Celebrating Student Success, Fall Term 2021

In support of the first goal of Portland State’s five-year strategic plan — elevating student success — Currently now features student success each term, acknowledging achievements such as publications, scholarships, grants, presentations and more. Here are some of the inspiring students who made us proud during fall term. Want your students to appear in our next roundup? See the submission guidelines and send information to currently@pdx.edu.

AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS AND OTHER HONORS

1. Davis Alexander ’21, post-baccalaureate student, is the quarterback of the Vikings football team and was named to the Peyton Award Watch List.
2. Sasha Bassett, sociology graduate student, accepted a position as a remote adjunct instructor for Pace University.
3. Nate Bennett, business administration student and wide receiver for the Viking football team, was named to the Jerry Rice Award Watch List.
4. Warren Gunn and Brett Stinson, mechanical and materials engineering students, were part of a team that won the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Cleaner Indoor Air During Wildfires Challenge for the team’s award-winning “do-it-yourself” design, an indoor air cleaner called “The Cocoon.”

5. 

   Lillian Hennings, film student, earned a coveted paid trainee position in summer 2021 in the camera department on acclaimed director Kelly Reichardt’s new feature film “Showing Up,” an opportunity awarded through Oregon Media Pathways, a program of the Oregon Made Creative Foundation.
6. Nathalie Hutchinson, architecture student, was featured in a Willamette Week story about creative ideas for repurposing the soon-to-be-defunct Lloyd Center mall. 
7. Adrian Manriquez, a psychology Ph.D. student, has been selected to the newest cohort of Health Policy Research Scholars, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
8. Justin Maxon, art and social practice graduate student, received a $17,100 Impact Projects Grant from the California Arts Council.  
9. Justin Maxon, art and social practice graduate student, received a $3,500 Project Support Grant from The Center for Photographic Art. 
10. Justin Maxon, art and social practice graduate student, received Center Santa Fe’s $5,000 Project Development Grant in 2020.
11. Justin Maxon, art and social practice graduate student, was a selected artist at the 2020 Queer Festival Heidelberg, “Breaking Gender Stereotypes.”  
12. Justin Maxon, art and social practice graduate student, received an $8,000 COVID-19 grant from the National Geographic Society for the project “Eureka! Keeping New Lives Amid Social Distancing.”
13. Justin Maxon, art and social practice graduate student, received an $8,000 COVID-19 Community Project Fund grant from the Humboldt Area Foundation in 2020.
14. Nicholas Meusch, urban and regional planning graduate student, was awarded a scholarship by the American Public Transportation Foundation Board of Directors, with a nomination endorsed by TriMet. Meusch works as a proposal manager for Elcon Associates, a minority-owned, electrical and systems engineering firm that performs consulting services for transit agencies operating rail transit systems, including TriMet and the Portland Streetcar.

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    Lillyanne Pham, art and social practice graduate student, received a $3,000 Make|Learn|Build grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council to create a housing justice zine with youth facing unstable housing in the Parkrose School District.
16. Lillyanne Pham, art and social practice graduate student and youth program coordinator for Historic Parkrose received the City of Portland’s $5,000 Community Healing Arts Grant in July for a two-day community filmmaking workshop with Outside the Frame and nine Parkrose youth to confront gun violence and white supremacy. 
17. Lillyanne Pham, art and social practice graduate student, received a $15,000 grant from the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon in September to collaborate with Paola Del La Cruz on a community engagement and mural production project at the Orchards of 82nd.
18. Devyn Radke, Callie Brown, Morgan Ramsey, Michael Shymanski, Emma Wolf and Amanda Hines, book publishing graduate students, recently launched the climate change handbook “From Knowledge to Power,” by John Perona, environmental biochemistry faculty, as part of their work with Ooligan Press, the trade press owned and operated by master’s students in PSU’s book publishing program. This book may join Ooligan’s “Cataclysms on the Columbia,” by Majorie Burns, English faculty emerita, and John Eliot Allen and Scott Burns, geology faculty emeriti, as a perennial resource for students and citizens alike.
19. Alecsandra Renfroe, clinical mental health graduate student, co-founded and implemented Love Your Body Week, a Campus Rec and Student Health and Counseling (SHAC) collaboration promoting health at every size, body image awareness and body positivity during winter term 2021.  

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    Alecsandra Renfroe, clinical mental health graduate student, co-presented “Creating an Inclusive Learning Environment for People in All Bodies” at the OAI Teaching Innovation Conference in September. 
21. Alecsandra Renfroe, clinical mental health graduate student, was recognized by Campus Rec during winter term 2021 with a Wellbeing Values Award, which is awarded to staff who exemplify one of Campus Rec’s six values. 
22. Alecsandra Renfroe, clinical mental health graduate student, was recognized this June as a “New Employee of the Year” for her contributions as a staff development assistant at Campus Rec.
23. Jason Turner, film student, won an Award of Excellence for Individual Achievement in Directing, Cinematography and Editing from the Southern Shorts Awards for his short documentary, “I Am the Storm,” which follows Olympic qualifying boxer Kendra Samargis as she vies for a place on the USA Women’s National Boxing Team.
24. Jason Turner, film student, won a Bronze Award for Best Student Director and an Honorable Mention Laurel for Best Documentary Short at Los Angeles’s Independent Shorts Awards for his short documentary, “I Am the Storm.”
25. Maria Wehdeking, graphic design student, was a finalist and $3,000 third place recipient of the 2021 Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize. Her artwork is currently being featured in the Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize Exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU. 

PRESENTATIONS, PUBLICATIONS, AND EXHIBITIONS

1. Yarina Aguilar Becerra ’21, Cecilia Diojuan Leal, pre-law student, and Jasmine Walker (a student pseudonym), co-authored the article “Who We Are” in Volume 53 of Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning.
2. Brittney Biggs, sociology student, wrote a review of the book “Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers” by Eli Revelle Yano Wilson, to be featured in the journal Future of Food: Journal on Food, Agriculture, and Society.
3. Frank Boateng Appiah, transportation engineering graduate student, had his thesis, “Improving Bicycle Crossings at Unsignalized Intersections through Pavement Markings: Analysis of the City of Portland Innovative Strategy” featured in an article by BikePortland.
4. Erika Carpenter, sociology graduate student, received a contract to evaluate the Prescribe A Bike PDX program facilitated by Multnomah County Health Department’s Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health Program.
5. Erika Carpenter, sociology graduate student, presented Oregon’s Sexual Violence Prevention Resource Map data at the “Connecting the Dots: Sex Ed is a Solution” public event jointly hosted by Oregon Dept. of Education and Oregon Health Authority.
6. Sarah Dys, Institute on Aging graduate research assistant, chaired a symposium discussion titled “Policy Series/ESPO and Social Research, Policy, and Practice Section Symposium: It’s a Practice, Not an End State: Centering Equity in Gerontological Research and Policy” at the 2021 Gerontological Society of America conference in November.
7. Sarah Dys, Institute on Aging graduate research assistant, presented a poster, “Large Scale Survey Research with Older Adults/Persons with Disabilities in a Public Health Crisis” at the 2021 Gerontological Society of America conference in November.
8. Ivory Fields, book publishing graduate student, presented at the Literary Arts Oregon BIPOC Writers Publishing Event on Nov. 20. 

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   Shelbie Loomis, art and social practice graduate student, received the PSUFA Professional Development Grant and 2022 Suttle Lodge Artist Residency. 
10. Damkerng Mungthanya, an applied linguistics (TESOL) graduate student, presented “Up Close and Personal with Award-Winning Teachers: Transformation through Passion and Inspiration” as a featured speaker for the Asia TEFL professional webinar series on August 21. 
11. Arun Pallathadka, geography doctoral student, published an article “The Spatial Patterns of Pluvial Flood Risk, Blue-Green Infrastructure, and Social Vulnerability: A Case Study from Two Alaskan Cities” in the International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research. 
12. Wynn Strange, sociology doctoral student, began teaching medicine and culture at Linfield University and social foundations of public health at Pacific University as an adjunct instructor.
13. Wynn Strange, sociology doctoral student, co-organized and co-facilitated the Sociologists for Trans Justice Publish Me 2021 Advancing Trans, Nonbinary, & Intersex Scholarship Writing Symposium Aug. 13-14. 
14. Ned Tilbrook, sociology graduate student, presented “Not ‘Just’ a Barista” at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association and at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, both in August.
15. Connor Weir, music student, gave his senior composition recital — featuring his written pieces “Jubilant Spring,” “Depth of the Giants,” “Sweetness of Sorrow” and “Mass of his Triumph” — at St. Mary Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in November.

SHARE SUCCESSES WITH THE COMMUNITY

We want to celebrate your students! Email submit student success items to currently@pdx.edu and include the following information: 

• The student’s full name
• The student’s year and area of study (example: Jane Doe, a junior studying art history)
• If applicable, the student’s job, volunteer or research position. For example, if a student won an award for their work as an employee with the PSU Residence Hall Association, their position with residence life would be necessary for the write-up
• The full name of the award, honor, scholarship or fellowship the student received
• The date the award was given
• Any other relevant information about the award, such as length of fellowship, total scholarship amount, location of award ceremony
• Links to additional information you would like to be included in the write-up, such as news stories, web pages or documents for the awards/scholarships/fellowships; and accessible pages for publications (such as the Amazon listing for a student book available for purchase, or the article’s journal web page for an academic publication)

If you have news about PSU alumni, please send it to the alumni magazine at psumag@pdx.edu.