Meet Our 2024 Graduate Medalists

The UW College of Arts & Sciences is pleased to announce three Graduate Medalists for 2024. The Graduate Medal honors exceptional graduate students who completed their advanced degrees this year, with medalists selected on the basis of nomination letters from faculty. Learn more about our medalists:

Liesbeth Gijbels
Christina Yuen Zi Chung
Freesoul El Shabazz-Thompson

Liesbeth Gijbels
Graduate Medalist in the Natural Sciences

PhD, Speech and Hearing Sciences

The Covid-19 pandemic threw a wrench into Liesbeth Gijbels' plans to research audiovisual (AV) speech integration in children ages 6-13. Gijbels envisioned working with and testing her young research subjects in person, but when that was not an option, she designed and launched her experiments online. The research focused on visual aspects of AV perception, particularly the gains conferred by seeing the face of a speaker, and how that develops as we age. In addition to contributing to the field of AV perception, Gijbels has demonstrated successful methodologies for online experiments in the field.

Before and during her time as a doctoral student in the Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences (SPHSC), Gijbels worked as a research assistant at the UW’s  Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS), helping with a reading camp for five-year-olds. The research looked at the development of phonological skills in camp participants. Again, Gijbels pivoted during COVID, switching the in-person camp to an online experience that proved equally effective. She has since taken on other projects at I-LABS.

Through her various research projects, Gijbels has had eight papers published in top peer-reviewed journals and has several more in development. She also completed a six-month internship at Meta Reality Labs.

“I have supervised many graduate students and postdoctoral students,” says SPHSC professor and chair Adrian KC Lee. “Liesbeth’s body of work is the most astounding in terms of scope and volume.”

“Everyone who works with Liesbeth is struck by her boundless energy, the breadth of her talent, and the depth of her knowledge,” adds SPHSC professor Patricia Kuhl, co-director of I-LABS. “Most comment, ‘How does she do it?’ Liesbeth is among the top 1% of PhD students I have mentored in my nearly 50 years on the faculty at the UW.”

Christina Yuen Zi Chung
Graduate Medalist in the Social Sciences

PhD, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies

Christina Yuen Zi Chung is interested in how art intersects with culture and politics. Her dissertation explores the integral and intertwined roles of gender and decoloniality reflected in Hong Kong contemporary art, which illuminates the cultural-political and economic negotiations among Hong Kong, Britain, and the People’s Republic of China. Her work examines the ways in which history, materiality, and the practice of art making are an integral part of shaping the territory’s future.

“Christina’s dissertation is groundbreaking and beautifully written,” says Sasha Su-Ling Welland, chair of Chung’s dissertation committee and professor and chair of the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies (GWSS). “Her scholarship… is forging the nascent field of Hong Kong studies and reshaping curatorial practice.”

Welland praises Chung’s teaching as well, noting that Chung received the department’s graduate excellence in teaching award. “I still hear glowing reviews from students that [a course taught by Chung] was their favorite GWSS course,” Welland says.

Beyond campus, Chung worked with curators at the Seattle Asian Art Museum on a major redesign of the museum’s permanent-collection exhibit, and she has contributed her writing and curatorial skills to a range of artistic and scholarly projects on Hong Kong and its diaspora. A committed volunteer and advocate of language justice, she has served as a Cantonese and Mandarin interpreter for the Chinese Information and Service Center as well as the Asian Counseling and Referral Service in Seattle.

“I have come to realize what a rare privilege it is to work with and learn from Christina,” says Welland. “She is theoretically adept, rigorous yet generous in her support of peers and undergraduate students, and remarkably clear-eyed as she charts a scholarly trajectory that combines her many talents and skills as a researcher, teacher, public-facing scholar, and curator.”

Freesoul El Shabazz-Thompson
Graduate Medalist in the Arts

MFA, 3D4M, School of Art + Art History + Design

“Freesoul El Shabazz-Thompson is the most dynamic graduate student I have ever seen at this University,” says Michael Swaine, associate professor and chair of the 3D4M (3D Forum) program in the UW School of Art + Art History + Design (SOA+AH+D). “His work opens possibilities for new thinking, such that it challenges one’s assumptions about the world around them.”

El Shabazz-Thompson is particularly interested in systems and how they work -- including monetary systems. That interest led him to spend winter quarter 2024 in Ghana to study cowrie shells, an ancient form of currency still used in Ghana today. He wanted to understand how the cowrie monetary system operated, and the nature of the shells’ current use. The research trip was made possible through an International Research Fellowship funded by the Chester Fritz Endowment.

While in the MFA program, El Shabazz-Thompson also taught sculpture courses and worked as a research assistant for Studio Tilt, a SOA+AH+D design research group. He participated in Black Embodiments Studio, an interdisciplinary UW program that builds discourse around contemporary Black art, and took art history courses for added perspective.

“Freesoul is the kind of student every professor would fight to have in class,” notes Jennifer Baez, assistant professor of art history, who had El Shabazz-Thompson in her Haiti and Print Culture course. “His observations fed my own thinking and reflected a deep sense of curiosity and problem pondering.”

“It feels like the word ‘Art’ might not be expansive enough to express what Freesoul might give to the world,” says Swaine. “I believe his work as an artist is leading us to not only imagine but also act in more expansive ways amidst the world around us.”