Undergraduate Research Project Contest (MU)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10355/12770
The MU Libraries Undergraduate Research Paper Contest seeks to recognize and reward outstanding research conducted by undergraduate students at the University of Missouri. Any undergraduate in any discipline is invited to enter the contest, which is judged by a cross-disciplinary panel of librarians, members of The Friends of the MU Libraries, and MU faculty members. The MU Libraries Contest is different from other research paper contests in that it judges not only the paper itself, but also the research process and the student’s ability to articulate his/her experience conducting research. It is also unique opportunity for undergraduate students to present their research to an audience.

Winners:

  • 2025
    • Explorative materials & sustainable fashion in the fashion industry
  • 2024
  • 2023
  • 2022
  • 2020
  • 2019
    • First place winner:Ashley Anstaett, Phong H. Nguyen, and Andrew J. Greenwald. Conceptual design of microfiber removal using pressure-swing filtration [not available in MOspace]
    • Second place winner: Erielle Jones. Fly like an eagle : the success of STOP-ERA in the Missouri Senate 1977 [not available in MOspace]
  • 2018:
  • 2017:
    • First place winner: Victor Topouria. The fabric road to power : geography of the textiles trade along the new Silk Road and China’s path to geopolitical dominance through the textiles supply chain. [Not available in MOspace]
    • Second place winner: Samuel Mosher. The suppression of the African slave trade in The Illustrated London News. [Not available in MOspace]
  • 2016:
  • 2015:
    • First place winner: Rebecca Honeyball. An examination of vocal fry in the context of peer bonding, authority and perceptions of self. [Not available in MOspace]
  • 2014:
    • Individual project winner: Emily Voss. Consanguineous Marriage in Bangladesh. [Not available in MOspace]
    • Group project winner: Read Hall History Collective (Christopher Bowen, Bryan Buer, Alexander Deckard, Christopher Fernandez, Andrew Holden, Adam Kleinerman, Russ Kohl, Bethany Korte, Meghan Moore, Daniel Neuhaus, Melissa Ryder, and Michael Williams.). All My Blood and Treasure: The Civil War and Divided Loyalties in Little Dixie, Missouri. [Not available in MOspace]
  • 2012:
  • 2011:
    • >

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    Recent Submissions

    Now showing 1 - 5 of 20
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      Sounds of the energy transition
      (2025) Huenefeldt, Jackson
      Noise is an overlooked impact of the fossil fuel economy. For the purposes of this paper, noise is defined as anthropogenic sound that is unwanted, disruptive, or harmful to living things. Noise pollution is a danger to human health,5 and negatively impacts biodiversity6 and wildlife behavior.7 Transportation, building temperature control, and fossil fuel extraction and processing are major contributors to noise pollution.8 If clean energy-powered versions of these sources are quieter, the transition to clean energy could be the greatest reduction in noise pollution in history. To determine the extent of this reduction, this paper will first investigate major sources of noise pollution as a result of energy use, particularly generation for the electricity grid, transportation, and climate control. It will then explore literature surrounding the health and environmental impacts of noise pollution associated with this energy use. Most importantly, it will compare the noise levels from fossil fuel energy sources (natural gas, coal, and petroleum) to those of clean and/or renewable sources (wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear). The paper will conclude with analysis on how and to what extent the energy transition will change noise pollution.
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      Tracing routes through roots: unraveling the Bantu migration through linguistics and archaeology
      (2025) Schmolzi, Nina
      Humans have been moving across the globe for thousands of years, often following food and other resources. As they migrate, they leave behind traces of their history, including linguistic, archaeological, and botanical evidence. One of the largest migrations in African history was the Bantu migration of Bantu-speaking peoples moving from Central West Africa to the eastern part of the continent. Despite its large scale, the fine details of this migration– specifically the timing and exact paths of the migrants– remains up for debate (Koile et al. 2022). I chose to study the Bantu Expansion because of its fascinating history and the link between two of my majors, anthropology and linguistics. Despite all the studies conducted in history, genetics, archeology and linguistics, there are still many unknowns about the early migration routes in Central Africa. The aim of this paper is to examine the findings made by archeologists and linguists working on lexicostatistics to classify languages in order to understand the mismatches within and between these disciplines.. This paper aims to summarize the main hypotheses according to leading linguists and archaeologists, and to discuss their merits and what future research could be done to come closer to the truth of this mass migration, which began around 5,000 years ago. The Bantu people are characterized by their language group of the same name which is a significant subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family that consists of 1,500 languages in Sub-Saharan Africa. The term “Bantu” was coined by the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek as a reconstruction of the Proto-Bantu term for ‘human’. In modern times, the Bantu subgroup encompasses over 500 languages spoken by approximately 240 million people across a vast area of 9 million square kilometers. The origin of these languages is widely believed to be situated near the border of Nigeria and Cameroon at approximately 4,940 BP (Koile et al. 2022). The early Bantu people were semi-sedentary agriculturalists occupying primarily savannah habitats and moved at a rate of approximately 1.2 km/yr (Clist 1989). At the migration’s completion, most Bantu people were sedentary as a result of widespread iron industry and today, represent hundreds of distinct cultural groups. Being such a large group within the Niger-Congo phylum with a great deal of internal diversity, there has been some argument over the decades about what a language requires to be considered Bantu. The seminal work in Bantu classification was done by Malcom Guthrie, who defined Bantu as a system of noun classes marked by prefixes– similar to gender in non-Bantu languages– organized into singular-plural pairs; and as having a common lexicon with cognates, words that share the same direct descent from a parent language. Guthrie created a system of dividing the Bantu area into 15 geographic zones with letters associated, and each zone was divided into smaller linguistic groups by decades (ie. A10, A20, etc), and each individual language within the larger group was given its own number (i.e. E53 to designate the language Mwĩmbĩ). His approach has since been updated and rearranged, as grouping languages geographically tends to give a false sense of relatedness between them. It is more reliable to group languages based on common ancestors, and the field of historical linguistics focuses in part on building phylogenetic trees for languages based on cognates and sound changes between closely related-languages, and this work is being done on Bantu languages.--Introduction.
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      Robust defense against extreme grid events using dual-policy reinforcement learning agents
      (IEEE., 2025) Peter, Benjamin M.; Korkali, Mert; 2025 IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference (TPEC)
      Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are powerful tools for managing power grids. They use large amounts of data to inform their actions and receive rewards or penalties as feedback to learn favorable responses for the system. Once trained, these agents can efficiently make decisions that would be too computationally complex for a human operator. This ability is especially valuable in decarbonizing power networks, where the demand for RL agents is increasing. These agents are well suited to control grid actions since the action space is constantly growing due to uncertainties in renewable generation, microgrid integration, and cybersecurity threats. To assess the efficacy of RL agents in response to an adverse grid event, we use the Grid2Op platform for agent training. We employ a proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm in conjunction with graph neural networks (GNNs). By simulating agents’ responses to grid events, we assess their performance in avoiding grid failure for as long as possible. The performance of an agent is expressed concisely through its reward function, which helps the agent learn the most optimal ways to reconfigure a grid’s topology amidst certain events. To model multi-actor scenarios that threaten modern power networks, particularly those resulting from cyberattacks, we integrate an opponent that acts iteratively against a given agent. This interplay between the RL agent and opponent is utilized in N − k contingency screening, providing a novel alternative to the traditional security assessment.
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      Explorative materials & sustainable fashion in the fashion industry
      (2024) Johnson, Rosie; Southard, Cailey
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