs, oncogenes, a tumor suppressor genes in PTC with respect to the following subtypes: classical PTC, follicular variant PTC, and tall cell PTC. Across all cohorts, we found that tRFs are significantly dysregulated (p<0.05), and that their expression is anticorrelated with dysregulated oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Binding affinity analysis further revealed that significant pairs of anticorrelated tRFs and genes have sufficient complementarity to form heteroduplexes, supporting the hypothesis that tRFs are mechanistically relevant to cancer and contribute to post-transcriptional regulation.