While Starks will begin working as an investment banker next fall, he said he plans to continue advocating for reparations for blacks. But first he says he will figure out how to spend his prize money.
“My roommates are already making plans on how to divvy it up,” he joked.
For his winning thesis, Economics concentrator Benjamin G. Edelman ’02 dived into a less trodden field—the dynamics of internet retailing.
Using a computer program he wrote, Edelman studied the ways in which editorial recommendations on the website of bookseller Amazon.com affected its book sales.
One of his findings, for instance, was that Amazon.com’s sales of childrens’ books responded more to positive reviews than did other books.
“It’s a fun piece,” said Edelman’s thesis advisor, Economics Professor Ariel Pakes. “It really is true that we don’t understand shopping on the internet, and he used a creative way of going about it.”
While Edelman said he probably wouldn’t buy anything from Amazon with his prize money, he said he hopes publishing his work will benefit the internet company and others like it.
Meanwhile, William J. Wailand ’02 said he plans to use his prize money to travel to Alaska—a fitting end to his study on the environmental and social impact of natural gas pipelines in that area.
“I thought I could do somewhat of a comprehensive approach to the issue in 70 or 80 pages. But [the paper] quickly reached the 150-page mark,” he said.
For Vanessa Henke ’02, a Biochemisty concentrator, long hours in the lab led to a number of unexpected discoveries about ChaK2, the protein on which she wrote her thesis.
“I found that [the protein’s] expression changes in cancer cells,” she said, a potentially beneficial finding she hopes to research next year as a Health Sciences Technology student at Harvard Medical School.
“[The thesis] took a lot of time, but it was something that I was really happy to do,” she said. “It’s been the highlight of my academic life.”
The winners of the Hoopes prize, mostly seniors, are Parag A. Pathak ’02, Geoffrey A. Starks ’02, Christopher O. Meserole ’02, Kathy Lu ’02, David D. Kornhaber ’02, John N. Friedman ’02, Benton B. Bodamer ’02, Margaret W. Elias ’02, Pavan K. Bendapudi ’02 and Jean C. Han ’02, of Lowell House.
From Pforzheimer House, Shanthi K. Naidu ’02, L. Stephen Long ’02, Michael Gerber ’02, Trevor S. Cox ’01-’02, Will G. Bain ’02, Hallam Stevens ’02; from Quincy House, Wenya Linda Bi ’02, Ross G. Douthat ’02, Stephen E. Sachs ’02, Melissa Tukey ’02 and Gernot Wagner ’02.
Other winners included Alexis G. Burgess ’02 and Tetsuro Onitsuka ’02 of Lowell House; Sue K. Paik ’02, Peter J. Chung ’02, Jonathan I. Flombaum ’02, Andrew Lynn ’02, Erik B. Sandegard ’02, Jillian R. Shulman ’02 and William Wailand ’02 of Cabot; Matthew A. Rojansky ’02 and Yuni Kim ’02 of Eliot House; and Christopher W. Cox ’02 of Kirkland House.
From Adams House, winners are Svetlana Rukhelman ’02, Robert R. Porter ’02, Elena S. Schoenberger ’02, Brian Shillinglaw ’01-’02, Alec Nevala-Lee ’02, Rob T. Dennis ’02, Melissa M. Gniadek ’02, Benjamin W. Jarvis ’02, Timothy F. Sohn ’02 and John Chia-An Tsou ’02.
From Currier House, Adriane H. Gelpi ’01, Abby L. Schlatter ’02, and Ian A. Tomb ’02; from Dunster, Vanessa G. Henke ’02, Susie Y. Huang ’02, and Rachel E. Ahern ’02; from Winthrop House, Mekhala Krishnamurthy ’02, Narie J. Yoo ’02, John M. Gansner ’02 and Jeremy Chao-Yen Hwang ’02.
Leverett residents Alexis Loeb ’02, Sara B. Johnstone ’02 and Emily N. Ogden ’02 were winners, as were Mather House residents Alexander P. Nyren ’02, Erica B. Levy ’02 and Conor M. Liston ’02.
Other winners include Katherine Sharaf ’02, Sarah Tsien ’02, Jesse Billett ’01, Jennifer Wagner ’01 and Daniel Yamins ’02.
—Crimson Staff writer Alex L. Pasternack can be reached at apastern@fas.harvard.edu.