Thirty-one graduate students receive awards at the 2026 Graduate Exhibition

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Thirty-one Penn State graduate students earned awards at the 2026 Graduate Exhibition, hosted by the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School on Friday, March 27, on the University Park campus.

The Graduate Exhibition is the premier annual community showcase for graduate student research, scholarship and creative activity across the University. Graduate students from all Penn State campuses are invited to create an exhibit to explain their scholarship and its impact in five minutes or less to a general audience. Exhibits can take the form of a research presentation poster, video, design explanation poster, art piece (open to students pursuing degrees in the visual arts only) or musical performance (open to School of Music students only).

Community volunteers serve as judges, evaluating student exhibits and presentations, and providing feedback to help them communicate complex topics to a non-specialist audience more effectively.

Awards are presented to the judges' highest-scoring student projects in each of the Graduate Exhibition's categories and subcategories. In addition, the University Libraries sponsors a data visualization award, and the Graduate and Professional Student Association funds a People's Choice Award in both the Performance and Visual Arts categories.

Recipients from this year's event, whose abstracts can be found on the Graduate Exhibition website, are:

Design Category

• First Place: Marta Siverio Hernandez, Theatre, "Designing the Unsettling: A Set and Puppet Design for Rhinoceros"
• Second Place: Sarah Bidini, Theatre, "Manifesting Memory: The Scenic Design of A MORRIS AND ESSEX LINE"
• Third Place: Blake James, Theatre, "Traditional Vs. Transgender Tailoring: Proportional Drafting Systems and Gender-Queer Individuals"

Performance Category

• First Place: Dor Amran, Conducting, "Saint Saens- Introduction & Rondo Capriccioso op. 28- Performed on the Mandolin"
• Second Place: Eunmi Hwang, Performance and Pedagogy, "Melody of Liberation: Integrating History and Modernity in Korean Art Song"
• Third Place: Ziyi Ji, Piano Performance, "First Movement of Brahms's Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34"
• People's Choice: Dor Amran, Conducting, "Saint Saens- Introduction & Rondo Capriccioso op. 28- Performed on the Mandolin"

Research Poster: Arts and Humanities

• First Place: Cara Arnoldi, Public Policy, "Navigating Civic Deserts through an Alternative Form of Civic Education"
• Second Place: Amy Orner, Art History, "An Enliven'd Isle: Politics, Class, and Empire, in Edinburgh's New Town, 1752-1802"
• Third Place: Tiffanie Leung, Architecture, "Tailoring Post-Consumer Clothing Waste to Fit Earthbag Construction: Domestic Sewing Practices as Circular Construction Methodology"

Research Poster: Engineering

• First Place: Antara Verma, Biomedical Engineering, "Axonal Transport of Nanoplastics by Kinesin"
• Second Place: Chandima Hevapathiranage, Energy and Mineral Engineering, "Critical mineral extraction from high-temperature geothermal brine"
• Third Place: Mohammad Javad Hassan Zada, Civil Engineering, "Intersection Crash Frequency Analysis via Bayesian Beta-Mixture Negative Binomial Models"

Research Poster: Health and Life Sciences

• First Place: Praveena Prasad, Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences, "Acute Kidney Injury Results in Sex-Specific Disruptions in NAD+ Metabolism and Signaling"
• Second Place: Devansh Gupta, Agricultural and Environmental Plant Science, "Evaluation of Chemical Frost Protection Products for Reducing Spring Freeze Damage in Peach Buds"
• Third Place: Anthony Taylor, Plant Biology, "Defective but promising: evaluating the utility of currently available bioinformatic pipelines for detecting defective viral genomes in RNA-Seq data"

Research Poster: Physical Sciences and Mathematics

• First Place: Vaibhav Pal, Chemistry, "Interparticle Crosslinked Ion-responsive Microgels for 3D and 4D (Bio)printing Applications"
• Second Place: Karli Sipps, Chemistry, "Shapeshifting Ligands Mask Lewis Acidity of Dicationic Palladium (II)"
• Third Place (tie): Kaitlyn Szekerczes, Astronomy and Astrophysics, "The Milky Way Imposters: Binary Stars Mimic Massive Black Hole Systems"
• Third Place (tie): Timothy Meyer, Artificial Intelligence, Penn State Great Valley, "Expected Pressing Success"

Research Poster: Social and Behavioral Sciences

• First Place: Suseel Maddali, Information Systems, Penn State Harrisburg, "A Geo-Spatial Health Equity Decision Intelligence Dashboard for Pennsylvania Hospitals"
• Second Place (tie): Eric San Miguel Flores, Economics, "Population Aging and Hospital Quality: Evidence from Medicare"
• Second Place (tie): Keia Jones, Rural Sociology, "Informality, Governance, and Environmental Harm in Bogotá's Leather Manufacturing Industry"
• Third Place: Elena Koung, Informatics, "Teen Vigilance: Navigating Risky Social Interactions on Discord"

Video Category

• First Place: Shakshi Sekar, Energy and Mineral Engineering, "Comprehensive Material Characterization of Synthetic Graphite from Plastic Waste Using Graphenic Additives"
• Second Place: MD Mashfiqur Rahman, Engineering Science and Mechanics, "How Materials Science Reveals the Hidden Side of Climate Change"
• Third Place: Han Chen, Art History, "Chinese Art en route: Reconstructing Global Knowledge of China in the Art Markets, 1900-1949"

Visual Arts Category

• First Place: Ilze Martinez, Art, "Ya Te Cargo el Payaso / Catch of The Day"
• Second Place: Sarah Gallow, Art, "A Complex Identity Within A Simple System"
• Third Place (tie): Rojina Azadi, Art, "Hero application"
• Third Place (tie): Venus Bayat, Art, "End of the World"
• People's Choice: Ilze Martinez, Art, "Ya Te Cargo el Payaso / Catch of The Day"

Data Visualization Award (Sponsored by the University Libraries)

• First Place: Navdeep Kaur, Agricultural and Environmental Plant Science, "Guiding Nitrogen Application in Corn Using Soil Nitrogen Status, Crop and Weather Data
• Second Place: Praveena Prasad, Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences, "Acute Kidney Injury Results in Sex-Specific Disruptions in NAD+ Metabolism and Signaling"