Spark! Symposium showcases four big questions driving graduate research at UD

The spring 2026 University of Delaware Graduate College Spark! Symposium, themed "New Frontiers: Discoveries Across Health, Society and the Galaxy," highlighted four graduate students whose research offers insights with the potential to drive meaningful change. Designed to help UD graduate students communicate their work to audiences beyond academia, the Spark! Symposium underscores their essential role in advancing knowledge and addressing real-world challenges through discovery.

Here are the four big questions explored at the symposium and the graduate students behind them:

1. What if a simple concept could move us away from the brink of conflict?

Brooke Molokach, a doctoral student in communication, studies whether intellectual humility - the willingness to acknowledge we might be wrong - can reduce forms of "us versus them" thinking that encourage support for political violence and offer an off-ramp to political extremism.

Her research tests whether simple, scalable interventions designed to build intellectual humility can reduce dehumanization. Citing survey research that shows the acceptance of political violence in the United States has risen sharply in recent years, increasing from roughly one-fifth of Americans in 2024 to closer to one-third less than a year later, Molokach explained why the stakes are high.

"When you hear about political violence on the news, you hear words like political polarization, hostility, animus, hatred … but the real villain is dehumanization," she said. Dehumanization facilitates cruelty toward opponents and drives support for violence, a cycle that intellectual humility could help disrupt.