Congratulations to UTSC student Bavan Pushpalingam, who has won two global undergraduate awards in the world’s leading academic awards program for undergraduate research.
The Global Undergraduate Awards (GUA), often described as the “Junior Nobel Prize” for students, recognizes exceptional undergraduate research across disciplines worldwide, through a rigorous anonymous review by expert academics and consists of global winners, regional winners and highly commended. The best ten per cent of submissions are highly commended, regional winners are the highest-performing highly commended entrants from a GUA region in their category, and the top submission in each category is deemed the Global Winner and awarded the Thomas Clarkson Gold Medal. Following an extensive judging process, the winners were selected from over 2,400 submissions spanning 348 universities in 99 countries across 25 categories. This year, Bavan, a fourth-year Public Policy student at the University of Toronto Scarborough, pursuing minors in Food Studies and Urban Governance was named the Global Winner in two categories: Politics & International Relations and Social Sciences: Anthropology & Cultural Studies, the first time any student has received this distinction in multiple categories.
Of his win he said: "Being named the first-ever student to win in two categories at the Global Undergraduate Awards is not simply a recognition of my work—it is a recognition of the memory, resistance, and resilience carried by Tamil communities and so many others navigating histories of displacement and marginalization. These are not my stories alone. They are the stories of my Amma and Appa, who survived war and genocide; of Tamil women farmers whose everyday labour and wisdom co-theorize my research; and of the Scarborough community that continues to shape how I think and act. My work at the intersection of food security and sovereignty, gendered labour, social reproduction, memory activism, and Tamil studies is guided by these collective struggles. Conducting research across Scarborough, Sri Lanka, India, Ghana, and Mexico has shown me that knowledge emerges from communities themselves. To see this honoured on a global stage affirms that scholarship can be accountable, relational, and rooted in justice rather than extraction."
Global Winners are invited to present their work at the annual Global Undergraduate Summit in November in Dublin, and their papers are published in the program’s open-access Undergraduate Library.