The Marriott Library is proud to recognize the extraordinary work of two graduates in the Honors College –  Jamie Nakano and Haley Payton Segura – for their exemplary senior theses. These recipients were selected from the pool of senior Honors College students who create theses projects prior to their graduation in the fields of humanities and general sciences. Nakano and Segura were each presented with the Alison Regan Library Thesis Award of $1,000 on behalf of the library in recognition of their outstanding projects.

The Alison Regan Library Thesis Award winner for the Humanities / Fine Arts thesis category went to Jamie Nakano for her work, Tennis Players and Bowlers: the Historical Sociology of the CIA.

Jamie’s paper explores the recruitment of CIA case officers during the 1950s, viewed through a lens of class and cultural divides.

Her advisor, Dr. Peter Roady, writes, “It is rare for an undergraduate thesis—even the honors thesis of an exceptional student—to break new methodological ground as Jamie’s has. Her breakthrough is even more exciting because the approach she has pioneered lends itself well to data mining, enabling the rapid expansion of the number of Agency officers captured in her database… I fully expect an academic journal article to emerge from her thesis and continuing research.”

This year, the Alison Regan Library Thesis Award Winner in the Science Category went to Haley Segura for her thesis, Fire History and Environmental Disturbance Reconstruction for Fish Lake, Utah.

Haley’s thesis is a study of the impact of wildfires on high-elevation forested ecosystems in the Colorado Plateau region. She writes that her thesis, “is part of a larger project exploring climate, vegetation, and fire dynamics and aims to provide land managers with insights into the long-term role of disturbances in aspen forests and recommendations for future maintenance.”

Haley’s thesis advisor, Dr. Andrea Brunelle states: “In addition to her contributions to the fire history in general, Haley selected a significant fire event from the record to study more closely for impacts of fire on vegetation for her thesis. She examined pollen samples before and after the largest fire peak (thus far) in the record to understand what vegetation composition leads to fire and what the post-fire response is. Haley did an excellent job on the research and also on framing her results in the larger climatic context of the last 10,000 years.”