Each academic year, the Library honors the very best undergraduate papers from courses across campus with the Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research. This is the last in a series of posts that highlight the fantastic work of each of our 2015 prize winners.
Ross Mattheis was one of two winners of the 2014/15 Library Prize from a lower-division undergraduate course. His Classics 10A paper, Efficiency in Minoan and Mycenaean Trade Networks in the Late Bronze Age, used computational methods to reconstruct trade networks of the era, attempting as he explains “to reach confident conclusions while permitting evidentiary gaps.” Mattheis’ approach addresses the challenge of working with fragmentary archaeological data, and his advisor, Yasmin Syed praised his “intellectual curiosity about complex scholarly questions.”
Applications for the 2015/2016 prize are open now until April 14th! See the Library Research Prize website for more information.