Wellspring Symposium shines a light on student research

By Chuck Gordon

As a kid, Tori Smith remembers staying indoors while her classmates went outside to play during allergy season. "My allergies were so bad," she says. "I would rub my eyes until they swelled shut. I couldn't breathe."

As a Wingate undergraduate student majoring in public health, Smith jumped at the chance to dive deeper into allergies and their effects on people's mental health for a major class project. She and her co-researcher, fellow junior Cassandra Silva, investigated, through literature reviews, how allergies lead to brain fog, mood swings, tiredness, depression - maybe even a little mild trauma from missing out on recess.

Smith and Silva were among the 135 students who presented their findings during the biannual Wellspring Symposium on Tuesday and Wednesday. Attendees had their choice of 40 oral presentations and 54 poster presentations to listen to. All presentations were made in the Ethel K. Smith Library.

The Symposium has grown considerably over the past few years. In 2022, it was split into spring and fall events, in order to accommodate the increase in research emphasis on campus and the incorporation of graduate-student projects. About 70 students participated in the fall of 2024.

The presentations run the gamut from monthslong, full-time summer-research projects funded by Reeves grants to Honors College capstones to intensive class projects. The opportunities to do deeper investigations into topics of interest have grown in number over the years.

Dr. Brett Schofield, an assistant professor of biology, turns some of his labs into de facto research projects. Schofield, who is taking over as coordinator of undergraduate research (and will therefore be in charge of the Wellspring Symposium this fall), is a huge proponent of giving students research opportunities, though he emphasizes that, at Wingate, the motivation is student development, not medical breakthroughs or the securing of sizable research grants.

"I view research as a mentoring and pedagogical tool first," Schofield says. "It's delightful when new knowledge tumbles out of that, but it's really about training these students."

In his undergraduate days at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., Schofield studied protein in yeast cells. He loved it, and it helped persuade him to go to graduate school and later to teach. "In some ways it still informs the things that I care about as a faculty member and why I've been so active in involving undergraduates in research, because it was so transformative for me," he says.

Grace Burrell, a senior psychology major, used her Honors College capstone project to help prepare her for her eventual career as a clinical psychologist focusing on addiction. She researched treatments for a wide range of substance-use disorders.

Some of her findings surprised her.

"I expected to find one form of treatment that was the most successful," Burrell says, "but it was so varied that the only really successful way was when people combined quite a few different treatments, like cognitive therapy, medication and peer groups."

After graduation next month, Burrell plans to take a year off of school to get clinical experience in her native England before starting a Ph.D. program. As with Schofield, she has been spurred by her undergraduate experience to research further.

"I think I'm going to want to research certain things myself, because there's so many gaps with the current research," she says. "It's made me realize I want to do my own research."

About a quarter of the presenters during the Wellspring Symposium this week were graduate students, such as Mohamed Algalazi, a second-year student in the School of Pharmacy. Algalazi conducted a literature review about the unregulated opioid tianeptine, an over-the-counter antidepressant that has been referred to as "gas-station heroin."

Algalazi discovered in his research that the number of toxicology reports filed in the U.S. regarding tianeptine skyrocketed from fewer than 20 total in the years 2000 to 2013 to more than 150 in 2020 alone.

"With social media and the spread of information in our age, the effects of Tianeptine have just spread like wildfire," he says.

Algalazi did his research as an extra elective, during March and April. He says it will benefit him in a few years when he's an established pharmacist because it reinforces the skills needed to do the job on a daily basis.

"In the pharmacy field, that's what we do: literature," he says. "You need evidence for everything. Every decision you make, whether you're in a clinical setting or a retail setting, is backed by literature, so getting to go through all this literature, getting accustomed to the different ways to test things in the pharmacy field, helped me develop as a student."

That, Schofield says, is the point of doing research at Wingate.

"At an R1 (Research 1) institution, their primary goals are to find results, publish papers, get more grants," he says. "If it helps students, Well, I guess that's good too. For us, those things of publishing papers and all that stuff, that's the 'if that happens, that's good too.' We do research here, but it's in service of training students."

A number of awards were presented at the close of the Symposium on Wednesday afternoon:

Outstanding Poster Presentation Award for Undergraduate Students

• Kevin Rusu, senior, marketing - Moldova: Geopolitical Influence in the Past, Present, and Future.
• Lilyana Wilson, senior, public health - Emergency Preparedness: The Effectiveness of Functional Access and Needs Registry.
• Madeline Hicks, senior, biology - Are Bacillus sp. the Bacterial Solution to Heavy Metal Pollution?

Outstanding Oral Presentation Awards for Undergraduate Students

• La-Nay Distin, senior, biology - Dead Muscles Tell No Tales, But Hemocytes Do: Unraveling the Role Hemocytes Play in Flight Muscle Histolysis.
• Gabriela Silva, senior, religion and philosophy - Black Churches Advocating for Changes in Education.

Outstanding Presentation Awards for Graduate Students

• The following six pharmacy students all presented the same winning poster: Tanner Barnhill, Noredys Casasnovas, Hamees Fahmy, Jordyn Jackson, Chasidy Reese and Taelor Valentin - Assessing the Impact of Digital Mobile Screen Time Usage on Psychological Well-being Among Adults.

Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year

• Katie Knop, assistant professor of sociology.

Graduate Research Mentor of the Year

• Lisa Dinkins, associate professor of pharmacy.

Learn more about undergraduate research at Wingate.

April 24, 2025