Wertheim Prize winners announced
Jul 1, 2025
1 min read
Updated: Aug 6, 2025
The Wertheim Prize is awarded each year at the AAALS conference for the best paper by a graduate student. Al Wertheim was the first AAALS member to bring his graduate students to an AAALS conference.
The following co-winners were announced at the 2025 AAALS conference in Honolulu, Hawai`i:
Sayantika Mandal, University of Georgia
Pumehana Holmes, University of Hawai`i, Mānoa
Please join us in congratulating them on their outstanding scholarship! We look forward to seeing how their careers develop from here.
Sayantika Mandal and Pumehana Holmes sharing the Wertheim Prize in Honolulu makes me remember my own first conference paper. Al Wertheim was the first AAALS member to bring graduate students along, so I copied that with my student; it backfired until we used a few of the better AI tools for literature review. Would the co-winners say the same?
Graduate program coordinators and first-time AAALS presenters should note the Wertheim Prize’s eligibility: one graduate-student paper, judged at the annual conference. Sayantika Mandal and Pumehana Holmes show the payoff. For organizing drafts, deadlines, and advisor feedback before Honolulu-style meetings, worksheet templates for conference paper planning can keep the paper on track. Al Wertheim’s original push to bring students along matters here.
It's nice to see Al Wertheim's legacy mentioned alongside the winners—especially that he was the first AAALS member to bring grad students to the conference. I still remember scraping together funds for my first grad conference, and even calculating travel costs felt like a second research project. Congrats to Sayantika and Pumehana; those early conference papers really shape a career.
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