On February 15, 2023, students and faculty gathered in McDowell Hall’s Formal Lounge for AU’s annual Undergraduate Academic Achievement awards ceremony. These awards recognize academic excellence at the undergraduate level in diverse categories from research to performing arts. Faculty are also recognized for their contributions and mentoring in undergraduate research or creative work. Several SIS students and faculty were among those honored.

Outstanding Community Service

Elana Caparco, SIS/BA ’23, is a senior in the DIS Copenhagen program. She interns for BPC Action where she works on economics, education, energy, health, and housing issues. As a Community-Based Research Scholar, she served with the Raising a Village Foundation. This led her to continue her educational work at Teach for America and her externship with TNTP. Caparco is the deputy director of digital media for Leading Women of Tomorrow, VP of Educators Rising, and a member of the First-Generation Student Union. She has previously served as deputy director of AU Pride, research reviewer for Clocks and Clouds, volunteer for Capitol Hill Village, mentor for the SIS Diplomatic Core, and tutor for the PASS Program. Caparco has also interned with Senator Jack Reed (RI) and Representative Jim Langevin (RI-02).

AU Honors student Johneé Wilson, SIS/BA ’24, is pursuing a degree in international studies and a minor in African American and African Diaspora studies. She previously served as the research team lead for the Dope Diaspora Project, an independent study on the evolution of female sexual empowerment through the socioeconomic lens of African diasporic music and language. In 2022, as a Gilman Scholar, she studied abroad with CET in São Paulo, Brazil. Wilson is the recipient of the AU Matthew and Cynthia Warshaw Scholarship, Black Alumni Awards Book Scholarship, and SISU Davenport Scholarship. During the winter of 2022, she interned overseas with Dream Sports Africa to co-design resiliency models for youth leadership programs in Nigeria. She is also the founder of Million Mats DC, a yoga initiative for underserved youth. After graduation, Wilson seeks to continue research in Brazil as a Fulbright Scholar and attend graduate school to prepare for a career at the intersection of foreign service, design thinking, and creative storytelling.

Provost's Award for Outstanding Faculty Mentorship in Undergraduate Research or Creative Work

Professor Robert Adcock is a senior professorial lecturer at SIS and affiliate faculty in the Honors program. He earned his PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley, and his interests focus on the politics and sociology of knowledge, the transatlantic history of the social sciences and liberalism, and the philosophy and methods of the social sciences. Adcock is the author of Liberalism and the Emergence of American Political Science: A Transatlantic Tale (Oxford UP, 2014), was the co-editor of Modern Political Science: Anglo-American Exchanges since 1880 (Princeton UP, 2007), and, from 2011-14, edited the newsletter of the American Political Science Association’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Research section. Since joining AU’s faculty in 2015, he has enjoyed introducing hundreds of AU sophomores to varied traditions of scholarly research. When not teaching research, he has offered an array of historically-themed undergraduate courses on topics from the evolution of international studies from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries to President Woodrow Wilson’s scholarship, politics, and policies, and from theories of totalitarianism from the 1920s-early Cold War to international relations theory reframed in light of global history.

Professor Nina Yamanis is an associate professor at SIS who holds a PhD and MPH in health behavior from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies how social and structural determinants are linked to health disparities globally and locally, and designs community-based interventions to reduce these disparities. Yamanis has worked on research in Tanzania since 2006, focusing on how social networks influence the HIV risk and protective behaviors of young people and on the nation’s COVID-19 response and vaccine rollout. She also researches HIV prevention in DC for Latina/o/x immigrants and is the associate director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Core of the District of Columbia’s Center for AIDS Research. Her work has appeared in many prestigious journals, including the Annual Review of Public Health, Social Science and Medicine, AIDS and Behavior, Global Public Health, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, and PLOS NTDs. Her current projects relate to the combination of economic empowerment and social norm change needed to reduce HIV risk for young women in Tanzania and how the pandemic affected HIV prevention and treatment services for Latina/o/x immigrants. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Yamanis teaches courses on global health, pandemics, applied research, program planning, and development.