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Graduate Prizes
Annamae and Allan R. Crite PrizeEstablished in honor of Annamae Crite, who for more than a half-century faithfully attended Extension courses, and her son, Allan R. Crite, AB in Extension Studies ’68, who is widely recognized as the dean of African-American artists in the Greater Boston area, the Annamae and Allan R. Crite Prize is awarded to Extension School degree recipients who demonstrate “singular dedication to learning and the arts.”
The recipient of the first Crite Prize was Catherine Amelia Kreider, concentrator in history of art and architecture, who graduated with a 3.92 GPA. A 1993 graduate of Colgate University, with a concentration in history of art, Kreider lives and works in Philadelphia. Her thesis explores the complex sculptural iconography that was designed to communicate the Philadelphia bank’s political, economic, and moral fitness at a time when the nation’s finances were tenuous and the stability of its government uncertain. Her thesis director, Jennifer L. Roberts, assistant professor of history of art and architecture, praised the study as a “splendid work of scholarship, by far the most substantial and sophisticated analysis yet produced of the sculptural program of the First Bank of the United States . . . Kreider has skillfully synthesized two fields of study that rarely intersect: art history and financial history.”
The second Crite Prize was awarded to George W. Frode, concentrator in classical civilizations. Frode received a bachelor’s degree in English from Indiana University in 1974 and the Certificate of Special Studies in Administration and Management from Harvard Extension School in 1990. His thesis examines a text believed to be composed of historical accounts, fantasies, and letters circulating shortly after the death of Alexander the Great, and asks what this hybrid of fiction and nonfiction contributes to the modern understanding of Alexander’s legend. The study also explores the ways in which this account reflects the cultural and literary preoccupations of the Hellenistic Age. David Gordon Mitten, James Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology, directed the thesis and praised it for its “exhaustive research into the voluminous scholarly literature on the ‘Alexander Romance,’ its development, and its reception within the Greek world and in the Western tradition. What has resulted is a valuable work of synthesis that makes an original contribution to our understanding of the ‘Romance’ as perhaps the most widely diffused and long-lastingly popular ancient novel.” Frode is featured in “A Quartet of Classicists.” Thomas Small PrizeEstablished in honor of Thomas Small, who received an ALM degree at the age of 89, the Thomas Small Prize is awarded annually on the basis of “academic achievement and character” to the two Master of Liberal Arts degree recipients with the highest GPA.
Three graduates shared the Thomas Small Prize this year, each with a GPA of 4.0: Timothy Di Leo Browne, Kristina Lyn Skrine, and Janiffer Whang Wyglendowski. Browne graduated from the University of Toronto in 1983 and is an assistant in the French-Italian division of Widener Library’s technical services department at Harvard. A concentrator in linguistics, his thesis is titled “Michif: A Study in Language Contact and Relexification.” Jay Jasanoff, Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology and chair of the Department of Linguistics, directed the thesis: “Tim did original fieldwork in Manitoba to form a nuanced picture of the Michif language and its speakers. His presentation of Michif as a relexified form of Cree is surely correct. With the experience he has gained from this project, Tim is now in an excellent position to make himself a real authority on ‘Métis linguistics.’ ” Browne has been accepted to a PhD program at Carleton University in Ottawa. Skrine, a psychology concentrator, also won a Dean’s thesis prize (see below). She graduated cum laude from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with a bachelor of science in computing science in 1981. Before coming to the ALM Program, she also took courses at the University of Houston and Northeastern University. Skrine will be applying to doctoral programs in clinical psychology next year. Wyglendowski, a concentrator in English and American literature and language, holds a bachelor of arts degree in music from Princeton University and a master of arts degree in music theory from Yale University. Her thesis explores the figures of summer and autumn in two Wallace Stevens poems, specifically their dual roles as manifestations of unmediated reality and as imaginative constructs. Her thesis director, Peter Sacks, John P. Marquand Professor of English, called the study an “excellent work on the aesthetic and philosophical features” of Stevens’ poems and praised its “practical insight into the evolution of the poet’s engagement with questions of reality, temporality, the limits of the imagination, art itself, and its capacity for existential and epistemological apprehension. Well researched and written, this is a work of intelligence, humanity, and elegance, and the fruit of long and serious thought.” Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM ThesisThe Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis, awarded in each discipline, recognizes work that embodies the highest level of scholarship.
The Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in the Behavioral Sciences was awarded to Kristina Lyn Skrine for her thesis, “Attention and Concept Formation in Socially Impaired Children.” A psychology concentrator, Skrine studied the neuropsychological profiles of children with features of Asperger’s disorder and borderline personality disorder, along with an emotionally volatile group with symptoms of each disorder that did not clearly meet criteria for either one. Experts in the field have proposed a new category, multiple complex developmental disorder, to diagnose these challenging and disruptive children who shift in and out of inpatient mental health units, residential treatment, and outpatient care. Skrine’s thesis further validates the distinctiveness of this group based on their unique performance on tests of information processing. Thesis director Eugene D’Angelo, assistant professor of psychology in the department of psychiatry and chief of the division of psychology at Children’s Hospital, Boston, wrote, “Ms. Skrine has completed a high quality thesis that makes an important contribution to the literature in developmental psychopathology . . . I felt as though she operated more at the level of a doctoral candidate than someone who was completing requirements for a master’s degree.”
The Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in the Biological Sciences was shared by Robert Monro Lennie and Luke Martin McKneally. Lennie’s thesis, “Recent Positive Selection in Human-Chimpanzee Orthologs and the Density of Recombination Hot Spots,” was directed by Marco Ramoni, assistant professor of pediatrics, Children’s Hospital, Boston. His thesis uses bioinformatics to show that genes that have undergone recent evolutionary change have a high density of recombination hotspots around them, suggesting that where recombination occurs is itself subject to natural selection. Ramoni says the thesis focuses “on a very interesting problem at the forefront of contemporary genetics.” Lennie is a 1994 graduate of the University of Illinois with a bachelor of science in biology. McKneally’s thesis investigates the evolutionary relationships of North American tent caterpillars, exhibiting the complex social behaviors among butterflies and moths. It was directed by Naomi Pierce, Sidney A. and John H. Hessel Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and James Costa, H. F. and Katherine P. Robinson Professor of Biology at Western Carolina University. Pierce says the thesis represents “the most comprehensive hypothesis to date for the evolution of North American species of Malacosoma.” McKneally came to the ALM Program with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Syracuse University.
The Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in Environmental Management went to Tracy Louise Stamos. Stamos’ thesis investigates the continuing water pollution and potential health effects of a decades-old military fuel spill of highly toxic and poorly contained jet fuel that has resulted in high levels of benzene and ethyleme dibromide in the Cape Cod groundwater aquifer. Thesis director A. Wallace Hayes, visiting scientist in environmental health at the Harvard School of Public Health, and John Spengler, director of the ALM in Environmental Management Program and professor of environmental health and habitation at the School of Public Health, commended the thesis as an exemplary project utilizing quantitative risk assessment methodologies on an important and timely topic while making optimum use of both current literature and government documents.
The Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in the Humanities was awarded to Kathleen Pike, concentrator in history of art and architecture. Pike’s thesis is titled “The Birth Horoscope of Iskandar Sultan: Astrology in the Service of Kingship” and is showcased in “Thesis Spotlight.” Pike has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is a mutual fund systems consultant at Boston Financial Data Services. She graduated with a GPA of 3.76.
The Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in Information Technology went to Clifford Patrick Lyon and Chi Yung Yuen. Lyon’s thesis, “CADET: An Interactive Java Application for Cluster Analysis and Data Exploration,” was supervised by Bhiksha Raj, research scientist, Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab, and Sergei Makar-Limanov, principal engineer, CNET. CADET is an interactive application supporting data clustering and data visualization. It allows users to analyze a variety of large data sets; for instance, to discover patterns in the behavior of users visiting a large commercial website. According to Bhiksha Raj, “The work is definitely of commercial grade. There are no comparable applications with the level of scalability and extensibility that this application has.” Lyon received his bachelor of arts in music from Wesleyan University and completed his ALM in Information Technology with a 4.0 GPA. Yuen’s thesis project, “A Card Game: AI Programming Using Java,” was supervised by Paul Bamberg, senior lecturer in mathematics, Harvard University. The project yielded an impressive game player that could perform better than human players at a Chinese card game called “Fight the Landlord.” Yuen not only developed an impressive artificial intelligence (AI) component but also gave serious attention to running a large number of tests to examine the effectiveness of several different strategies. Yuen has a bachelor of science in psychology and a master of science in statistics, both from McGill University.
Daniel Elias was the recipient of the Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in Museum Studies for his work, “Vastly More Than Art & Money: A Strategic Analysis of the Harvard University Art Museums.” The thesis director, Arnold M. Howitt, executive director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, praised the work, stating that it “demonstrates a substantial body of original research . . . his analysis is very sophisticated by comparison with the typical master’s thesis . . . or, for that matter, among the thesis-equivalents I see at the Kennedy School.” Elias received a bachelor of arts degree from Tufts University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1984. He graduated with a 3.79 GPA.
The Dean’s Prize for Outstanding ALM Thesis in the Social Sciences went to Jonathan Salz, graduate in history, whose thesis investigates the history of folk renaissance and folk revival music and challenges the conventional scholarly wisdom that “folk music of protest” is dead. The thesis director, Alice Jardine, professor of romance languages and literatures, writes that his “thesis demonstrates a combination of historical and aesthetic seriousness [that is] rare. . . . ” She was “deeply impressed by his ability to synthesize vast amounts of archival research, theoretical exploration, and almost a cultural anthropologist’s sensitivity to oral history.” She commends Salz “for his original work and insightful writing.” Salz received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and currently works as a production associate for the Memorial Hall/Lowell Hall complex at Harvard University. Class MarshalsThis year’s class marshals for the graduate liberal arts program were Robert Andrew Pontbriand and Tanya K. Bhatia, and for the graduate professional programs they were Clifford Patrick Lyon and Ted Carpenter.
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