The senior thesis is often one of the most memorable parts of the college experience: an independent research project that enables students to become subject matter experts in the topic of their choice.
For some, this means hundreds of hours in a lab, learning first-hand how to design and execute research on an open scientific question. For others, this involves traveling to another state to sift through government archives, uncovering new details about an area of the past that has gone unexplored.
In the first edition of our three part series, seniors in the Class of 2026 share what they’re researching, where it’s taken them, and how their final projects got done.
Amelia Rice: Biology
Evolution of U.S. drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment guidelines (1983-2019): a dual case study of HIV and pregnancy
What’s your thesis about?
In a post-antibiotic world, we are comforted to know that, if prescribed the right medicines, tuberculosis won't kill us. But individuals have been getting cases of tuberculosis that are harder and harder to treat due to antibiotic resistance; we have a finite number of antibiotics available, and we have been observing tuberculosis strains with resistance to more antibiotics. Some patient populations are more likely to get active tuberculosis infections and are at increased risk for drug-resistant tuberculosis. In my paper, I focused on two of these groups: pregnant people and HIV+ individuals.
What do doctors do when a pregnant person and/or someone with HIV is very sick with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis? How has this changed since antibiotic resistance became more of a problem? Using a "jigsaw puzzle" approach, I went backwards in time to look through CDC recommendations from 1983 to 2019 for tuberculosis treatment to find where and why the guidelines changed.
Is there a finding that surprised you?
I was shocked at how little research has been done on pregnant people for tuberculosis treatment, particularly antibiotic-resistant TB, which poses a particular threat. Every 10 years, when the CDC publishes its updated treatment guidelines, the authors reiterate how further clinical studies and clinical trials needed to be done on pregnant patients due to a large gap in understanding.
Without this evidence, physicians are left to weigh difficult potential consequences when prescribing pregnant patients tuberculosis medications: Are they sick enough? What might happen to the patient and the fetus because of the prescribed antibiotics? What might happen without them?
Where did the project take you?
This project was heavily influenced by my work in the Weil Lab at the University of Washington School of Medicine. There, I focused on Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes cholera disease. I extracted DNA from over one hundred human stool samples that came from cholera patients in Bangladesh and their families. I remember wondering how physicians made decisions about the treatment of cholera, and what evidence supported those decisions—with the senior thesis, I wanted to learn about something new within the field of infectious disease while keeping those questions in mind.
What was your go-to research spot on campus?
I spent a lot of time on the fourth floor of Milstein as I scoured PubMed and Google Scholar for peer-reviewed articles dating back to the 1940s. I also did a lot of brainstorming by staring off into space from my desk at home and chatting with my roommates around our dining room table.
Katelyn Floyd: History
Red Shirts Redeemed: Violence and Politics in South Carolina, 1865-1882
What’s your thesis about?
My thesis explores white supremacist paramilitary violence during and after Reconstruction in South Carolina. It begins from the fact that Black political power in the state reached an unprecedented level during Reconstruction, and it traces the reactionary movement that emerged in response, including the ways it was forced underground, reorganized, and reshaped over time in the face of federal intervention and Black resistance.
I track the evolution of that movement from the Ku Klux Klan to the Red Shirts, who successfully overthrew the democratically elected state government in 1876 in what they deemed ‘Redemption.’ However, the main historical intervention I’m making is tracking how the Red Shirt movement endured beyond 1876. Historians of white supremacist violence in South Carolina often stop there, for obvious reasons, but my project follows the story into the 1880s. I argue that those later elections were also violent, deeply contested, and central to the broader work of rebuilding white supremacy and laying the foundations of Jim Crow.
Is there a finding that surprised you?
What surprised me most was how long the political life of this movement lasted, and how relevant it still feels. This project actually grew out of an earlier paper I wrote on the rise of the Red Shirt movement leading up to 1876, and even then I was surprised to find Red Shirt activity continuing into the 1880s. But the deeper I got into the research, the clearer it became that the movement remained politically and symbolically powerful well beyond the nineteenth century.
Actual Red Shirt associations survived into the New Deal era, and the memory of the movement continued to shape South Carolina politics for decades. ‘Redemption’ has been invoked on the floor of the South Carolina legislature up to the 1990s, and many of the men I study are still commemorated in monuments and public memory across the state. The movement was central to South Carolina political culture for nearly a century and mobilized broad segments of white society, including women (which was also a big surprise!).
Where did the project take you?
This project took me across South Carolina! I spent the most time at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Columbia, where I worked with the letters of Reconstruction governors, criminal court records, election records, and other state documents. I also did research at the South Caroliniana Library at USC, where I looked through personal letters and papers connected to Red Shirt leaders, and visited museums and historic sites like Oakley Park Museum and the Confederate Relic Room.
What was your go-to research spot on campus?
The green chairs on the third floor of Milstein… that became my regular writing spot, usually with a coffee and pastry from Liz’s nearby.