Theses and Research

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 128

Adelina Ruvalcaba 2025
(2025-05-16) Ruvalcaba, Adelina
"I Am de Mis Antepasadas" is a dedication to the labor of love. I use my art as a way of honoring my ancestors’ perseverance, drawing influences from the personalities, sacrifices, and the strengths of our family that continue to shape me into the adult I am today. This is my rendition of recontextualizing identity as an artist born into two beautiful Latin American cultures—both unique in their own right—alongside being born and raised in the United States of America. Creating ceramic fossils imprinted with the ingredients of my cuisine allows me to commemorate my ancestry while simultaneously passing down heirlooms for my descendants. I create for the pasado, the present, y el futuro.
Aidryn Hinderhofer 2024
(2024-12-06) Hinderhofer, Aidryn
“Following the Light” is a picture book that deals with themes of personal resilience, community, and queer identity. The story follows a small insect faerie named Moth. They are a mail courier with one last package to deliver who, upon getting distracted by a grove of glowing plant life, finds that they’ve lost their way in the surrounding forest without a light to guide them. Moth wanders until they find their way to another faerie’s door. They introduce themself as Firefly and offer to show Moth to their final destination in order to finish their delivery. “Following the Light” is a 8x10”, 48 page, self ended picture book dummy intended for an audience of older children from the 4th to 6th grades (9-12 years old). The entire book is brought to the rough sketch stage, toned in black and white. Two important spreads, as well as the cover, are finished entirely. The whole thing is compiled in a dummy ready for publisher consideration.
Albany Case 2025
(2025) Case, Albany
Through creating a pitch bible for an animated feature film including character designs, backgrounds, and supplemental illustrations, I used the characters of anthropomorphized racehorses to explore themes of male relationships, their nuances, the dynamic shift that defines a romantic or platonic relationship, and to make an authentic and accessible narrative of male-male love. Targeted at general audiences, Off the Bit seeks to bring queer stories to a broader demographic and to remove the stigma of queer stories being only for adults. Following the story of the characters Sterling Silver, Lord Desmond, and Little Red, this work’s focus themes are self-acceptance, finding your own peace, found family, and adjusting to major life changes and how those changes affect the relationships a person has.
Ale Uriarte 2024
(2024-11-19) Ale, Uriarte
This is a visual development project, in which I developed a story around three young witches who are all misfits in their own disciplines. In a world in which magic is slowly disappearing, and you can only practice the kind of magic you are born with. An unconventional friendship is born between a healer who would rather break bones instead of fixing them, a necromancer terrified of the dark and everything spooky, and a summoner who is unable to summon in the conventional way who comes from a background of all witches with food related powers. In this project I will show character designs, interactions, prop and background designs and key story moments, which I plan to develop further once I graduate into a visual novel or, if possible, an animated project pitch in the future.
Alex Zarate 2025
(2025-04) Zarate, Alex
The First Cyber Monarch is a 28 page visual essay that tells the story of Valeria, an immigrant who moves to a new city where technology triumphs. We follow her and through her experiences as an immigrant. A vision of a new life, experiences, emotions, feelings and perspective. With her, we get to meet new people with unique personalities that comes with moving to a new place to help those close to you. Her new life, emotions, feelings, experiences, perspective are what real immigrants feel. We are not aliens, illegals or wetbacks but we are human. We experience the complexities of what it is to be human and even the mistreatment we still experience to this day.
Alexandra Lawson Mangum 2025
(2025-04) Lawson Mangum Alexandra
Pory Roku My main inspiration for my thesis in general is mythology and folklore, more specifically Slavic and Eastern European folklore. I created a 12 month calendar inspired by Slavic myths and folklore as well as Slavic culture and their associations with the seasons rooted in paganism. Each image in the calendar draws influences from different folktales as well as characters like gods, goddesses, mythical creatures, and deities. My family on my mothers side is Ukrainian, Russian, and generally Eastern European, so my personal family history has also informed the subject of my project. I have created 5 copies of the calendar as well as twelve larger posters to display the illustrations. It is an illustration project first, and a design project second, and is a deeply personal project showcasing my interests and love for mythology as well as the pride I feel for my family history and where I come from.
Alishba Rahim, 2024
(2024-11-25) Rahim, Alishba
Digital Girl World is a teaser and trial episode showcasing the viewer’s attempt at survival after being transported into a horrific version of PNCA. Your only ally, a young, hyperfeminine girl named Nami helping you find a way out of this liminal space PNCA. Can you trust this girl? She looks sweet, but something about her feels…off. Through a merging and contrast of hyperfeminine and retro horror game aesthetics, internet-core and analog elements. I will create a narrative that reclaims hyperfeminine women’s sense of autonomy in the horror genre. The genre is a psychological horror, animated as a visual novel. In the plot of the teaser, after the viewer is transported into the liminal space PNCA, they are immediately chased by shadow people. There the viewer meets Naami, who helps you out by solving a puzzle, which unlocks the elevator, allowing both Naami and the viewer to the next floor. Naami then introduces herself and informs you that the school creates puzzles depending on what the shadow people and the environment want. The two process to explore the floor, and stumble upon a Monster door that wants something to eat. Naami guides you along with a puzzle, unlocking a locker that reveals a still-beating heart. Naami fills the heart with blood and feeds it to the Monster Door. After the door is satisfied, the elevator door opens, indicating the puzzle is solved and the two are free to go. The viewer feels relieved that someone as reliable and totally not suspicious as Naami is there by your side. The core of my thesis is merging a retro horror-game aesthetic with hyper-femininity to reclaim women's sense of autonomy in animation by recontextualizing traditional feminine traits. Most media depict the 'girly girl' as vain, unintelligent, and basic. Someone who has not earned their agency. This correlates with how the interests of young girls are seen through similar lenses of lesser value. Instead, misogyny encourages both men and women to invest their me with traditional masculine, interests/fields/appearance, which are more respected and important in society. This is especially relevant in horror movies, where the hyper-femme girl who is neither the ‘succubus’, ‘femme fatale’, or ‘final girl’ is treated to be insignificant and weak—the victim. This is all exemplified through Digital Girl World’s main character Naami. A smiley and sweet feminine girl, with an ‘off-side’. The goal for the future is to create more episodes where Naami’s true nature gets revealed before it is too late for the viewer to do anything about it. Therefore, crowning the girly Naami as undefeated, forever more. In the plot of the teaser, after the viewer. Link to Digital Girl World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnUi2lI2H44
Alyssa Morris-Hatch 2025
(2025-04-23) Morris-Hatch, Alyssa
Aloma, who comes from the waves of sound and fabrics of space, ensures all souls arrive safely, but will theirs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41zdtUznfWU
Annika Rausch 2025
(2025) Rausch, Annika
With my series of intaglio prints, I explore themes relating to identity construction and place, arguing that those residents who think of themselves as “Portlanders” should instead shift their primary allegiance to the Willamette River. My thesis work contributes to this project of identity reformation by building an affective-aesthetic matrix of imagery, recalling viewers back to local land and water forms, the reality of political violence, and the larger cosmos. My work includes references to the often-suppressed Indigenous materiality of this place, recognized as a fact of the social environment that demands reckoning, plus imagery from the distant past of my own European ancestry, as well as “composted” charts and diagrams from scientific research. By “composting,” I mean erasing the legibility of a graphic or making it esoteric, in order to remove it from rigidly emotionless systems of information-and-control. The main text of my thesis takes the form of a glossary, meant to aid in “reading” the visual work.
Applications of Environmental History on Bolivia’s Coca Trade
(2010-04-23T17:39:06Z) Baptista, Rafael
Bolivia’s coca trade offers one of the most compelling narratives of the complexity of environmental history in Latin American. This is indeed a case where economic instability, social power struggles, and neoliberal economic policies combined to pose not only a highly visible social and health threat (worldwide increase of drug consumption) but also a threat to long-term sustainability of both the environment and agricultural crops.
Audrey Shuman 2025
(2025-04-14) Shuman, Audrey
For my thesis project I created a 48 page self-ended picture book dummy about a shepherdess who turns into a werewolf, as a metaphor for medical trauma. Her journey is about self-acceptance and about the difficult emotions that arise from developing a chronic illness at a young age. The story talks about a lot of difficult emotions, but the overall message is about leaning on friends and family for support and that even if you have a chronic illness, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. The core idea of my project is to tell the story of a girl who is a shepherdess in a fantasy world. She spends her days tending to her flock and is very dedicated to her task. But one night she starts hearing howling and it keeps happening night after night. On the third night she goes out to investigate because it keeps scaring the sheep. She wanders into the night and is bitten by a werewolf, she is scared and confused and runs home to her parents. Her parents are upset but they accept her and comfort her, but she is in denial about it and acts like everything is normal. But her body starts changing and it makes it harder to do her job, eventually she reaches a breaking point and runs away from home. Her family chase after her, when they find her, she tells them to go away but they stay and talk through things with her. They talk to her about how things won’t be easy but that she can work through them and still achieve her goals. And that things are harder, but she is not broken or wrong, just different. In this way my story will be a metaphor for what it’s like to have a chronic illness.
Beth Starkey 2024
(2024-11-19) Starkey, Beth
Monsters of Aslamere is a 36-page concept art book, detailing an early civilization fantasy world, with the intention of using it to pitch a video game. The first part of the book details the cast of characters. Part two shows several of the original monster designs created to fill Aslamere’s world. Part three is several finished illustrations used as key art for the feeling of the game. Aslamere is filled with fantastical monsters that still control most of its territories. The people struggle to survive each day, hunting monsters that are just as likely to turn around and return the favor by hunting them. All of this starts to change when a young hunter and aspiring researcher named Kai sets out from their village, along with their small winged familiar, Vanati, determined to create this world’s first monster book. Kai grew up fascinated by monsters rather than fearing them, and so explores every corner of Aslamere to hunt down every monster, gathering information about each of them in different ways. With some luck, food, and a gentle hand, Kai is even able to tame some monsters to bring back to their village. Doing so helps their people expand and open up greater possibilities for farming, crafting, hunting, and traveling for Aslamere, setting the trail for animal domestication in this world.
Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium Schedule, Spring 2012
(2012) Biology Department
This is the 2012 program for the Biology Department's Senior Symposium. The annual Biology Senior Symposium takes place each spring. The program lists the biology student's name, time of the presentation, title of their thesis, their adviser/mentor, and their abstract.
Blue Corvidae 2025
(2025-05) Corvidae Blue
PRISMATIC MELANCHOLY was constructed with anti-capitalist collective care in mind and an understanding that collective work must start with the self. This research originated with a desire to find a way for my spiritual-artistic practice to live in accordance with collective care praxes. With this in mind I adopt an autoethnographic exploration of my early experiences with religion and trauma– specifically the fragmenting effect they had on my developing queer-trans sense of self and how I might reapproach spirituality as a survival pathway through apostatic faith practices. As a mad, disabled, queer-trans multiplicity I was born into a series of tragedies that assured my bodymindspirit would never truly feel there was space enough for me. Strung from one ill-fitting home/label/town to the next, I began to crack, we began to splinter. Before long, compacted within the contours of societal expectation, our consciousness had shattered into multiplicity, pushing us to think multivalently despite our melancholy. In this project we were called to ask: what kind of relationship with divinity could support us in bearing the emotional distress of ongoing global catastrophe? And, more importantly, what kind of space could hold us, in all our multiplicity, such that we might be able to approach divinity?
Brady Wolchansky 2024
(2024-06-24) Wolchansky, Brady
MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL SYNDROME, A Micro-Cinematic Experience features the premier of an experimental short film I wrote, co-directed, and starred in called, Manic Pixie Dream Girl Syndrome, an adaptation from a comedic monologue of the same name I performed at an all-female group art show in 2023. This tangential monologue begins with, “you guys ever hear of the expression ‘all beautiful women are crazy’?” The 5-minute short screens at looped intervals in a makeshift microcinema constructed alongside a pop-up museum of “artifacts”; a behind-the-scenes look of the filmmaking process, including but not limited to props, costumes and images from the film’s set. The complete installation revolves around my investigations of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” (MPDG) character archetype, as seen in popular romantic films such as, Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and 500 Days of Summer with Zooey Deschanel. In cinema, the MPDG is portrayed as an artsy independent woman who often rejects societal expectations of classic womanhood and domesticity. While the MPDG is presumed to be free-spirited and independent, she is still defined by the expectations of a predominantly male protagonist and is mostly restricted within the confines of said male protagonist’s own personal goals and growth, and rarely displays any self-actualization or true personhood. This exhibition aims to recreate my own version of the MPDG, examined from a modern, feminist lens. Through the aesthetics of filmmaking, stand-up comedy and intermedia installation my hope is to show empathy with those who can relate and rouse awareness of the MPDG trope’s negative effects in others.
Can Virtue Make Us Happy? The Art of Living and Morality
(2010-05-12T18:56:17Z) Burns, Kathryn
Is happiness found through an external focus on accomplishing goals in the material world? Or is happiness fashioned through an internal focus on performing one’s duty according to the moral standards of one’s community (religious or secular)? Might happiness (eudaimonia) consist in taking personal responsibility for one’s creative capacity to accomplish things that nature cannot accomplish on its own? Might viewing virtue in terms of the origins of one’s creativity rather than the external consequences of one’s actions lead to an understanding of virtue that allows us to be human and happy?
Can Virtue Make Us Happy? The Art of Living and Morality: Otfried Höffe
(2010-05-11T18:47:31Z) Murphy, Eryn
Höffe’s first question is how to determine and define “the good.” He cites three habits, three interests, and three meanings that, together, form a recipe for an understanding of goodness. “Good” can apply to any one of the three meanings of ethos: Ethos 1, the habits associated with the relationship between an organism and its location; Ethos 2, moral habits that correspond to societal conventions; and/or Ethos 3, habits that form a personal course, independent of society’s influence. Habits can be evaluated through the lens of three interests. They can be examined empirically, through description of cultural moral habits and through explanations of origin and function. They can be examined with concern for the normative task, either in an effort to evaluate the validity and morality of the habit or to prescribe “should” imperatives that apply to both eudaimonistic and deontological views. Finally, they can be examined through attention to moral philosophy, seeking a meta-ethical standard for standards.
Caroline MacLean 2025
(2025-04-16) MacLean, Caroline
Roots and Tides is a love letter to the people who ground me. It explores relationships, identity, and the ways we express care, specifically through music and design. I’ve always made playlists for people I love. It’s one of the ways I show up. This project is a larger, more intentional extension of that. Each album cover is inspired by a person in my life. Some are family, some friends, and some chosen family. I interviewed each of them, curated a short playlist based on our conversations and our connection, and created a visual language around their energy and aura. Each cover is unique to the individual but designed to exist as part of a collective whole, like a record collection. The name Roots and Tides reflects how these people shape me. Roots keep me steady; tides represent change, movement, and emotional currents. Both are necessary. This project was originally going to include a bound book and custom record case, but I scaled back due to time and resources. Still, I’m proud of what I completed: seven album covers and a gallery space that feels like an extension of my world. Many of the objects in the space are from my own home or my family’s. This process pushed me to play multiple roles: designer, art director, curator, and collaborator. It challenged my time management, decision-making, and ability to synthesize personal and visual storytelling. Ultimately, it’s about the people I love and the language I use to say so.
Changes in Anaerobic Work Output Following a Carbohydrate Loading Protocol
(2010-04-21T21:29:42Z) Schultz, Leslie; Cebron, James; Soma, Erica
Carbohydrate loading is a common pre competition method that aims to improve athletic performance. It has most commonly been used in endurance activities, however there is some evidence that it may also improve anaerobic performance. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of carbohydrate loading on anaerobic work, measured by an anaerobic treadmill test. Participants were college varsity athletes who performed two anaerobic treadmill tests, one with carbohydrate loading the evening prior to the test and the other after a normal diet. Anaerobic work was calculated and results were analyzed with a one tailed student’s t-test. Subjects generated an average of 22.90 ± 9.55 kJ of work under the loading condition, and only an average of 20.716 ± 8.39 kJ of work under the non-loading condition. The statistical analysis revealed a p value of .011. Given these results, the hypothesis that carbohydrate loading would cause a significant increase in anaerobic performance was accepted.

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