UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State undergraduate researchers made the 2026 Undergraduate Exhibition one of the biggest events in recent years, with more than 330 total presenters.
The annual Undergraduate Exhibition for Research, Inquiry, and Creative Activity, held April 20-22, invited students from all academic fields to showcase their work. Each poster and presentation represented the many hours spent in the lab, studio, field or at a computer, as well as significant mentoring by faculty, staff and graduate students to help undergraduates develop the skills to succeed in further schooling or industry. Students were judged on their posters and presentations by volunteers, and those with the highest average scores in each category were recognized with awards, some of which come with a cash prize.
The virtual exhibition was open for three days starting on April 20. Then, student researchers, judges, friends and family packed Alumni Hall in the HUB-Robeson Center for the April 22 in-person sessions. Research interests were as diverse as sentiment analysis of student teaching evaluations, the impact of a community cycling program or studying mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in younger adults.
Braeden Joyce, who is pursuing a bachelor of science in nursing, presented his research which looked at a case study of a 44-year-old man with MCI. He said that only 3% of adults under 60 years old are affected by MCI, compared to 6.7% of people in their 60s and 25.2% in their 80s. So, while MCI rates do increase with age, it is often dismissed as normal aging. Joyce and his research team looked at the case of the 44-year-old, who experienced sudden cognitive decline, depression and suicidal ideation while on vacation and was ultimately diagnosed with multiple sclerosis after evaluation.
“The best thing to do is just make sure you have regular appointments with a neurologist or your primary care provider, so that you can recognize those symptoms as early as possible, and so that you could find the underlying cause, treat the underlying cause,” he said.
Joyce said he’s interested in critical care and plans to work in an intensive care unit after graduation. He became involved in undergraduate research during his second year through an adviser. He explained that the group had diverse interests like geriatrics and home health, and they wanted to find something that intersected with those topics.
Victor Sandoval, Jenna Moranelli and Matthew Diamonds are information technology students who traveled from Penn State Greater Allegheny to present their project on integrating augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into curriculum to help students transition from high school to college, especially those affected by COVID-19. While initially focused on IT and cybersecurity students for interview practice, it expanded to include internship prep and biology courses. In the biology course, for example, students can interact with a virtual kidney, and an instructor can lecture alongside that.
Moranelli explained that both she and Sandoval were in their first year of high school when COVID-19 began. She took dual enrollment courses and had an idea of what college-level work was like, which led her to wonder if she could help others adjust to college. A few things they tried didn’t seem to produce the results they were looking for, when staff and faculty at Greater Allegheny came together and suggested VR.
“They saw that there was a trend of people using these in classrooms and high schools,” Moranelli said. “There was very little studies with colleges. So, that's why we started out small and said, ‘Well, let's do what high schools are doing. They’re doing internship prep. How about we have them do interviews or maybe talk about themselves?’”
Alan Rieck, associate vice provost for undergraduate education, said the exhibition reflects a research culture built on the work of students and their mentors.
“Our undergraduate research culture remains strong. That’s due to our outstanding students and their many mentors who provide opportunities for young scholars,” Rieck said. “We hear all the time that undergraduate research experiences, in all fields, have a massive impact on students’ future plans. It’s our hope to keep expanding those opportunities and the support structures needed to create them.”
Awards
Gerard A. Hauser Award, top presentation
The winner of the Gerard A. Hauser Award for the top presentation was Kaitlyn Ventre in the social and behavioral sciences category for the project “Neighborhood Deprivation and Crime Exposure as Predictors of Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms in Early School-Aged Children.”
Peter T. Luckie Award for Outstanding Juniors, $250 each
The Peter T. Luckie Award for Outstanding Juniors is sponsored by Undergraduate Research and Fellowships Mentoring and the Penn State Chapter of Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society. The award recognizes an outstanding junior entry in three areas.
STEM: Elise Beishline, “Designing the RF Switching System for PBR Ground Calibration”
Life and Health: Aine McCann, “Dendrite Regeneration in Drosophila”
Social and Behavioral: Megan McQuaid, Kassandra Marin, “PLAY Project: How Does Infant 'Play Behavior' Change Within 12,18, and 24 Months?”
Arts and Humanities
First Place
Second Place
- Rachel Xue, “Examining Retributive Justice: Does it Have Merit?”
- Lianna Gardner, Javier Werner, Aiden Thornton, Ryan Kiyak,“Bamboo Solutions for Self-Sustainability in the Amphibious Community of Claverito, Peru”
Business and Entrepreneurship
First Place
Janet Ruiz, “Gender Differences of Perceived Barriers of Participating in Innovation Competition Programs (ICPs)”
Second Place
Kayla Funk, “Panama's Strategic Geographic Position in Global Supply Chains”
Engineering
First Place
Braden Love, “Laser-Powder Bed Fusion of Scalmalloy for Aviation and Aerospace Applications”
Second Place
Vidyut Sriram, “Tool-Guided Retrieval-Augmented Repair for Securing LLM-Generated C Code”
Third Place
Keshav Khandelwal, Viraj Mishra, Nitish Reddy Molakatalla, “Designing and Evaluating a Prompt-Injection-Resilient LLM Agent Using a Dual-Model Authorization Layer”
Health and Life Sciences
First Place
Ashley Booth, “Towards Real-Time and Autonomous Tuning of Cell Therapies”
Second Place
- Marissa Palau, “Management of Spotted Lantern-flies with Milkweed”
- Aratrika Chakrabarti, “Phyllosphere Microbiome Profiling of Spearmint (Mentha spicata)”
Physical Sciences
First Place
Maxfield Chan, project title withheld
Second Place
Neha Dushyantha Kumar, “The Role of Intrinsic Temperature and Vertical Mixing in Characterizing Sub-Neptune Atmospheres”
Third Place
Sloan Householder, “The Effect of Cover Crop Mixture Seeding Rates on Soil Particulate Organic Matter Dynamics”
Social and Behavioral
First Place
Victor Sandoval, “Enhancing Information Technology and Cybersecurity Student Communication Skills through Immersive AR/VR and AI-Driven Simulations Using VirtualSpeech”
Second Place
Lian Al Damluji, “Factors Influencing Patient Decision-Making to Decline Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson’s Disease”
Third Place
Sofia Folino, Kyle Obdzinski, Naiya Mody, Vinay Saraiya, “Differences in Alcohol-Induced Blackout Experiences By Parent Injunctive Norms”
University Libraries Information Literacy Awards
Grand Prize
Suryansh Sijwali, "Partial-Credit RL for Reliable Code Generation with Small Language Models"
First Prize
Katie Scott, "Transcriptional Repression of a Chemoreceptor by Quorum-Sensing Regulator Inhibits Host Colonization"
Second Prize
Aratrika Chakrabarti, "Why Eligibility Doesn’t Guarantee Access: Insurance Gaps in U.S. Veteran Health Care"
Third Prize
Jessica Sutton, "Eye-Gaze Data to Support Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) Development for Children with Multiple Disabilities"
Honorable Mention
- Massimo Ragonese, "Sugar Accumulation of Arabidopsis thaliana in Response to Cold Stress"
- Thy Nguyen, "Image-based unitization and associative memory retrieval in older adults: An fMRI study"
- James Appelgrijn, "Men in Tights to Gritty Gods: How Audience's Values Have Shaped Superheroes in Cinema, 1950-Present Day"
- Damini Nair, "Effects of Oral Hormonal Contraceptives on Alcohol Use Behavior and Ovarian Function"
Data Visualization Awards
- First place: Thy Nguyen, "Image-based unionization and associative memory retrieval in older adults: an fMRI study"
- Second Place: Quinn Burnett, "Distinct sourdough microbiomes alter FODMAPs of final breads"
- Honorable Mention: Ciara Garvey, "Investigating the Role of Centric Chromatin in Neuronal Microtubule Regulation"