#  Banga Social Innovation Thesis Awards 

 



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 ![Banga Social Innovation Thesis Awards](/sites/g/files/omnuum3641/files/servicetosociety/files/banga_social_innovation_thesis_awards.png)

 

**Banga Social Innovation Thesis Awards** recognize Harvard College seniors whose outstanding senior theses or capstone project reports have the potential to develop innovative solutions to the challenges and opportunities facing people, communities, the environment, and our collective future.

Applicants from all concentrations are encouraged to apply. These awards recognize excellent student research in their respective academic fields. The relevance for social innovation might take many forms, including developing new strategic policies, new prototypes and technologies, creative processes and techniques, improving data-driven systems, or developing novel methods of inquiry and engagement to bridge theory, research, policy and practice. Thesis research is recognized as a first step in what could become an ethical design and intervention development process: research topics and questions provide motivation, insights and new ideas, and evidence for potential interventions, tools, methods, and strategies that have potential benefit to humanity.

Awards will be evaluated on:

- Quality of research
- Relevance to significant social issue
- Use of evidence in supporting potential interventions
- Prospect for future development into an innovative social intervention
- Potential for social impact

**Recipients of the Banga Social Innovation Thesis Award will receive $3,000.**

Interested members of the Class of 2026 must submit a copy of their thesis or capstone project report, a short essay explaining the relevance and future implications of their research to social innovation (1,000 word maximum), a one-page resume, and a copy of their unofficial student record by March 24, 2026. [Click here to apply!](https://carat.fas.harvard.edu/applicant/newApplication?applicationPurposeId=4&fundingSourceId=9062)

All awardees agree to share their research findings publicly through the Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship and present their work at an annual symposium to be scheduled in late Spring 2026.

**lass of 2026 Banga Social Innovation Thesis Awardees**

Sort**Awardee****Department****Research Topic**Ashley Adirika ’26

Government

Locked Out: Civic Engagement and Political Participation among Incarcerated Voters in Boston

Umar Azad ’26

Engineering Sciences

The Delta Regeneration Pod and Co-Design in Pointe-au-Chien: A Nature-Based Approach to Community-Stewarded Restoration in the Mississippi Delta

Anika Christensen ’26

Human Biology, Behavior,& Evolution

Crisis Causing Crisis: The Effect of Global Warming on Modern Day Plague Outbreaks in Madagascar

Amy Dong ’26

Statistics

AI-Driven Protein Representation for Neurodegenerative Therapeutic Discovery

Allison Hunter ’26

African & African American Studies

Unequal Starts, Uneven Journeys: Black Students, Unequal Schools, and the Politics of College Readiness in Atlanta

Hana O’Looney-Goto ’26

Government

Just Admissions? Race, Class, and the Distributive Justice of University Admissions in the United Kingdom and the United States

Wren Opperman ’26

Social Studies

“I Start to Feel More and More Dead”: Addiction and Spiritual Malaise in the Age of Digital Technology

Christopher Ruano ’26

Economics

Illuminating the Invisible Fleet: Satellite Measurement of Dark Fishing and Its Economic Consequences

Saman de Silva ’26

Statistics

Quantifying the Operational PM2.5 Burden of Hyperscale Datacenters

Gauri Sood ’26

Psychology

Biases in Frontier Image Generation Models

Leo Vanciu ’26

Statistics

When Cities Heat Up: Extreme Heat and Firearm Violence in Urban America





**Class of 2025 Banga Social Innovation Thesis Awardees**

Sort**Awardee****Department****Research Topic**Alice Goyer '25

Environmental Science & Public Policy

Optimizing Harvard's Fleet Electrification Strategy with V2G:   
Opportunities for Carbon Reduction and Price Arbitrage in Transactive Energy Management

Alex Klein Wassink '25

Mechanical Engineering

SpiroSniff: A Machine Learning Driven Breathalyzer for Lung Cancer Detection

Nicholas Lopez '25

Applied Mathematics

Dynamic, Welfare-Maximizing Pooled Testing

Roaa Marei '25

Mechanical Engineering

SpiroSniff: A Machine Learning Driven Breathalyzer for Lung Cancer Detection

Craig McFarland '25

Neuroscience

All in My Head? Brain Structure Morphology and Socioenvironmental Factors in the 'Symptomatology of Adult Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Ayush Noori '25

Computer Science

A Knowledge Graph Foundation Model for Neurological Disease

Sofia Pérez Casillas '25

Mechanical Engineering

An Accessible Maize Sheller for the Post-Harvesting   
Challenges of Small Farmers in Kenya

Grace Taylor '25

Environmental Science & Public Policy

Roots of An Outbreak: The Role of Deforestation in the 2013 Ebola Virus Spillover Event

Gabriella Troy '25

Engineering Sciences

SpiroSniff: A Machine Learning Driven Breathalyzer for Lung Cancer Detection

Izumi Vazquez '25

History of Science

Mobile-izing Care: The Mobile Health Clinic Movement