UC San Diego Undergraduate Library Research Prize

Honorable Mention 2025 Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Category, nominated by Adena Schachner (Department of Psychology)

Human towns are shaped by intentional design. Here we ask whether people use societal features to make social inferences, specifically focusing on how the presence of protective architectural features influences people’s intuitions about towns’ residents. U.S. adults (N = 100) were presented with two novel societies – a 'protected' town with walls, locks, and gates, and an 'unprotected' town lacking such features. We manipulated whether residents had chosen or been randomly assigned where to live. Across both conditions, people judged that unprotected society residents felt safer, happier, and were nicer; and that protected society residents dressed more similarly, stayed inside more, and had more rules. Most people preferred to live in the unprotected society. Positive attributions and preference for the unprotected society were associated with liberal (vs. conservative) political affiliation. Overall, we show that people use the physical features of built environments to make social inferences about residents’ behaviors, traits, and mental states.

Winner 2025 Special Collection & Archives Category, nominated by Adena Schachner (Department of Psychology)

At UC San Diego (UCSD), student-run cooperatives—Groundwork Books, Food Co-Op, General Store, and Che Café - function as hubs for cultural expression, activism, and community connection. Focusing on Groundwork Books, this study examines how place attachment, the emotional bond individuals form with meaningful space and community resilience, and the capacity to adapt and recover from adversity are displayed in the past fifty years since its conception as a student cooperative. Through a mixed-methods approach, this study explores the quantifiable levels of place attachment and community resilience within UCSD’s student cooperatives and specifically unearthing Groundwork Books legacy in being a functional space. Archival data and document analysis, surveys, and interviews with past and current Groundwork Books members are implemented in understanding the lived experiences of Groundwork Books history. This study provides a nuanced understanding of how place attachment and community resilience manifest in Groundwork Books, highlighting the historical and social significance of student cooperatives.

Honorable Mention 2025 Life & Health Sciences Category, nominated by Weg M. Ongkeko (Department of Surgery)

Enhanced PD-L1 (Programmed Death-Ligand 1) expression in tumor cells aids the evasion of immune surveillance. Nivolumab and pembrolizumab, PD-L1 blockade agents, have been applied in clinical settings to treat Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma (HNSCC), yet low response rates, unimproved prognosis, and treatment resistance necessitate further research into the underlying molecular mechanism. While alcohol, tobacco, and HPV exposure are the most prominent risk factors responsible for HNSCC pathogenesis, their synergistic influence on PD-L1 blockade treatment responses is largely unknown. In this study, we characterized how different combinations of the three etiologic factors alters the molecular landscape of HNSCC, influencing either favorable or adverse PD-L1 blockade treatment outcomes.

Winner 2025 Life & Health Sciences Category, nominated by Weg M. Ongkeko (Department of Surgery)

Honorable Mention 2025 Special Collections & Archives Category, nominated by Anna Joy Springer (Department of Literature)

The artist's visual directions for recreating the artwork includes textual content used in the book and images of the process and completed work.

Winner 2025 Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Category, nominated by Andrea Mendoza (Department of Literature).

In this thesis, I analyze the work of Nina Mingya Powles through a critical mixed race lens. Powles is a multiracial author and poet who writes about her experiences navigating multiracial girlhood as she travels to and lives in various locations tied to her heritages. Focusing on Powles’s use of water imagery, I examine how both her prose (Small Bodies of Water) and poetry (Magnolia) illustrate the multiracial body’s fluid nature. I argue that the multiracial body is a fluid entity that permeates racial boundaries via its occupation of peripheries, allowing it to exist beyond the rigid classification of colonial racial categories. Through this occupation, multiraciality exists in and moves through the contested in-between space, deconstructing socially constructed categories of identity that dictate power hierarchies within the colonial framework. Although multiracial fluidity serves as a site of colonial deconstruction, I also argue that this mutability leaves the multiracial body vulnerable to external racial exploitation. I term this multiracial malleability, theorizing that the multiracial body’s racial ambiguity is a source of manipulation on both an individual and institutional level. I argue that this malleability may be the root of multiracial fetishization, as it allows external forces to shape the multiracial body into the desired racial entity. In my theory, the multiracial mythic serves as an embodiment of both multiracial fluidity and malleability by occupying the borders between concretely defined entities, therefore existing within the in-between and blurring discrete categories of identity.

Winner 2025 Life & Health Sciences Category, nominated by Chengbiao Wu (Department of Neurosciences).

Triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2), an immune receptor expressed on the surface of microglia, has been identified through genome-wide association studies to be one of the risk factors in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Several studies have also identified missense variants of TREM2 to be associated with frontotemporal dementia and Nasu-Hakola disease (NHD). To date, 51 novel missense variants of TREM2 have been identified in the literature, with the disease risk profiles of most variants still unknown. Assessing and classifying the pathogenicity of these variants is essential to investigate the disease mechanisms and develop effective treatments. Herein, we classified 44 missense variants involved in TREM2 using structural bioinformatic data with AlphaFold2. Using the protocol described in our previous work [1], we determined the structural, stability, and potential functional effects of these variants. Our evaluations of the mutations were divided into those (i) implicated in NHD, (ii) located on the transmembrane domain, (iii) surface of the IgV-like domain, (iv) buried in the receptor, and (v) on low confidence predicted local distance difference test residues. Our analysis of variants involved in NHD suggests that, while V126G imposes the greatest effects, the T66M variant exerts significantly less effects on the TREM2 structures compared to the other remaining variants. Variants in the transmembrane domain of TREM2 did not impose significant alterations to the three-dimensional structure. Outside of known variants in the IgV-like domain, we identified 10 variants that imposed significant destabilizing effects to the structure and are of potential interest. Overall, the baseline biochemical data provided from this study may be informative to experimental efforts to better classify rare coding variants of TREM2 that are of unknown biological and clinical significance.