The Honors Thesis is a research project for which eligible students apply during their junior year and complete in their senior year. Colby departments and programs that have an honors program establish the requirements for the project and its final format. Each student, upon completion of the thesis, has the opportunity to publish their project in Digital Commons so that it may be made available to the Colby community and to the world at large.
Honors Theses from 2022
“…To Represent the Needs of the Residents—Not the Needs of the Outsiders” California’s Housing Crisis and the Dilemma of Local Control, Ravi S. Joshi-Wander
“Green” Marketing in the Apparel Industry: The Spectrum of Veracity, Stephanie R. Keane
Memories and New Beginnings: Chinese American Restaurants and Food as a Contact Zone in Early-Twentieth Century California, Nicholas Kim
Double Trouble: The Development and Use of a Novel Spatial Memory Task to Study Depression in a Female Rodent Model, Ekaterina L. Koelliker
Understanding the Role of Race in American Medicine, Fariel C. A. LaMountain
Whose Nation is This? Conceptualizing Burmese National Identity Through Case Studies of Inter-Ethnic Conflict, Jason Leong
Cellular Automata and Multi-scale Simulation of Infection in D. discoideum, Mingyang Li
Philosophy and Music: A Search for Truth, Zhengzhou Li
A Prosaic People? Literature, Propaganda, and National Identity in Second World War Britain, William L. Maines
The Impact of Trauma-Responsive Voice-Centered Practice on Students with Learning Differences, Elizabeth S. Marsh
Science and Sadness: Critiques On How We Handle Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia, Katherine Martinez
The New Mainers: An Exploratory Analysis of Healthcare Experiences in the Somali Bantu Community, Jordan R. McClintock
The Multifront Battle Waged Against Female Autonomy: A Comparative Study of Ancient Medical and Literary Texts, Leah K. Montello
Epistemic Classism in Elite College Mathematics Education, Silas Olsen
The Power of One: Majority Leadership Power in the United States Senate, Andrew Taylor Ordentlich
Bean to Buck: Examining the Effects of the Global Coffee Commodity Market on Smallholders in Colombia, Alexander Ozols
Two Sided Matching: A Study of Underemployment, Benjamin E. Plevin
"It’s Just Another Thing”: Perceptions of Well Water Quality and Barriers in an Arsenic Hot Spot, Linzy Rosen
Characterizing Cellular Stress, Hippocampal Function, and Behavior in a Novel Rat Model of Alzheimer's Disease, Anne A. Schulman
Cultivating Family Empowerment in Schools: The Experiences of Marginalized Families in Special Education, Rachel-Marie F. Sinco
Decoding Cyclic Codes via Gröbner Bases, Eduardo Sosa
IMPACTS OF PROFAMILIA PROGRAM SPREAD ON CONTRACEPTIVE USE AND FERTILITY RATES IN COLOMBIA DURING ITS INTRODUCTION, Katherine C. Specht
Maternidad en España: Una investigación sobre cómo las mujeres navegan los límites patriarcales para ampliar visiones y realidades de la maternidad, Katerina Tanasijevic
Assembling Place: White Supremacist Formations at a Place-Based Educational Institution, Emma Terwilliger
Analyzing the Free Energy of Ions Sampling a Voltage Gated Sodium Ion Channel, Isabel Varghese
"It's Not About the Polar Bears": Evangelical Christian Arguments for Environmentalism, Teresa D. White
Challenges of Constructing Entrainment Map for Arbitrary Circadian Models, Yuxuan (Nelson) Wu
Modeling Jadera haematoloma’s Phenotypic Variation in the Context of its Developmental Plasticity, Michael C. Yorsz
Decomposing Manifolds in Low-dimensions: from Heegaard Splittings to Trisections, Suixin "Cindy" Zhang
Gravity as a Gauge Theory in the Poincare Group, Yu Zhi
NFT Sneaker Marketplace Design, Testing, and Challenges, Chris Zhu
Honors Theses from 2021
Social Capital UnMASCed: The Role of Social Capital in State-Level Economic Growth, Meredith H. Allen
MOT-based Lifetime Measurements of Potassium-39 5p1/2 and 5p3/2 States, Huan Q. Bui
Una deconstrucción espacial: Movimiento Maricas Bolivia y la resistencia Indígena cuir, Cooper J. Bussberg
Socrates and the Divine Mission of Political Friendship, Ronahn I. Clarke
Investigating the AGN-Merger Connection Using Close Galaxy Pairs in the CANDELS Fields, Sean L. Dougherty
Golden Mountains: Pike's Peak, Western Capitalism, and the Making of the Colorado State: 1858-1876, Jason T. Dunn
Gold Mining Districts and Path Dependence, Jason T. Dunn
The Transcendental Foundation of Kant's Cosmopolitanism, Daniel J. Ellison
Artificial Reefs: a History, a Science, a Technology, Mairead D. Farrell
Beyond Realism: Reading the Ongoing Wounds of Enslavement in Beloved and Kindred, Stephanie Fawell
Stimulated neutrino oscillations in supernova, Shannon J. Gray
Sailors’ Perceptions of Offshore Wind Energy in the Northeastern United States, Henry Harris
Counting Conjugacy Classes of Elements of Finite Order in Compact Exceptional Groups, Qidong He
Reconstructing the Voting Rights Act: Subnational Action and Voting Rights Post-1965, Sean M. Holly
Reduced performance of ash-specialist caterpillars on non-native, cultivated Oleaceous plants, Grace Horne
Neo-Colonial Actors?: Analyzing French NGOs in Francophone West Africa, Katharine R. Kilcoyne
Increasing Police Accountability to the Citizens it Serves: The Production of High-Quality Public Services Through Bottom-Up Governance, Esther B. Kim
Bitter Waters: And Other Stories, Sydney R. Koeplin
COVID and the Classroom: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Special Education and Policy Implementation, Danielle Lange
Comunidad y contagio: La narrativa del brote de COVID-19 en España, Samantha Lee
Morphological Variance in Mouthparts and Foraging Behavior in Bumblebees, Ye Jin Lee
Use of Small Molecule Fanconi Anemia Pathway Inhibitors as Sensitizing Agents to Laromustine., Sam W. Marchant
Estimating Heading from Optic Flow with Neural Networks, Natalie T. Maus
"Nice, Quiet Hand": The Creation and Navigation of Feeling Rules in a Second Grade Classroom, Avery Munns
Ethnicity and Education: College Attendance Patterns Among Early 20th-Century Maine's Immigrant Community, Jacob M. Nash
Contrasting Patterns of Nutrient Limitation in the Littoral and Pelagic Zones of Mesotrophic Maine Lakes, Grace C. Neumiller
You're Hired: An Analysis of the Determinants of the Hiring of Head Coaches in College Women's Soccer, Sofia M. Oliveira
Convolutional Audio Source Separation Applied to Drum Signal Separation, Marius Orehovschi
Ganar Local: La política cantera del Athletic Club y la construcción de lo vasco, Sam Orenstein
Pollen: A Secure, Decentralized Wireless Communication Platform, Max Perrello
Us and Them: Populism in the United States, Julia E. Pfau
The Museum as a Mirror: Reinterpreting and Delinking American Landscape Art from Colonial Narratives, Blythe C. Romano
The Tetralemma of Nothingness, Samuel O. Sessions
Identity-making and spatialization among Colby College's international students, John G.G. Shamgochian
College Application Fee Effects on Applicant Volume, Diversity, and Academic Quality, Benjamin J. Smith
The Quantitative Assessment of Pond Scum: An examination of the biogeochemistry of phosphorus cycling in the Belgrade lakes, Abbey M. Sykes
El mar y la gente: Hacia una contextualización de lo indígena en El botón de nácar, Jonathan Braden Taylor
From Fire to Ash: Merging and Mediating Popular Fiction and Literary Elements in Writing, Aaron A. Thibodeau
Protecting Privacy in COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing, Nicolas M. Turner
Should We Pool or Should We Nationalize? A Quantitative Assessment of the Role of Sovereignty in Brexit, Alexa K. Urmaza
Visualizing the Range of Glaciers: Science, Art and Narrative, Claire E. Waichler
Impact of the North American Monsoon on Molt Migrant Passerines, Liuqingqing Yang
The Predictive Power of the Term Structure Under Unconventional Monetary Policies, Luying Yang
Microbiome community and parasitic infections in wild bees, Mark G. Young
Honors Theses from 2020
Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated with Bitter Taste Perception and Influence on Food and Drink Preferences, Maria K. Armillei
Modeling Hemlock Woolly Adelgid Spread Throughout the Northeast with Updated Parameter Values, Jamie A. Attanasio
Effects of Exposure to Chinese Imports on School Spending and Revenue from Property Tax, Yilei Bao
Ground to a Halt: A Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding U.S. Government Shutdowns, Ian R. Baum
Creating Dynamic Spaces: Exploring Student-Empowered Self-Expression through Art, Meghan E. Charest
Blessings and Burdens: Family Planning in the Rural South, Amber D. Churchwell
The Impact of Climate Change on the Migration Phenology of New England’s Anadromous River Herring and American Shad, Charles K. Cobb
Québécois, malgré nous : Naissance et évolution d’une identité québécoise dans trois romans de Réjean Ducharme, Serrat David
How Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Gender Shape Feelings of Competition within the Pre-Med Department at a Small Liberal Arts College, Amanda B. Deming
Data-Driven Automatic Dance Improvisation in 2D, Yitong Deng
Measuring Differential Forest Growth in the Sheepscot River Headwaters with Bitemporal Lidar, Soren Denlinger
Impacts of a Movie's Rivals' Releasing Decisions on its Domestic Box Office Revenue, Yuanyuan Dong
Naloxone Access and Opioid Use: A Theoretical Analysis, Caroline Dunsby
Identifying Metabolites as Markers of Fatigue in Athletes, Christopher D. George
Spectroscopic Characterization of Atmospheric Aerosol Particle Mimics, Hayley Elizabeth Gibson
Abraham Lincoln, the United States, and Mexico: The Implications of Memory in a Continental History, Emilie E. Ginn
All The President’s Men? Politicization and Executive Control over the Rulemaking Process, Josh Goldberg
Give ME a Choice: Perceptions of Freedom and the Anti-Vax Movement in Maine, Louisa Goldman
Assessing a Two-Hit Model of Schizophrenia: Prenatal choline deficiency and induced hypofunction of NMDA receptors in male and female Long Evans rats, Samuel Gray and Samuel W. Gray
Comunidad, antigüedad y solidaridad Ser gay en el tardofranquismo 1969-1978, Andrew Healy
Quantum Defect Measurements for High Angular Momentum Rydberg States of Potassium, Abraham Hill
The “Humanitarian Mystique:” Tracing the Rhetoric and Politics of Aid in Southeast Asia from the Age of the Civilizing Mission to the Present, Elizabeth M. Holland