Awards for Mentoring Undergraduates In Research, Scholarly and Creative Activities

Jacee Cho is an associate professor in English and the founding director of the Second Language Acquisition Lab (SLAB), established in 2015. Her research focuses on bilingualism and multilingualism from linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. She describes her approach to mentoring as a scaffolded one, ensuring that her mentees progressively build their critical thinking and research skills through carefully thought-out and tailored engagement with her mentees’ growth.

Brendan Eagan’s goal is to support students in defining and maintaining high standards for their professional practice. Through a distributed mentorship model, he builds a reflective community rooted in care and mutual support. To sustain this, his undergraduates engage in deep training in leadership and management, empowering them to serve effectively as peer mentors for their colleagues and establish a solid foundation for their future careers.

Aditi Gargeshwari is a researcher in auditory neuroscience and clinical audiology, and she is passionate about mentoring undergraduates through supportive, hands-on learning. She emphasizes individualized mentorship, blending structured guidance with open-ended exploration so each student can develop their own voice, connect their interests to meaningful questions, and grow with confidence and purpose. Her approach focuses on meeting students where they are while helping them build independence and a deeper understanding of the “why” behind their work.

Alexey Glukhov earned his PhD from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and completed postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis, The Ohio State University, and Imperial College London before joining UW–Madison in 2015. He is a dedicated and inclusive mentor who has guided more than 40 undergraduate students through sustained, hands-on research experiences over the past 11 years, with trainees contributing to 22 peer-reviewed publications, over 50 conference presentations, and earning competitive fellowships (Hilldale-Holstrom, Goldwater, American Heart Association). His mentoring philosophy is intentional, mentee-centered, and adaptive, emphasizing individualized research projects, clearly defined roles, and evolving professional development within a supportive environment that fosters creativity, resilience, and intellectual ownership.

Valerie Hammer is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Instruction who mentors preservice teachers in the Elementary Education Program. Her mentoring philosophy is rooted in compassion, humility, and curiosity. She is passionate about collaboratively exploring the art of teaching with mentees, cooperating teachers, and community partners, and finds deep fulfillment in supporting preservice teachers as they discover their unique paths to flourishing in the profession.

Shamya Karumbaiah is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, where she directs The Responsible AI for Learning (TRAIL) Lab. As a mentor, she brings her training in learning sciences to foster an inclusive and equitable learning environment that values all voices. She works one-on-one with her mentees and tailors her mentoring strategies to support them in becoming independent researchers. Together, they have co-authored fifteen stringently-reviewed articles.

As an instructor in UW’s Biocore Program, Seth McGee facilitates undergraduate honors biology through a hands-on, inquiry-based approach that emphasizes curiosity and authentic scientific questioning. Seth leads internships at UW’s Biocore Prairie, a living laboratory in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve that has become a national model for teaching the process of science through the lens of ecology. He founded the UW Bat Brigade, engaging students in bat research on campus, and the Biocore Adventure Club, a program dedicated to fostering community-building outside the classroom. His mission in mentoring undergraduates is to inspire a love of science through curiosity and wonder.

Caglar Uyanik is an assistant professor of mathematics, and the founder and director of the Madison Experimental Mathematics Lab (MXM), which has provided a robust research experience in mathematics for more than three hundred UW undergraduates so far. The MXM creates a synergistic experience involving all stages of academia: the undergraduates’ research reinforces their coursework; graduate students’ research blends with mentoring; and faculty foster a deeper connection between research and teaching. He has personally advised more than 25 undergraduates in various settings such as REUs, semester-long research projects, and senior theses, and he is excited to continue to train the next generation of mathematicians.

Joseph Walston is a third year PhD candidate in the Department of Botany studying the evolution and diversity of carnivorous plants commonly known as pitcher plants, and he runs an undergraduate mentoring program aptly named the “PitcherPals.” Joseph emphasizes long-term development of his mentees, often taking on students early in their college career, and is excited by showing students the behind-the-scenes processes in science, helping to make it more accessible. He mentors students from different majors in multiple colleges on campus, meeting them where they are in their botanical education and working to adjust their research experience to suit their professional plant-related goals.

Ziyen Wu is a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her mentoring philosophy is treating each of her mentees as a whole human being and meeting each mentee where they are. What excites her about mentoring undergraduate students at UW-Madison is seeing the sparkling eyes when they do something that excites them in the lab or in the project, and seeing them grow along the way.