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Distinguished Dissertation Awards

Nominations for the Distinguished Dissertation Awards are now submitted directly through our website. This may require some changes in the way nominators put together the dossiers. Please read through this site before you begin the nomination process.

The purpose of the Distinguished Dissertation Awards is to recognize exceptional and unusually interesting work produced by doctoral students in the last phase of their graduate work. The nominees’ overall academic accomplishments will also be taken into account.

Open/Edit a Nomination

General Information

Eligibility

The nominee must have completed the dissertation and have been awarded or will be awarded the doctoral degree during the 2009 calendar year: May 2009, August 2009, and December 2009. Students enrolled in dual degree programs who have completed the dissertation but who have not yet met all the degree requirements for the second degree are also eligible. Students whose degree will not be conferred until May 2010 are not eligible, even if they gave their final defense during fall 2009. Nominations from a broad range of academic disciplines are desired.

Review Process

Members of the Michigan Society of Fellows, in collaboration with the Rackham Associate Deans and additional faculty reviewers, make the final selections. Up to eight nominees will be selected to receive the award, which includes a $1,000 honorarium. The reviewers also have the option of assigning Honorable Mention.

Deadline and submission

The nomination deadline for the 2010 Distinguished Dissertation Awards is November 16, 2009.

For more information contact:

Homer C. Rose, Jr., Ph.D.
Assistant Dean for Academic Programs
915 East Washington Street
1130 Rackham
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1070
Telephone: 764-4400; E-mail: 

Guidelines for the Preparation of Nominations

The complete instructions for submitting a nomination for this award, and the FAQ for the general process of submitting nominations online, are available here as well as on the separate nomination website.

Listed below are the seven items that must be included in the dossier before the nomination can be submitted. You will be asked to either enter text into text boxes or online forms, or upload document in Adobe PDF format.

Before you begin, please read the sections about requesting and submitting letters of support below. These letters should not be sent to you but rather submitted directly by the letter writer electronically through a separate website.

A nomination dossier can be set up by a U-M faculty or staff member. Up to six others may be given access to the site by the person who opens the dossier on the website. After a nomination dossier is started the nominator(s) and assistant(s) may login to the faculty awards nomination systems as many times as needed in order to complete the nomination.

Nomination Process

The nominations must be submitted by the chair of the student’s department or program. Each department should make only one nomination; two may be accepted if the department can argue persuasively that the dissertations are distinctly different in intellectual content. Note: Award winners will be selected by a broad group of faculty, including non-specialists. Therefore, nominators should explain the contributions of the work clearly. Each nomination should be submitted via the website and should include the following items:

  1. Contact Information Form
    Provide in the online form all the contact information requested for the nominee, nominator and department contact.
  2. Letter of Nomination (Nomination Statement)
    Each nomination must have a letter of nomination as described below. On the letter, please note the nominee’s name, department or program, and the title of his/her dissertation. The statement should be presented in distinct sections that speak to each of the following topics, in the order of the headings listed below:
    • Description: A brief description of the topic
    • General comments: General comments about the nominee, including his or her overall scholarly credentials
    • Innovation: The degree of innovation, creativity, and insight shown by the author
    • Scope: The scope and importance of the work to the department and to the field
    • Writing: The effectiveness of the writing (including whether it is written in language that is reasonably understandable to faculty in related disciplines)
    The nomination letter may be no longer than two pages (1,350 words) in length.
  3. Letters of Support
    NOTE: Do not have the letters of support sent to you. These letters must be submitted by the writers directly to the nomination dossier through a separate website. Writers will be asked to either enter text into an online form, or upload documents in Adobe PDF format.

    When you contact the letter writer with your request, direct him/her to https://secure.rackham.umich.edu/Faculty/support/ and provide the writer with the UMID of the nominee and name of the award. On this website the writers will find directions for submitting the letter of support for your nominee.

    Once the letters have been sent into the website you will be able to read them in the nomination dossier and then select which letters you actually want to include when you submit the nomination. Only the letters you have selected will be seen by the review committee.

    Nominations must include three (and only three) letters in support of the nominee from current and/or former professionals who have worked with the nominee. These letters should detail the nature and extent of the nominee’s work.

    Each letter of support may be no longer than two pages (1,350 words) in length.
  4. Complete and Current curriculum vitae
    Include the nominee's c.v. by uploading the most recent version in Adobe PDF format. (Note that while information provided in the c.v. may be provided elsewhere on this site, a complete and current c.v. must be supplied. Make certain that the c.v. contains the full details for all publications and presentations.)
  5. Copy of the Dissertation Abstract
    Include the nominee’s dissertation abstract by uploading the most recent version in Adobe PDF format.
  6. Copy of the Unofficial Transcript
    Include the nominee’s unofficial transcript by uploading the most recent version in Adobe PDF format.
  7. Miscellaneous
    Include a phonetic spelling of the nominee's name and the title of her/his dissertation.

Finalists will be required to submit a bound copy of their dissertations to their nominating department so they can forward it on to the Rackham Graduate School. The dissertations will be returned once the final selections have been made.

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Distinguished Dissertation Awards of 2008 Winners

Elizabeth Ben-Ishai
Political Science
The Autonomy-Fostering State: Citizenship and Social Service Delivery
Todd Bryan
School of Natural Resources and Environment
Aligning Identity: Social Identity and Changing Context in Community-Based Environmental Conflict
Kimberly Clum
Social Work and Anthropology
The Shadows of Immobility: Low-Wage Work, Single Mothers' Lives, and Workplace Culture
Lori Khatchadourian
Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology
Social Logics Under Empire: The Armenian 'Highland Satrapy' and Achaemenid Rule, CA. 600-300 BC
Mark Kiel
Cell & Developmental Biology
Identification, Localization and Characterization of Hematopoietic Stem Cells and Their Niche
Michelle Miller
Romance Languages and Literatures
Material Friendship: Service and Amity in Early Modern French Literature
Matthew Schulmerich
Chemistry
Subsurface and Transcutaneous Raman Spectroscopy, Imaging, and Tomography
Susan Sierra
Mathematics
The Geometry of Birationally Commutative Graded Domains

Distinguished Dissertation Awards of 2007 Winners

Xiaoyun Chen
Chemistry
Investigating Biointerfaces Using Sum Frequency Generation Vibrational Spectroscopy
Francis Cody
Anthropology
Literacy as Enlightenment: Written Language, Activist Mediation, and the State in Rural Tomilnadu, India
Catherine Rose Fortin
Linguistics
Indonesian Sluicing and Verb Phrase Ellipsis: Description and Explanation in a Minimalist Framework
Emily Greenman
Public Policy
Intersecting Inequalities: Four Essays on Race, Immigration and Gender in the Contemporary United States
Rebecca A. Haeusler
Biological Chemistry
tRNA Genes as Organizers of Genetic Information
Hoyt J. Long
Asian Languages and Cultures: Japanese
On Uneven Ground: Provincializing Cultural Production in Interwar Japan
David Lynn Moehring
Physics
Remote Entanglement of Trapped Atomic Ions
Scott A. Tomlins
Pathology
Discovery and Characterization of Recurrent Gene Fusions in Prostate Cancer