Students share research at annual Undergraduate Exhibition
Hundreds of students participated in the 2025 Undergraduate Exhibition, both online from April 14-16 and in person at the HUB-Robeson Center at Penn State University Park, on April 16.
The annual Undergraduate Exhibition welcomes students from all academic disciplines to present and be judged on their research. For some students, the exhibition is their first opportunity to present their research to someone unfamiliar with it, a crucial skill in many disciplines and professions. It’s also the culmination of countless hours spent in the field, lab or studio, in collaboration with others or in solitary work.
Kaden Kelly-Pojar, of Warren, presented his research on the formation and evolution of exoplanets, conducted with the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. Kelly-Pojar’s work centers around the creation of models for the simulation of exoplanet systems, based on observations made by the Kepler Space Telescope of multi-planet systems. For his research project, he and his co-researchers simulated 100 exoplanet systems. The size of each “embryo” planet is determined by flow isolation, and each simulation represents 30 million years. They can observe how big these planets would likely become and how those planets then fall into different orbits.
Kelly-Pojar said undergraduate research cemented his college and future plans, and that when he started doing research last summer, he fell in love with it. He said he enjoys the opportunity to make a discovery that no one else has.
“Here at Penn State, we are making tangible progress towards revolutionizing our understanding of both the solar system and systems around other stars and how they formed and how they got to be like what we see them today,” he said.
Many students have followed a path of inquiry driven by their interests, sometimes dating back through primary and secondary school. Kelly-Pojar said as a child he was fascinated by the idea of aliens. As he entered Penn State, he became interested in the emerging scholarship on exoplanets, which have only been observed in the last few decades.
For others, their academic work and research is connected to something of paramount importance to them, their families and loved ones. Victor Latsanych, of Kyiv, Ukraine, is a Penn State senior majoring in international relations with a minor in business. His research focuses on the assessment of psychological and behavioral effects of war on university students, based on data from the national 2022-23 Healthy Minds Study, which surveyed 76,000 college students across the U.S. on mental health, substance use and academic performance. Students were grouped by national origin in the survey.
Latsanych said he divided up students into three groups: domestic students from the U.S., international students from countries at peace and international students from countries of conflict. He then ran models to examine the data, and looked at depression, anxiety, smoking frequency, alcohol abuse and academic impact due to emotional and mental well-being. Some findings were contradictory to his hypothesis: Students from countries of conflict reported the lowest levels of depression, anxiety and smoking frequency. However, they did report the highest amounts of alcohol abuse and the highest academic impact due to mental and emotional distress compared to their international peers. Latsanych said there were many factors at play, such as to whom students are comparing themselves when they respond to the survey and the general nature of self-reporting.
“I write off a lot of the depression and anxiety values being lower due to the fact that their perception of their personal depression and/or anxiety is considerably lower because they're not comparing to their peers at their institution,” he said. “They're more so comparing to their peers at home.”
He went on to explain that what he finds to be the true metric is the academic impact, because it indirectly signals to these students that there is an impact due to their emotional state. Latsanych said he hopes to conduct his own survey that addresses these specific issues.
Undergraduate research experiences often change a student’s trajectory. Loren Foster, of Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, is a fourth-year biology major with a minor in global health and a Millenium Scholar. Foster said she initially wanted to go straight to medical school, but undergraduate research and her minor in global health has led her to pursue a master’s in global health and consider a path to a doctorate in epidemiology.
Her research looked at the effects of chronic adolescent stress on the SOCS3 gene expression, which has been associated with depressive- and anxiety-like behaviors and disorders, in mice.
“Overall, we saw no significant difference,” she said. “However, obviously, this is research that we want to continue doing, because adolescents, if they do get exposed to a lot of stressful events early in life, it can later mean having greater chances of having depressive and anxiety like disorders. ... I found this research very interesting, and it's something I'd like to continue to do, mixing bio, behavioral health, global health and epidemiology. Research has changed my perspective and made it clear that there's a lot more than just primary care.”
Awards announced for Undergraduate Exhibition
Some awards carry cash prizes.
Gerard A. Hauser Award, top presentation
- Jacob Orrico, “Characterizing protein-peptide binding affinity using isothermal titration calorimetry”
Arts and Humanities
- First place: Julia Matthews, “Weavers of Fate: Women's Work in the Viking Age”
- Second place: Xuanming Zhang, “Rendering a Chinese Classic for Western Audiences: An Initial Exploration of Translating ‘Tales of the Water Margi’”
Business and Entrepreneurship
- First place: Olivia Karoly, “Economic Anchors, Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, and Entrepreneurship in Regional Pennsylvania”
Engineering
- First place: Elisabeth Aliftiras, “Aspiration-assisted 3D Bioprinting of Cultured Mammalian Cell Spheroids In Vitro”
- Second place: Zachary Badinger, “Purification of Precipitated Monoclonal Antibodies via Tangential Flow Filtration: Process Optimization of Particle Morphology and Module Geometry”
- Third place: Khushi Patel, “Enhancing Performance in Classifying Insect Bites Across Diverse Skin Tones Using Transfer Learning and Task Arithmetic”
Health and Life Sciences
- First place: Natalie Meriwether, “Dietary Strategies as Mediators of Food Security and Nutritional Status During Severe Drought Among Daasanach Pastoralists in Northern Kenya, 2019-2024"
- Second place, tied:
- Damini Nair, “Adolescent Oral Contraceptive Use Decreases Ethanol Consumption in a Rodent Binge Drinking Model”
- Melinda Jin: “Adenylosuccinate Synthetase is Involved in Mobility and Mechanosensation in Caenorhabditis elegans”
- Thomas Quinn, “The Role of Kat60L1 in Neuronal Microtubule Maintenance”
Physical Sciences
- First place: Luc Schrauf, “Installation of low temperature transimpedance amplifiers to improve the performance of a scanning tunneling microscope”
- Second place: Maria Giarrusso, “Assessing the Dynamic Soil-Stream Interface at Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory Using Steel Bar IRIS Devices to Detect Anaerobic Soil Conditions”
- Third place: Aristea Alexopoulos, “Supermassive Black Holes: The Hidden Influencers in Massive Galaxies”
Social and Behavioral
- First place: Ryley Runk, “Accented Speech Comprehension of Polish-English Bilinguals”
- Second place: Jessica Firestone, “The Conditional Relationship Between Trumpism, Patriotism, and Support for the Right to Protest: A Quantitative Study of Center County Resident”
- Third place: Ruarai Field-Gibson “How Perceived Stress, Depressive Symptoms, and Demographic Characteristics within, can predict Exercise Class Selection among College Students”
Peter T. Luckie Awards
- STEM: Alexa Adams, “Impact of Temporal Variability on Soil Health: The Role of Frequent POXC Assessments”
- Life and Health: Skyler Tan, “Identifying Sex Specific Markers in Early Stages of Plasmodium Falciparum Using Single Cell Transcriptomics”
- Social and Behavioral: Connor McMahon, “Education's Role In Our Elections"
Information Literacy Awards, University Libraries
- Grand prize: Paige Fino, “’Pura Vida’ — An Exploration of the One Health Impacts from Costa Rica’s Conservation Programs”
- First place: Dalimar Flores-Torres, “The Implications of Large Language Model Integration on Bias in Lending Practices”
- Second place: Isaac Gray, “Model Membranes with Cardiolipin as the Major Component”
- Third place: Lucas Beddick, “Self-Compassion as a Predictor of Tendencies for Prosocial Behavior”
Honorable mentions:
- Jacob Kohler, “Exploring the Protein-Binding Interactions of ES9S in Stage-Specific Plasmodium Ribosomes”
- Abigail Silberman, “Feasibility of Online Group Cycling Program for People with Aphasia”
- Natalie Meriwether, “Dietary Strategies as Mediators of Food Security and Nutritional Status During Severe Drought Among Daasanach Pastoralists in Northern Kenya, 2019-2024"
- Gabrielle Mu, “Deviance Among Latine Youth: The Role of Neighborhood Characteristics and Ethnic-Racial Socialization”
Data Visualization Awards, University Libraries
- First place: Ryan Gelman, “Investigating the Use of ara-Uracil as a Drug Treatment of ADSL Deficiency”
- Second place: Adrian Chen, “Oxidative stress impact on Kinesin KIF1A structure and function”
Honorable mentions:
- Adam Lieb, “Structural Characterization of P. falciparum wild-type and H2A.Z/H2B.V nucleosomes”
- Melinda Jin, “Adenylosuccinate Synthetase is Involved in Mobility and Mechanosensation in Caenorhabditis elegans”
How to participate in the Undergraduate Exhibition
Applications for the annual Undergraduate Exhibition, held each April, typically open in February. Undergraduate Research and Fellowships Mentoring offers workshops to help students prepare for academic exhibitions.
The Undergraduate Exhibition is coordinated by Penn State Undergraduate Education.