1st place: Searching for Life in America’s Dead Sea
People's Choice Award winner  

Author: Michael Werner, faculty, School of Biological Sciences

This image was captured during a field work trip to Great Salt Lake (GSL). We had just finished paddling in kayaks from Antelope Island to Fremont Island, which takes about 2-3 hours. As I was resting, my graduate student (Shelley Reich, left) and post-doc (Julie Jung, right) began collecting submerged sediment to bring back to the lab. I couldn’t help but notice the profile of the two scientists in the foreground framed by the mountains, which seemed to emerge almost from nowhere above the placid conditions of the lake that day. This turned out to be a pivotal sampling trip from which we discovered a new species of roundworm (nematode), representing the third animal to live in the hypersaline bays of GSL.

2nd place: Unused, Unneeded, Unsafe 

Author: Jordan Johnson, post-doc/researcher, general surgery advanced practice clinician

Every year in the US, 42 million surgery patients are prescribed opioids for post-discharge pain management and 60-92% of patients will have leftover opioids. Presently, we advise patients to dispose of opioids at take-back events or drop boxes, but less than 10% will do so. Instead, patients insecurely store, misuse, or share opioids putting themselves, families, and communities at risk. Despite this, we currently lack an effective and scalable intervention for motivating patients to dispose of leftover opioids. Thus, there is a critical and time-sensitive need to develop effective, scalable opioid disposal interventions. Our research aims at providing the needed evidence and training for developing, implementing, and evaluating opioid disposal and other patient safety health system interventions.

3rd place: Networks of Resistance: The Hidden Architecture of an ExPEC Biofilm 

1st place: Underneath the Yellow Woman

Author: Jamie Nakano, graduate student, Department of History 

Literary studies scholar Dr. Anne Anlin Cheng coined the concept of the “Yellow Woman” to refer to the amalgamation of representations of Asian women in Western media. The Yellow Woman is both a person and an object, decorated and a decoration, constructed from centuries of intercultural contact between the West and the Asian Orient. My research on media portrayals of Asian femininity in the 19th and early 20th centuries considers this theory, attempting to find the real women at the root of such portrayals. Representation is a combination of observation and interpretation, and the final product of art – be it a painting of a young Japanese girl, a travelogue recounting a foreign temporary wife, a film about Chinese peasants, a performer dressed in opulent gold, an advertisement for vice and luxury, or a superfluous dragon – comes from a real story somewhere down the historical pipeline. When you peel back the layers, tearing through even the base picture – underneath everything, who will you find staring back at you?

2nd place: Broken Treaties and ICBMs: Cold War Conflict between Western Shoshone Land Claims and U.S. Nuclear Militarization

Author: John Flynn, graduate student, American West Center

Two treaties, signed over 100 years apart, collided at the height of the Cold War as nuclear warheads and Native American land claims presented different futures for the lands of the Great Basin. In 1863, the Western Shoshone signed a treaty of “peace and friendship” with the United States, through which the Western Shoshone retained rights to their original territory in Nevada. In 1979, President Carter signed the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union as part of the Cold War arms race. A consequence of SALT II was a U.S. plan to cover Nevada with hundreds of nuclear missiles called the “MX.” My research image visualizes the land conflict created by U.S. militarization of the Great Basin and the Western Shoshone efforts to defend their aboriginal homeland during the Cold War. The image is a collage of two archival sources—the original 1863 treaty and a US government rendering of the MX missile from 1979. The missile image is superimposed over the treaty, tearing across the page to symbolize the collision of competing land use claims. This visual collision reflects the crux of my research: the tension between Cold War militarization of public lands and Native claims to traditional territory.

3rd place: Cracking Horizon 

Author: Cait Quirk, graduate student, Environmental Humanities Program

As a researcher in the Environmental Humanities, I use experimental film photography to communicate glacial melt to broader audiences. Through work with the North Cascades Glacier Climate Project, I measure the mass balance of glaciers and study water resources. To parallel how the processes of climate change are affecting glaciers, I pre-exposed the 35mm film to light and heat. The resulting saturation distortions in the photo "Cracking Horizon" enhance the visual of the crevasse to demonstrate how global warming exacerbates glacier recession. This image was taken on the Easton glacier of Mt Baker, which has lost over 20% of its volume in the last 20 years.