UC Merced student wins first place in competition among UC system’s top dissertations

UC Merced has achieved many notable firsts in 2021.

Recently, that included a student receiving a Rhodes Scholarship, plus a professor receiving a presidential nomination for a top. leadership role.

The university has added another important first to its list of accomplishments. Graduate student Shayna Bennett is UC Merced’s first student to win the University of California’s Grad Slam competition, held virtually May 7.

Bennett has competed in Grad Slam for three years in a row, placing in the top 10 each time. She was a runner-up in 2020.

She credited UC Merced Foundation Board diplomat Jane Binger for helping her present her research to a large audience.

“It’s very exciting for me,” Bennett said. “Ever since I started doing the Grad Slam competition this was something I was really hoping for and to see it actually happen was just incredible.”

Grad Slam is an annual competition put on by the University of California. All 10 campuses offer graduate and doctoral students the opportunity to present their theses and dissertations. Whoever wins the competitions put forth by their own schools gets to square off in the annual grad slam competition.

Students have three minutes or less to present their research, discussing its positive impacts. The winner is awarded $7,000.

A panel of judges representing higher education, government, media and other areas select the winners.

Bennett is a fourth-year student in Professor Shilpa Khatri’s lab, who studies numerical methods for partial differential equations to understand how landscape features like rivers, roads and mountains affect the spreading rate and pattern of invasive species.

Bennett’s dissertation is titled “A New Tool to Fight Invasive Species.”

Khatri is proud of Bennett’s efforts and what the win means for the applied mathematics department and graduate research. “I think she does an amazing job representing our department and the university as a whole,” Khatri said.

“I think what winning this competition exemplifies is that not only do we need to do the work, but we also need to be able to communicate the work and Shayna is a really great example of a student who does this so well.”

Chris Kello, UC Merced’s interim vice provost and graduate dean, said Bennett’s mathematical model helps predict “where and when invasive species spread,” giving it a real world-application.

Bennett previously won the National Science Foundation fellowship award during her first year as a UC Merced graduate student. She is president of the university’s graduate student association.

Her presentation can be viewed on the Grad Slam’s website.

This story was originally published May 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM.