Each semester, UROP awards the prestigious Douglas S. Yamamura Scholarship to the Project funding recipients with the best reviewed STEM andor non-STEM Project. The scholarship was established with a generous endowment from the estate of Paul T. Yamamura to support scholarly work at UH Mānoa, and preference is given to undergraduate students who have graduated from a high school in Hawai‘i.

Shawna Takaki

The Summer 2025 Douglas S. Yamamura Scholarship for a non-STEM project was awarded to Shawna Takaki (English major). Her project, “Margery Kempe: Religion, Desire, and Violence,” examines “the representation of religious devotion, sexual desire, and violence, including self-harm and social ostracization in two texts: Margery Kempe’s fifteenth-century book (The Book of Margery Kempe), long considered the first autobiography by a woman in English, and the queer writer Robert Glück’s 1994 novel Margery Kempe, which weaves together a re-telling of Kempe’s life with the depiction of an erotic affair between two men.” Takaki further explained, “Using queer/trans theories, I plan to examine the ways that desire, including religious desires, can transgender and queer sexuality, both past and present.”

Ruby Helmuth

The Summer 2025 Douglas S. Yamamura Scholarship from a STEM project was awarded to Ruby Helmuth (Global Environmental Science major). Her project, “Influence of Fireworks on Trace-Metal Concentrations in the Coastal Waters of Waikiki,” explores how firework displays over Hawai‘i’s coastal waters affect the levels of trace metals in the water. Helmuth shared, “This project will analyze seawater samples collected before and after the show to evaluate its impact on metal concentrations in Waikīkī’s nearshore waters.”