This September, START sponsored the first annual Student Poster Contest at this year's Annual Meeting. Students competed for awards for the best graduate and undergraduate posters. Congratulations are due to the winners, Jeff Gruenewald and Jason Belcher, for their outstanding posters. Gruenewald won in the Graduate Poster Division with his poster titled, "Ideologically Motivated Homicide Incidents and Participants in the United States, 1990-2007."
He is a START Pre-doctoral Fellow at Michigan State University, mentored by START researchers Steven Chermak and Joshua Freilich. Jason Belcher took home the prize in the Undergraduate Poster Division with his poster titled, "The Spatial Concentration and Patterns of Terrorism in Colombia (1977-1997): A Geographic Analysis of the FARC and Other Left-Wing Terrorists." Belcher is a student at the University of Maryland, mentored by Brandon Behlendorf and Gary LaFree. Belcher and Gruenewald both received awards of $250 for their excellent work.
Runners-up for the Graduate Division were Rebecca Carter's "Religion in the Lived Experience of Disasters" and James Hendrickson's "Just 'A Bunch of Guys'? Testing the Sageman Theory of the Etiology of Terrorism." In the Undergraduate Division, runners-up were Catherine Kramer's "Relationship Between the Level of Gender Equality and Female Participation in Terrorist Groups" and Sterling Raehtz' "Geographic Profiling of Crimes Committed by Domestic Right-Wing Extremist Groups in the United States, 1990-2006." START would like to thank the panel of judges from START's Executive Committee and Researchers for their participation in the contest.