Outstanding Graduates 2022

Master of Science, Biology - MESP

Microbial Community Dynamics During Key Life History Transitions in the Deep-Sea Chemosymbiotic Mussel, Gigantidas childressi

Tessa Beaver, of Dupont, WA, first became interested in marine biology at Pierce College where she graduated with a 4.0 GPA with an AS in Biology in 2017. That fall, she began at WWU as a biology major, where she made lots of connections with faculty and researchers and began her foray into research as an undergraduate. After efficiently earning her BS in biology, Tessa began her graduate degree in biology at WWU in 2019. As a graduate student, Tessa taught introductory laboratory courses in cellular and molecular biology, stepping up her leadership role in these courses amid the COVID-19 pandemic. During her graduate career, Tessa also participated in four research cruises, during which she led teams of graduate and undergraduate students in collection, sorting, imaging, and sample preservation of planktonic larvae throughout the water column in the Western Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Southwestern Pacific. Her thesis, titled “Microbial community dynamics during early life-history transitions in the deep-sea chemosymbiotic mussel Gigantidas childressi,” made observations that challenge current assumptions about how symbiotic relationships with bacteria develop and persist during early development in this species. This work is currently in preparation for publication and was also awarded the outstanding graduate research award from the Biology Department. In all, Tessa is passionate about using molecular methods to answer ecological questions in marine systems, specifically in deep-sea and symbiotic communities. Tessa hopes to continue this line of research in the future.

Master of Arts, Rehabilitation Counseling

Sara Billington completed a BA in Political Science and an MA in Rehabilitation Counseling from Western Washington University. Over the four years she was in the RC program, faculty observed the effort and excellence Sara put into each of her courses. She was viewed as a compassionate and patient member of her cohort. Throughout her program, Sara faced many personal adversities with grace and tenacity. The RC faculty take this opportunity to acknowledge Sara’s diligence in her studies and her commitment to the field of rehabilitation counseling. Sara has a strong passion for working with and advocating for individuals with disabilities. She's currently working at the Center for Continuing Education in Rehabilitation at the University of Washington.

Master of Education, Language and Literacy

Letys is a bilingual teacher who teaches both English and Spanish. Her scholarship centered around how to elevate students' voices in both languages. In addition to improving her pedagogical practices, she also was a leader in using her voice to advocate for students around literacy practices. Letys secured funding to get students access to a virtual library in order to encourage them to keep reading and capitalized on the opportunity to engage parents as home coaches.

Letys is an innovator and a social justice advocate for her students. She recognized the need to incorporate coding with her 3rd graders as an issue of social justice. During remote learning, Letys utilized Wonder Workshop to engage her students in coding remotely and as motivation to show up to online class. Not only is Letys a creative, caring, reflective teacher, but she also brings passion and humor to her work, which makes learning from and working with her joyous. 

Master of Education, School Counseling

Master of Education, Language and Literacy

Jessica Canul Diaz, a 3rd-grade bilingual teacher, has a vision for integrating technology into Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD) strategies to teach and support multilingual learners. GLAD strategies are designed to promote language and cultural skills as well as overall academic achievement.

Jessica’s passion for language learning combined with her skill and enthusiasm for meaningful technology integration as well as the willingness and discipline to work hard, has led her to create powerful, fun, and engaging lessons. She capitalizes on tools like Jamboard, Book Creator, Seesaw, Padlet, and Gify to create cognitive content dictionaries, observation and inquiry charts, big books and more.

During remote learning and while she worked toward her Digital and Media Literacy certification, she created  “Club Creadores Digitales” (Digital Creators Club) in order to motivate students to complete assignments, particularly in the target language of instruction, in this case Spanish. As a Seesaw Ambassador, Book Creator Certified Author, GLAD certified teacher, and a GLAD lead for her building, Jessica is transforming the education of her students, who will be multilingual and multi-literate, but also prepared with 21st century digital skills.

Master of Arts, English

Master of Science, Environmental Science

UAV remote sensing approaches to mapping glacier ablation and snow algae radiative forcing in the North Cascades

Shannon Healy has been an exceptional master's student. It is highly unusual for a student to be competent across many components of graduate research, from rigorous fieldwork (such as carrying a heavy pack over crevassed glaciated terrain), to high level analytical chemistry (such as pigment analyses using the Quadrupole Time of Flight Mass Spectrometer in SciTech and cell counts using the Guava Flow Cytometer at the Shannon Point Marine Center), to operating a UAV and working with high resolution UAV and satellite imagery with complicated Python scripts in combination with ArcGIS. Shannon has contributed to all of it and in meaningful ways (such as helping to get these methods set up and running) and has excelled across these domains. Shannon has already published one paper, and we have a second UAV paper in review. Additionally, she was awarded a NW Climate Adaptation Science Center Fellowship for the 2020-2021 AY, (the Nooksack Tribe collaborated on this work), and she volunteered with the Mt. Baker Snow School in Winter 2020.  This past year, 2021 – 2022, Shannon also participated in an EPA Pathways internship. 

Master of Business Administration

Master of Education, Educational Administration / Educational Leadership and Inclusive Teaching

Master of Business Administration

Master of Arts, Anthropology

Optimistic Anthropology: Identity and Well-Being on Instagram

Katherine Picchiotti graduated from WWU in August 2021 with a Master of Arts in Anthropology after two years of research and the completion of her thesis - Optimistic Anthropology: Identity and Well-Being on Instagram. Picchiotti’s thesis investigates how students at WWU practice Well-Being through identity performance on Instagram, which brought findings later discussed during her opportunities with companies such as Amazon and Meta. Her focus on cultural and digital anthropology earned her an Outstanding Graduate award, where she attributes her success to her cohort and committee consisting of Dr. Judith Pine, Dr. Sean Bruna, and Dr. Joshua Fisher. Katherine now works as an Information Technology Sourcing Consultant in Chicago, Illinois and hopes to continue researching and learning about user experiences.

Master of Science, Chemistry - Biochemistry

Engineering Segmentally Labeled Intrinsically Disordered Proteins

Erin works in pharmaceutical sciences at Seagen, formerly Seattle Genetics, a biotech pioneer in cancer care. 

Rosenkranz works with antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), which are antibodies, specific to particular tumor cells, that are combined with anti-cancer agents. These therapeutics are engineered to target cancer cells directly, allowing a person’s healthy cells, which might be damaged by whole-body therapies like chemo, to remain as healthy as possible during treatment. These ADCs have the potential to vastly improve the lives of people undergoing oncological treatment. 

At Seagen, Rosenkranz tests the practical application-oriented side of cancer therapeutics. She works toward maintaining the stability and efficacy of these drugs to improve the practicalities of efficiency of production, dosing, administration, and distribution. 

Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing

Bitter Roots

In every endeavor, Caity Scott has demonstrated that she is an exemplary educator, leader, writer, editor, scholar, coordinator and collaborator. With The Bellingham Review, Caity was Assistant Managing Editor. Suzanne Paola Antonetta, Editor-in-Chief at The Bellingham Review, writes: 

“Caity Scott has been invaluable to me this year in her position as Assistant Managing Editor of the Bellingham Review. Caity has managed our book reviews, obtaining review copies and assigning and then editing book reviews written by our graduate student staff. She conducted an in-depth, smart, and feminist interview with writer Jessica Pierce that we published in the fall of 2022, and her editing, copy-editing, and editorial advice to me has been at the skill level of a person who had been in publishing for many years.”

As the English Graduate Representative on the Graduate Student Advocacy Council, Caity launched the “Buddy Program,” matching first-year and second-year students as a way to promote peer-mentoring, student belonging and student persistence. As the Events Coordinator for the English Graduate Association, Caity ran the EGA Reading Series, organizing, publicizing and hosting everything from visiting author events to panels to professional events to open mics to student readings. Recently, understanding that many of our English majors are first-generation college students, Caity coordinated a Grad School Application panel, where current MA and MFA students fielded questions about applying to graduate school, requesting letters of recommendations, and building an effective writing sample.

To her students, mentees, and peers, Caity is beloved as a competent, enthusiastic, and innovative educator. She has lectured as a Composition Instructor for ENG 101 since 2020, where her pedagogical interests include active learning, promoting inclusive classroom dynamics, universal design for learning, and strengths-based feedback. Uniquely, Caity has pursued a multitude of teaching developments, including working as a Graduate Studio Assistant at Western Washington University’s Hacherl Research and Writing Studio, and being an active participant in workshops offered by Western’s Center for Instructional Innovation and Assessment (CIIA) and the Teaching and Learning Cooperative (TLCo-op).

Alongside teaching and service, Caity is thriving as a publishing writer. During her time at Western, she has published more than a dozen pieces of fiction, poetry and multi-genre work in journals such as On the Run, Dark Recesses, and Sheepshead Review. Her forthcoming thesis is a full-length novel as well as a branching-narratives video game called Bitter Roots, and it interrogates the cruelties of repetitive low-wage labor. 

Master of Science, Computer Science

Melissa’s degree from Western is her second master’s degree, after the one she earned at Drexel University in 2010 studying library and information science. After some years in the working world, she returned to school with the goal of becoming an AI researcher. After completing the undergraduate computer science prerequisites, she began graduate coursework and research working in computer vision. In the summer of 2020, Melissa won funding through the Washington NASA Space Grant, which jump started her computer vision research project related to visualizing multiple timescales in long fixed-viewpoint videos. Serving both as the primary author and mentor to several undergraduate research students, her diligent work on this project over the following couple of years culminated in a paper that has been conditionally accepted to the 2022 IEEE VIS conference, a top-tier venue for research in visualization.

In addition to her strong academics, Melissa was also an engaged and active citizen in the Computer Science Department, through her many quarters as a TA, her involvement with the Association for Gender Inclusion in Computing, and her leadership in developing the Computer Science Mentoring Program. She was recognized by the CS department with their Citizenship Award (2020/2021).

Melissa spent the summer of 2021 interning at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where she developed a novel semi-self-supervised few-shot method for image classification in overhead imagery. Since graduation, she has been working full-time at PNNL as a data scientist, conducting research on a variety of interesting computer vision projects. She is also continuing to be a mentor by supervising an undergraduate intern this summer at PNNL.

Master of Arts, Anthropology

Embodied Feminism: An Ethnographic Study of Abortion Access and Hopeful Praxis

Nicolette Tuttle’s timely, patient, diligent, and dedicated work in the Anthropology MA program at Western Washington University represents the best of feminist and engaged anthropology. Her thesis, Embodied Feminism: An Ethnographic Study of Abortion Access and Hopeful Praxis, seeks to understand the political terrains in which reproductive rights activists in Los Angeles operate, something that she comes to understand, in part, by accompanying patients to their needed care. Her work is built upon a foundation of ethical research that prioritizes transparency and mutuality as the only avenue for properly conducting research on critical social issues.

At the same time, Ms. Tuttle admirably demonstrates something every student of the social sciences should understand: that research, particularly ethnographic research, is also a process of self-transformation. One does not merely do fieldwork, collect data, and write it all up in order to receive a degree. Ms. Tuttle exemplifies engaged research that matters because she has always brought her whole self to that work, connecting her political, social, ethical, and emotional self with every other part. The implications for this approach to research are exemplified in her ongoing friendships with her interlocutors, who see Ms. Tuttle, in turn, as friend, colleague, advocate, and advisor.