SJSU Student Research Day Showcases Student Projects Across Multiple Disciplines

Out on the breezeway of Duncan Hall, Student Research Day is in full swing. Around 250 students stand in front of mounted posterboards as they present in-depth research spanning countless topics.

Fragments of sentences including words like "disease-associated mutations" and "fermionic neural quantum states" can be heard drifting through the outdoor space. There is a palpable kind of energy in the air, as the students, who represent every department of the College of Science, showcase their findings.

This is what happened at the 21st annual Student Research Day, which occurred this past Spring on Friday, April 17.

"For most students, this is the first time they've presented their research," says Roy Okuda, who has been teaching organic chemistry at SJSU for the past 36 years.

Okuda has been organizing Student Research Day for the last two decades. And in that time, a total of 1,425 research posters have been presented by what is estimated to be around a few thousand students.

The initial spark that led to hosting the event happened in 2001. Okuda was asked to be part of a focus group for an international science fair that year. The fair was set to happen at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center and would bring together 1,200 high school students from all over the world.

Leading up to the fair, Okuda and other members of the community came together to speak about their experiences.

"I got to meet a lot of people I wouldn't have otherwise met," says Okuda. "I told them I taught at San José State. And from those conversations, I saw that they all thought that very little, if any, research happened at SJSU."

Okuda was astounded. He knew for a fact that the university was doing a lot of great research. Each and every academic year, he saw the rigorous research that his students - and other students across the College of Science - were producing.

"In those days, there just wasn't a lot of communication about all the kinds of research that was happening on campus," says Okuda.

He was determined to do something about it.

For the past several decades, those in the scientific field have engaged in poster sessions to present their research findings at meetings and conferences all over the world. Okuda drew on this idea to launch Student Research Day in 2005, inviting students to create posters for presenting their research to the community.

Since then, the event has been going strong every year, except for 2020, when Covid hit.

The first event started with 36 posters. In 2009, the event hit 100 posters - the maximum the space can accommodate - and has remained at capacity ever since.

"Putting this on every year is a major effort," says Okuda. "Research has really grown here in the last 20 years in the College of Science, so there are more and more people involved. And as we hire new faculty members, they're all research-active in a broad range of fields."

The creation of Student Research Day also paved the way for the launching of the annual SJSU Research Week back in 2022.

"The College of Science Student Research Day is an amazing opportunity for our faculty, staff and students to come together to learn about each other's discoveries," says Miri VanHoven, who serves as associate dean for research. "It speaks directly to our college's motto, creating knowledge, and expanding opportunity. We are so grateful to Dr. Okuda for all he has done to inspire our student researchers over his years of service."

Melody Esfandiari, '08 Chemistry, has been teaching Chemistry 1A at San José State since 2012. When she was a student at SJSU, Okuda was her organic chemistry teacher. She remembers being a part of the first Student Research Day; for her project, she delved into research on lanthanide, one of the elements at the bottom of the periodic table.

"Over the years, this event has definitely evolved. I remember meeting a lot of other students from other departments. This is an event that really brings people together. And so many more students are doing research now than before," says Esfandiari.

At this past Student Research Day, Sahil Atul Mhatre, '26 MS Computer Science, spoke of his project, which was focused on improving the systems that recommend items to users across various platforms, like those found in social media and e-commerce.

"I built a knowledge graph to capture semantic embedding and using hypergraphs to capture higher order interaction data to see how to get better embeddings," says Mhatre.

There was also a group of students who worked on research that involves finding the origin of life on earth by way of extraterrestrial analysis. One of the students who conducted the research, Irfan Jarkas, '26 Biochemistry, feels that their discoveries had so many implications, which could lead to further research in the future.

"We're astrobiologists, and we're interested in finding the origin of life. What has been useful to us has been looking at meteorites for data. It's been known for decades that meteorites contain biologically relevant molecules, like amino acids and sugars," says Jarkas. "So we used this data to show that reactions similar to biological metabolism happened on these meteorites, and they could have landed on earth and enriched it with the necessary molecules to start life."

Another group of students looked into evaluating the relationship between the year a home was built and its wildfire mitigation status, using what's known as generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMM). Data was collected from field surveys from 176 homes that are located in several communities in California.

"The amazing thing is that we actually did the models with a large amount of messy data. And we somehow found a way to analyze it all and build the models. And we built the stimulations on top of that," says Doris Zhang, MS '26 Statistics. "We came to the conclusion that increasing more sites is more effective than increasing houses per site."

Zhang coded the stimulation in just a week - a feat that her advisor says would take many other graduate students an entire semester to accomplish.

This year's Student Research Day was Okuda's last as an organizer. He has been working to transition the coordination of the event to new faculty, and is looking forward to enjoying the event as a guest in the years to come.

"This is the largest event on campus that celebrates student success in research. I know we're just one college, but we have so many students here from all the different departments and even students from all over the university who come to do research here," says Okuda. "Every year, all of the students who've been a part of Student Research Day have been so proud and happy to share all the work they've done."