Each year, SIGDOC conducts a competition for the "Best Graduate Student" submission. The award consists of...

• Subsidized travel and registration for the SIGDOC conference
• Paper published in the conference proceedings
• A featured time slot at the conference to present your research

The Program Committee received a record number of submissions this year for the Graduate Student Competition, and all student papers were very strong. This year, the Program Committee selected as winner the paper, "Rhetorical Models for Computational Systems: An interdisciplinary approach to reusable tailorable medical information." This paper was co-authored by Ashley R. Kelly, Allan McDougall, and Nike Abbott:

Ashley R. Kelly is a second-year Masters student in the Rhetoric and Communication Design program in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Her primary research has been in the area of the rhetoric of science, in particular science popularizations. Other areas of interest include new and digital media studies as well as technical communication. Ashley is currently interning at Research in Motion as a technical writer.

Allan McDougall recently completed his Masters degree in English Literature at the University of Waterloo. His thesis, "A Sociocognitive Theory of Literary Reading," focused on the potentially rehabilitative function of reading literature. Allan has also been analyzing medical discourse on transcripts of end-of-life psychotherapeutic interventions between doctors and palliative care patients.

Nike Abbott is also a second-year Masters student in the Rhetoric and Communication Design program at the University of Waterloo. Her research interests include both literary and rhetoric studies. Nike's research focus is satire and irony comprehension as described through cognitive rhetoric.

Read more about SIGDOC's Graduate Student Competition.