Annie Franklin
Graduate Medalist in the Arts
MFA, Dance
Hip Hop, street dance, and club dances have all historically been excluded from university dance departments. But Annie Franklin is about to change that, according to Juliet McMains, professor of dance, and Hannah C. Wiley, professor emerita of dance.
In their nomination letter for Franklin, McMains and Wiley note that Franklin is “an exquisite dancer and choreographer” who is developing a new model for a curriculum that places these dance forms on equal footing with ballet and modern dance. “We anticipate that Annie will become a major force in transforming dance in higher education,” they say.
Franklin has firsthand knowledge of street, club, and Hip Hop dance culture, having found a home in the Chicago Hip Hop dance community when she was growing up. Her scholarly work expands her expertise, including research into Bruk Up, a relatively unknown improvisational dance style named after Jamaican dancer George “Bruckup” Adams. Thanks to a Howard P. Dallas Endowed Fellowship, Franklin traveled to New York to meet (and dance) with a pioneer of Bruk Up and other members of the Bruk Up community.
For her master’s project, Franklin developed and taught a lecture/laboratory course that introduced students to the history and philosophies of Hip Hop, street, and club dance through a lens of community. She invited community members into the classroom and brought students into the community as part of the course. “Community engagement is central to Annie’s teaching philosophy and defines all of her work as a teacher, artist, and scholar,” note McMains and Wiley.
This fall, Franklin will become an assistant professor of dance at Slippery Rock University.
Jieyu Zhou
Graduate Medalist in the Humanities
Ph.D, Asian Languages & Literature
Jieyu Zhou’s research focuses on “collocations” — word combinations that are natural for native speakers of a language but may be less obvious for second language learners. (Why “fast food” but not “quick food”?) Her dissertation explores how advanced-level second language learners of Chinese process collocations, which are critical to promoting fluency in a second language.
While studies in other languages have confirmed the importance of collocation in learning a second language, few studies have identified the linguistic and learner-related factors that affect collocation-learning in Chinese, and particularly how instruction of collocation would work in the classroom. To answer these questions, Zhou designed two experimental studies, with research grants from the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations and the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. She will complete her dissertation this summer.
Zhou has also excelled at teaching. She has been an instructor or co-instructor for UW Chinese language courses since 2020 and received her department’s Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award in 2021.
“Jieyu has been acknowledged as our best teaching assistant because of her consistent excellent performance and her near perfect course evaluation scores,” writes Chan Lu, associate professor of Asian languages and literature (AL&L), in a letter nominating Zhou for the graduate medal. “Additionally, Jieyu offers her guidance to junior graduate students in the department. She is a valued member of the AL&L community.”
This fall, Zhou will join Northwestern University as a full-time assistant teaching professor.
Jiaqi Cai
Dean’s Medalist in the Natural Sciences
Ph.D, Physics
Jiaqi Cai’s doctoral research has led to a landmark discovery in condensed matter physics: the experimental realization of the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAH) -– a phenomenon long theorized but never before observed. His FQAH research contributed to the project’s principal investigator, Xiaodong Xu, receiving the 2025 National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery.
“This discovery is not only of fundamental interest but also offers a paradigm shift in the development of fault tolerant quantum computation — a grand challenge for the quantum computing community,” notes Subhadeep Gupta, professor and chair of the Department of Physics.
Cai had an astonishing 24 research papers published in high-impact journals during his doctoral study at the UW, including first author or co-first author papers in Nature, Science, Nature Physics, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, and Nano Letters. But what sets him apart is not just the groundbreaking nature of his research but also the breadth and depth of his skills.
“Jiaqi possesses a rare combination of exceptionally strong theoretical capability and outstanding experimental skill,” writes Xiaodong Xu, Boeing Distinguished Professor in the Department of Physics and the Department of Materials Science & Engineering.
Xu also notes Cai’s strength as a collaborator and mentor. “He has the personality of working extremely well with anyone and has been a terrific mentor for several graduate and undergraduate students,” Xu explains. “He has been the heart and soul in the FQAH projects, not only doing great research by himself but also leading the team efforts.”
Cai is now a Pappalardo Fellow in Physics, a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Cristina Gildee
Graduate Medalist in the Social Sciences
Ph.D, Anthropology
Cristina Gildee is a long-time Husky. After transferring from Green River College, she earned a BS in medical anthropology and global health from the UW in 2019 while working in the lab of Patricia Kramer, professor of anthropology. She remained in the Department of Anthropology — and Kramer’s lab — as a graduate student.
Gildee is committed to diversity in science, as demonstrated by her dissertation topic. Her research aims to extend our understanding of bone aging, beyond the mechanistic aspects of bone aging to the impact of an individual’s lived experience.
“Her goals are big,” writes Kramer in her letter nominating Gildee for a graduate medal. “She seeks to understand how skeletons age, particularly those of people who have been pregnant without sufficient resources. She brings her training in biomechanics and human variation together with new skills in aging and data analysis to extricate the intertwined causalities of bone loading, aging processes, and reproductive demands.”
Beyond her research, Gildee had a positive impact in the department, particularly when emotions were heightened during the Covid pandemic and after the murder of George Floyd. “She was instrumental in recognizing the varied anxieties that everyone in the lab felt…and in cajoling her fellow graduate students to persevere,” Kramer observed. Gildee served on several department committees — including its Diversity Committee — and mentored undergraduate researchers.
“There is no doubt that she will make an attentive and connected faculty member and mentor,” says Kramer. “She has not only the experience but also the passion and determination to connect people from groups underrepresented in science to the wonders of it.”
This fall, Cristina is continuing her work in the UW Department of Anthropology as a postdoctoral lecturer.
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