The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for 2019 has been awarded to Maya Chatterjee, who will earn a bachelor of art degree in sociology. In her senior year, Chatterjee completed an honor’s thesis analyzing media coverage of mass shootings, specifically examining differences in media depictions of mass shooters of different races. Tristan Bridges, an assistant professor of sociology and advisor on the thesis, described it as “an incredibly important contribution to research on mass shootings in the U.S.”

 

Chatterjee’s thesis examined one part of a larger project by Bridges and Tara Leigh Tober, who have assembled a new dataset of mass shootings in the U.S. between 2013 and 2018. They invited Chatterjee to serve as a research assistant on their endeavor, and to be part of some resulting publications. “Maya has made an important discovery and broke ground in this field deploying new methods to help us gather data on a scale previously not seen in research on mass shootings,” Bridges wrote in nominating Chatterjee for the award. “Maya is the strongest undergraduate student I have ever instructed or worked with. I recommend her in the highest and without reservation.”

 

Chatterjee will next pursue graduate work, either in sociology at Oxford or at the London School of Economics. She has been accepted to both.

 

 

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