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Service Learning and Undergraduate Research Office of the Provost

Spring Expo 2017

The 2017 Spring Expo included both undergraduate research and service learning presentations. It celebrated excellence in research, service learning, creative activity, and scholarship by showcasing the endeavors of undergraduate students. It was held on April 13-14.

For service learning, the Expo is an exposition of student and community engagement collaborations from students engaged in service-learning courses. Service learning students have the opportunity to gain presentation experience and to celebrate the projects and collaborations between community partners, UAB, and our greater community.

Winners

Oral Presentations

  • First Place: Isabell Moon
  • Second Place: Charlotte Boles

Poster Presentations

  • Arts and Humanities

    First Place: Cameron Gordon, Michael Azar, Louis P. Watanabe, and Nicole C. Riddle

    Second Place: Mina Y. Momeni, Heidi M. Johnson, and Nicole C. Riddle

  • Biological and Life Sciences

    First Place (tie): Thaddeus Kwan, Candace L. Floyd, Jason Patel, Amanda Mohaimany-Aponte, and Peter H. King

    Second Place: Samantha R. Golf, Jada H. Vaden, Julie A. Wilson, and Scott M. Wilson

  • Business, Financial, and International Studies

    First Place: Andres Caceres

    Second Place: Samuel Sullivan IV

  • Education

    First Place: Tina Tian, Joanna Schmidt, and Joseph Lucker

    Second Place: B. Luke Harris and Eric P. Plaisance

  • Engineering

    First Place: Devin Bonner, Austin Baecher, and Thomas Bailey

    Second Place: James Ansell, Alexander Cruz Walma, David Lee, Hemali Patel, and Catherine Porter

  • Health Sciences

    First Place: Magdalene Blevins and Elizabeth Kroeger

    Second Place: Cecily Buchanan, Melanie Edwards, Karissa Krause, Hannah McClellan, Vicki Winstead, and Rita Jablonski-Jaudon

  • Physical and Applied Sciences

    First Place (tie): Aidan L O'Beirne, Michael R.C. Williams, Mel Hainey, Joan M. Redwing, and Rohit R. Prasankumar

    Second Place: Carl Bartlett and Aaron Catledge, Ph.D.

  • Service Learning

    First Place (tie):

    • Joshua Peeples, Blake Driggers, Michael Bedwell, Sikai Chen, Gilbert Contreras, and Ned Tracht
    • Olivia Battle, Michael Burson, and Bethany Mades
    • Michael Gray, In Knoll, Tracy Smitherman, and Audrey Swee

    Second Place (tie):

    • Emma Latham
    • Kesha Oduyela, Brystin Arnold, Brenton Capers, and Jesse Shoop, Clarissa Parker, Namisha Adamson, and Bashar Khalaf
  • Social and Behavioral Sciences

    First Place (tie):

    • Abigail Franks, Sara Harper, and Megan Richard
    • Kimberlie Payne

    Second Place: Remy Y. Meir, Stacie K. Totsch, Aaron R. Landis, Tammie L. Quinn, Robert E. Sorg

  • Works in Progress

    First Place: Kristine Farag, Wendy Jiang, Aneesh Pathak, Karen Wang

    Second Place: Bijal Vashi

    Third Place (tie):

    • Cameron J. Gordon, Michael Azar, Louis P. Watanabe, Nicole C. Riddle
    • Anna-Katherine Escoto, Sari Terrazas, Paul Wolkowicz, Geeta Datta, C Roger White

Keynote Speaker: Michele Forman

Michele Forman is a documentary filmmaker and Director of Media Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an interdisciplinary minor she co-founded in 2003. The aim of the program is to educate college students in media production practice and film history, as well as connect them with crucial community issues in the Greater Birmingham area through documentary filmmaking, digital storytelling, and multimedia-based research.

Forman gained her experience as an executive in feature films. As Director of Development at Spike Lee's 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, she was responsible for the acquisition and development of new projects, including New Jersey Drive, Girl 6, Sula, The Jackie Robinson Story, and Summer of Sam. In addition, Forman served as associate producer on Mr. Lee's Academy Award-nominated film 4 Little Girls, a feature-length documentary for HBO about the bombing of the Sixteenth Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

Her work with the UAB Media Studies Program has created a student-produced archive of over 400 community-based social justice short films. The films are available free of charge online, streaming from both the UAB Mervyn H. Sterne Digital Collection and the UAB Media Studies Vimeo Channel. Program partnerships include Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, McWane Science Center, UAB School of Public Health, Sidewalk Film Festival, Vulcan Park and Museum, Red Mountain Park, WBHM, and the national oral history project, StoryCorps. Media Studies has been supported in part by the Ford Foundation Difficult Dialogues Initiative.

Since 1997, Forman has been directing and producing documentary projects for film and television, earning an Emmy nomination in 2001 for Coat of Many Colors. Her feature-length documentary Climb for the Cause: A Breast Cancer Story (2007) documents five women who became activists for women’s health after surviving breast cancer. The film sent Forman up Mt. Kilimanjaro, one of the world’s tallest peaks, following the women as they raised money and awareness about what women can accomplish after cancer. Climb for the Cause was optioned for fictional adaptation by Caribou Entertainment.

Her current film Alabama Bound tells the story of same-sex families fighting for custody of their children, a crucial issue not resolved by the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Alabama Bound is slated for premiere in California in June 2017.

Forman began her film work at Harvard University, where she double-majored in English and filmmaking.

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