In Fall quarter, we awarded our Boothe Prizes and Lunsford Awards for the spring 2025 nominees. Read on below to learn about our amazing winners. You can read their award-winning essays and watch recordings of their presentations after May 2026 through the Boothe Prize and Lunsford Award websites.
Spring 2025 Boothe Prize Winner: Harshvardhan Singh
For “Cognitive Cyborgism as Zero-Sum Game,” written in Norah Fahim’s course, From Paper to GenAI: Exploring Changes in Research and Cognition.
Harsh is a Computer Science major from Flower Mound, Texas. His academic interests center on ML systems and energy-efficient AI. At Stanford, he works with the HazyResearch group to push the frontier of “intelligence efficiency” in large language models, and at AMD, he works under the Research & Advanced Development team to design hybrid local–cloud inference protocols for coding agents. Last summer, he was the first undergraduate intern at Khosla Ventures, where he built agentic AI infrastructure for portfolio management. For fun, Harsh enjoys reading critiques of Silicon Valley tech culture and runway modeling with Stanford FashionX.
Harsh remarks: “It is strange how my RBA seems in direct tension with my projected career path. Indeed, while writing my 6,467-word treatise on how cognitive offloading to large language models (LLMs) is slowly warping our minds, I’d follow drafting sessions with research blocks—optimizing an LLM for local inference or determining which model best performs on reasoning-heavy tasks. After attending my PWR seminar, where we workshopped essays, I’d bike to CS231n (Deep Learning for Computer Vision), where I learned the fundamentals—down to the matrix multiply—behind how generative AI works today.”
Harsh admits he is not sure what to make of this, explaining, “The adoption of generative AI presents an entirely new set of opportunities and obstacles that are both epistemically interesting (the transformer architecture is mechanistically beautiful) and extremely relevant in the present day. At best case, LLMs (or diffusion models, or whatever next-gen ML system researchers come up with) will enable a future that’s radically productive—one where mental bandwidth is no longer the bottleneck for what we’re able to imagine or build. At worst case, he explains, we risk losing human cognition altogether. It’s not implausible to foresee a reality where thought that deviates from generative AI’s statistical likelihood distribution—the next token—becomes novel, a kind of intellectual antique. Seeing human-written emails these days already feels faintly anachronistic; what happens when this paradigm extends to all media?
“I don’t have the answers, and I don’t claim to be an expert in any way, shape, or form. But drafting this RBA in PWR taught me how to interrogate these tensions with clarity—how to build arguments, synthesize research, and articulate technical anxieties in human terms. The process has made me realize that perhaps the sheer philosophical challenge is what draws me to the field. Untangling a problem this vast, this consequential, feels like the kind of work that defines a generation. And learning to write about AI’s stakes has changed how I study it.”
Spring 2025 Boothe Prize Honorable Mention: Ellie Xi
For “Bodies on Loan: Gendered Disability and Ideological Ownership in Maoist China,” written in Lindsey Felt’s course, #NoBodyisDisposable: The Rhetoric of Disability.
Originally from Cupertino, California, I am a prospective Biomedical Computation major on the pre-med track with additional interests in accessible education, geriatrics, and chemistry. I am the co-founder of Love-All, a Stanford VSO that provides inclusive tennis programming for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), and I serve as an officer in both Stanford Synapse and the Vaden Student Healthcare Advisory Council (VSHAC). Outside of academics, I enjoy exploring aesthetic cafés to study in, creating portraitures of the leads of any movies I'm currently watching, researching hepatocyte maturation and differentiation, and hiking with friends and family.
My PWR project became the first space where I could bring together two parts of my life that had always felt disconnected: my long-standing work teaching reading and art to children with intellectual and developmental disabilities and the social consequences and losses that shaped my family's experiences, on both my maternal and paternal sides, during the Cultural Revolution. I wanted to understand how propaganda not only shapes public sentiment but also constructs ideals about which bodies and roles are valued in society. Unlike my usual work in stem cell biology and bioinformatics, where analysis revolves around datasets, experiments, and recent results, this project demanded a qualitative and historically grounded approach. I often struggled to distill complex ideas into clear sentences, and it was Dr. Felt who continually pushed me to sharpen my thinking and condense my writing. Every time I struggled with finding primary sources or analyzing foreign media, she asked me, “So what?” and guided me toward furthering my argument.
I am deeply grateful for this experience because it fundamentally changed how I approach research, writing, and even the scientific questions I care about. PWR taught me to look beyond surface-level narratives, to recognize the rhetorical forces shaping cultural and scientific discourse, and to trust myself when engaging with material outside my comfort zone. The opportunity to pursue a project so personally meaningful, with Dr. Felt’s support and advice at every step, has become one of the most formative parts of my Stanford education so far, and I hope to carry these lessons into my future work.
Spring 2025 Lunsford Award Winner: Ellie Lin
For “A Tale of Two Citizens: Race, Rhetoric, and Revocation” presented in Hayden Kantor’s course, In the Moment: The Rhetoric of Time.
Ellie is a Physics major and a Computer Science minor originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her academic interests span physics, biochemistry, and machine learning. She conducts research at the intersection of these fields, leveraging large scale simulations for drug discovery and optimization. Outside of class, she enjoys playing soccer and violin. Her ambition is to pursue graduate school for biophysics.
Of her PWR 2 experience Ellie states, “PWR 2 encouraged me to step outside of my writing comfort zone. For my RBA, I ultimately chose a topic at the intersection of compelling concepts I had been following in the news and hoped to investigate more rigorously myself: the philosophy of deservedness, the ambiguity of terrorism, and the conditionality of citizenship. Along the way, PWR 2 has also equipped me with a set of invaluable skills—engaging with existing research, developing my own arguments, and communicating complex ideas clearly—that I will no doubt use for the rest of my professional life.”
Spring 2025 Lunsford Award Winner: Jack Quach
For “Airsick: The Emerging Disease Threats of a Shifting Pacific Flyway” presented in Emily Polk’s course, Trekkers, Trampers, and Travelers: Storytelling on the World’s Trails.
Jack is a junior at Stanford, originally from San Francisco, CA. As a computer science major with a prospective minor in communication, he loves exploring computational biology, data science, and journalism. He has worked on technology projects in the education and healthcare spaces and especially loves diving deep into my research work using computer science skills to conduct computational genomics and cancer data science research. For him, “stories are key to sharing the benefits of scientific advances. Where dense terminology or complicated topics wall off understanding, powerful storytelling says, ‘Welcome to this unfamiliar world. Don’t worry, I’ll be your guide.’” At Stanford, he is a section leader for CS106A/B, a writer and former editor for the Stanford Daily in the Science & Technology section, and a tour guide! He also loves getting involved in community service by making breakfast with the Stanford Breakfast Club. During his free time, he cheers for his hometown (and Stanford) sports teams, makes new recipes, plays guitar, and practices nature photography while out on hikes.
Of his PWR 2 class, Trekkers, Trampers, and Travelers: Storytelling On The World’s Trails, he says, “I felt captured by the creative nature of the course, and I wanted to tell the story of a one-of-a-kind trail. So, I looked to the skies. In the months leading up to this PWR class, I read headline after headline of growing fears about bird flu (or avian influenza) disease spread. I grew curious about how migratory birds around the Pacific Coast, a region I’ve called home all my life, are affected.
“During high school, I interviewed doctors at Stanford fighting against new COVID-19 strains. With wrinkles from the many masks and protective gear they wore, the doctors shared the emotional turmoil of the pandemic’s uncertainty. I learned that fighting against pandemics requires proactive effort. Through my research project, I looked to uncover how emerging disease threats for birds might grow, and how protecting wild animals also works to protect humans at the same time.
“I’ve always felt a love for nature and the outdoors, and this research project gave me an opportunity to dive into this field. In my presentation, I also highlighted how emerging software and technology can work to connect people more closely with the wildlife that surrounds them, so I felt that this presentation formed a perfect combination of my academic and personal interests.
“I’m immensely grateful for Dr. Polk, who created a welcoming environment full of enthusiasm to explore. With each new trail discovered in class, she pushed me to find new ways to express my research, through sound, vivid imagery, and emotional storytelling. Working with my classmates through the brainstorming and editing process inspired me in my own work, and I felt a sense of true community each time I stepped into the classroom. Everyone offered helpful and encouraging advice, while sharing illuminating topics about all kinds of trails. This PWR 2 experience will, without a doubt, remain with me as a highlight of my time at Stanford.”
