We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Collegiality and Scholarship Excellence Awards! Click on each person below to learn more about them and how they are improving their research or creative community.

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Sophia is a 3rd year PhD student studying Aerospace Engineering. Her research focuses on functional allocation of nominal operations in increasingly autonomous deep space habitats. Sophia was recently awarded a Collegiality and Scholarship Award based on her contributions to the research or creative community. We asked Sophia a few questions to learn more about her as a scholar and get to know her better. Read more below!

What is a useful research or creative skill you think everyone should have?

Pursuing multiple interests! Being a good researcher does not mean you have to only want to do research 24/7. My colleagues are all incredibly talented at a number of athletic, artistic, and musical endeavors outside of our technical research, and I believe that enhances what we can bring to the table for research.

Why is your research or creative work important to the community or world at large?

Automation is increasing in all of our daily lives and interactions with technology. We've all had an annoying experience with a robotic phone agent, and clearly it is important we incorporate autonomous technology in a way that is more than being bothersome. My research intends to evaluate interactions between humans and autonomous technology, as well as teaming options, which has numerous applications outside of aerospace.

What does an ideal research or creative community look like to you?

One that is inclusive, humble, uplifting and encourages interests and mental wellbeing outside of work. I believe we are all engaged in varying topics and this is part of what makes us who we are. I don't think anyone is just categorized as what they do for work, and encouraging pursuits outside of one's career make life more enriching.

Tell us a fun fact about you that is not related to your research or academics.

I play for the CU Women's Club Soccer program and I absolutely love it. I also stress bake far too often but thankfully have multiple offices of coworkers where I can share my creations.

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Xu Han is a 5th year PhD student studying Computer Science. Her research focuses on developing computational approaches and tools to enhance the evaluation and design of dialogue systems that can behave effectively and ethically. Xu Han was recently awarded a Collegiality and Scholarship Award based on her contributions to the research or creative community. We asked Xu Han a few questions to learn more about her as a scholar and get to know her better. Read more below!

What is a useful research or creative skill you think everyone should have?

Communication is the key. Everyone has his/her own unique perspectives and experiences to share and to be learned from.

Why is your research or creative work important to the community or world at large?

How can we interact with the increasing digital data? How can we find answers to personalized queries with fewer efforts? In many of these cases, conversational agent (CA) is a good answer. Despite CAs' great promises, designers face lots of challenges during design processes. Thus, my research aims to develop effective computational approaches and tools from a designer’s perspective. It is important in enhancing the evaluation and design of CAs that can behave effectively and ethically. The interaction experience between lots of real-world users and CAs can be improved.

What's a benefit you have found from collaborating with others?

My collaborations with people inside and outside my research community help me accumulate unique research experience in interdisciplinary areas, which inspire many innovative research questions and hypotheses to explore.

If you could have dinner with anyone (living or dead), who would it be and why?

Li Bai, one of the greatest Chinese poets. His poetry always comforts me.

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Paige is a 3rd year PhD student studying Philosophy. Her research focuses on epistemology and ethics; for example, rational belief and how to do good effectively. Paige was recently awarded a Collegiality and Scholarship Award based on her contributions to the research or creative community. We asked Paige a few questions to learn more about her as a scholar and get to know her better. Read more below!

What is a useful research or creative skill you think everyone should have?

One useful research skill (broadly construed) is learning how to ask for things, and, in some cases, insisting on them. I mean by this that graduate students should be proactive in accessing the resources they need to succeed as beginning scholars. Graduate school can be wonderful or horrible, and early career researchers shouldn't be bystanders to their own development. Ask for feedback from colleagues, ask for feedback from professors and advisors, ask for time, ask for mentorship, ask for conference funding, insist on accountability for harassment, insist on kindness from those in our community, etc. More broadly, we need to destigmatize asking for help.

Why is your research or creative work important to the community or world at large?

A core part of epistemology is concerned with rational belief, which is relevant to every field of inquiry. Some questions I've recently been interested in include whether practical reasons are commensurable with evidential reasons, when to defer to the testimony of others when you don't have access to their reasons, how to respond to putative cases of underdetermination of theory by evidence, whether we should prioritize explainability over predictability in AI, and more. In ethics, I'm interested in effective altruism, which is a philosophical and social movement to figure out how to do the most good possible and then put those findings into practice. This movement has already made a huge impact on the world and I'm eager for students at CU to reflect on how they can arc their studies and vocations to find that intersection between what they want and what the world needs.

What does an ideal research or creative community look like to you?

An ideal research community would be just that—a community! In graduate school, there is often implicit or explicit pressure to stand out. I've heard this referred as the desire to be the wizard among the muggles. But, this sort of competitive environment is alienating and can drive up attrition rates, especially for students from underrepresented backgrounds who may already struggle to belong. Research benefits tremendously from a collegial work environment where people can let go of trying to appear clever and instead share ideas earnestly. We also need to give feedback in a way that is constructive, rather than demoralizing. Some professors make excuses that the sort of gratuitously harsh feedback they give is what they received in graduate school or what we should expect when we begin publishing, but this upholds the status quo of toxic graduate school climates. We need to integrate being kind with being critical.

Tell us a fun fact about you that is not related to your research or academics.

I once befriended a nun in Israel and spent two weeks in her convent before going on to Paris, where I (very) informally started DJing for several weeks after the owner invited me to plug my iPod into his bar's sound system my first night there. Once at 3am, a drunk Parisian lady asked to give the DJ a hug to thank me for the music. I'm really shy, so it was one of these incredible experiences one can only have when traveling.

What is a good book you have read recently and why did you enjoy it?

This is a two-for-one: I recommend both Migrations and Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy. Both novels take place in an unspecified future where we've driven many animals to extinction. The environmental crises are a mirror to the main characters' traumas, and the unreliable narrators make the plot mysterious and fast-paced. Both these books are devastating, but, ultimately, redemptive. They're an homage to nature, humanity, and the resilience of each.

If you could have dinner with anyone (living or dead), who would it be and why?

I've said this in another interview, but it's still true: Raphael Lemkin. He coined the term "genocide" and spent his life tirelessly trying to prevent the worst parts of history from repeating themselves, so much so that he died worn out and impoverished. His indefatigable efforts are both humbling and inspiring.

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Jo is a 5th year PhD student studying Communication. Her research focuses on human and nature relations through a communication lens. Jo was recently awarded a Collegiality and Scholarship Award based on her contributions to the research or creative community. We asked Jo a few questions to learn more about her as a scholar and get to know her better. Read more below!

What is a useful research or creative skill you think everyone should have?

Everyone should have a citation manager skill with Zotero, for example. Life saver. Creatively, everyone should have good friends they can collaborate with academically and artistically.

Why is your research or creative work important to the community or world at large?

My research and creative work go hand in hand. I do research, and the creative aspect is a part of my thought process and a way to disseminate my research outcomes. Because my research deals with how we relate to the more-than-human world, it is important to the world at large because we need to rethink many of the relationships we currently have with our shared environments and the fellow creatures around us. Hence, as we think about the ways we relate, we should questions our dualistic perspectives and engage in reciprocal relations. We can definitely start doing that by changing the ways we speak about nature, for example, from IT to KIN, as Robin Wall Kimmerer would say. Therefore, my research I believe benefits not only humans, but those whose human actions impact.

What's a benefit you have found from collaborating with others?

Collaboration makes things better. We do not have all the skills to succeed in this world. When we collaborate, we make each other better and we produce incredible pieces of academic and creative work.

What is a good book you have read recently and why did you enjoy it?

"Hands of Light," by Barbara Brennan. I enjoyed being reminded that to reach our full potential, we need to be in contact with our energy and the energy of others.

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