Harvard Radcliffe Institute honored seniors Jessica Lynn Jenkins, Mira Hu Jiang, and Arundhati Oommen with the Captain Jonathan Fay Prize, the annual award for the top theses of Harvard College’s graduating class.
This year’s Fay Prize recipients are recognized for their exceptional undergraduate work in economics, neuroscience, and statistics and philosophy, respectively. Their theses were selected from among 71 Harvard College seniors, all winners of the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize in recognition of outstanding scholarly research from undergraduate students. Fay Prize winners were announced Thursday at Harvard Radcliffe Institute during a gathering of all Hoopes Prize winners.
“These projects reflect Radcliffe’s mission to foster advanced work across disciplines, to ask the unasked questions and reach well outside of comfort zones,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “For many Hoopes and Fay prizewinners, this work represents the start of far-reaching academic and research careers, and we are honored to be part of that important, lifelong journey.”
For Jess Jenkins, a key question for her thesis was, where you grow up shapes where you end up — but why? Jenkins, who grew up in a small beachside town on the West Coast of New Zealand’s North Island, wanted to address that question in her home country by producing what became New Zealand’s first suburb-level intergenerational income mobility estimates, drawing on linked administrative data comprising 231,000 children and their parents.
Mira Jiang’s winning thesis focuses on disorders of gut-brain interaction, which afflict about 40 percent of the world’s population. What makes these disorders somewhat unique is that there are physical symptoms like bloating, constipation, and pain, but when looking at the GI tract, everything seems in working order.
Dhati Oommen’s thesis sits at the intersection of statistics and philosophy. “Specifically,” she said, “what I look at is how do we measure responsibility in situations that involve luck?”
“Every legal system holds that punishment should fit the crime,” reads her thesis abstract. “Yet two people can commit the same crime with identical prior choices and face radically different punishments based on nothing but outcome. The luck that separates them — an inch of positioning, a millisecond, a gust of wind — means one walks free while the other faces imprisonment.
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