USD's Venkatesh Kolluru and Justin Gray Honored with 2025 Distinguished Dissertation Awards
The dissertation awards are presented annually to doctoral students who, in the opinion of the award committee, have completed dissertations representing original work that makes an unusually significant contribution to their disciplines. The Council of Graduate Schools allots the Distinguished Dissertation Awards in two of four categories that alternate every two years.
Kolluru has been selected as the recipient in the category of Biological Sciences and Life Sciences for his dissertation manuscript, “Regional and Landscape Scale Examination and Attribution of Vegetation Changes to Social-Environmental System Drivers in Kazakhstan.”
“I’m honored to receive the 2025 USD Distinguished Dissertation Award for my research developing advanced methods to track vegetation changes and create detailed datasets for ecosystem monitoring in Kazakhstan,” said Kolluru. “This recognition reflects countless hours of fieldwork, data analysis, and the incredible support from my advisor, Ranjeet John, committee and USD faculty.”
Moving forward, Kolluru plans to expand his research through his current position as a research scientist with NASA Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Alabama.
Gray has been selected as the recipient of the award in the category of Humanities and Fine Arts for his dissertation, “Celebration Palms,” a short story cycle consisting of loosely connected stories set within the titular, fictional city in his home state of Florida.
“I am humbled that my work was selected for this award,” said Gray. “I composed these stories to examine how the narratives we construct for our lives contain the potential to both actualize our ambitions, as well as inhibit our abilities to follow through on those ambitions, depending on the corrosiveness of the life-narratives we construct. As a graduate of USD, I hold my professors and fellow students in high regard.”
Each year, the USD winners are nominated and if selected will travel to the CGS Annual Meeting to represent the university and accept the award. This year’s meeting will be held in December 2025.
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