Campus & Community A&S Students Shine at Annual Undergraduate Research Festival

From left to right, Julia Bruno, Katie Southard, Arina Stoianova, Katherine Wendler and Liz Linkletter pose for a photo in front of their research poster.

A&S Students Shine at Annual Undergraduate Research Festival

Students gathered at the Life Sciences Complex to present their work to faculty, staff, peers and guests.
Casey Schad May 14, 2026

Nearly 140 undergraduate students showcased their academic work at the College of Arts and Sciences’ (A&S’) annual Undergraduate Research Festival on April 17 in the Life Sciences Complex’s Milton Atrium. Faculty, staff, peers and guests—including members of the Dean’s Advisory Board, who received a special preview the night before—turned out to see the breadth and quality of student scholarship on display.

This year’s festival featured projects spanning an impressive range of disciplines, with titles from “New Frontiers in Forensic DNA Analysis Evaluating Single Cell Sequencing” (Ava Polak ’26) to “‘Forgive My Northern Attitude’: Are Northeasterners Really That Rude?” (Abram Speek ’26). Together, the projects reflected A&S’ commitment to research that bridges the sciences and the humanities, examining the world’s most pressing questions through rigorous, creative inquiry.

A student wearing glasses presents her research poster to an attendee at a university research festival, gesturing as she explains her work on food insecurity and diet-related chronic disease.
Olutoyin Green ’26, a health humanities and political philosophy student, explains her project, “Beyond Treatment: Food Homology and the Limits of Current U.S. ‘Food is Medicine’ (FIM) Programs in Addressing Structural Drivers of Diet-Related Chronic Disease.

With 99 poster exhibitions and 26 faculty-moderated presentations, this year’s festival continued its annual tradition of being among the largest of any such event at Syracuse University.

Students from across A&S participated, representing departments and programs including African American studies, art and music histories, biology, biotechnology, chemistry, communication sciences and disorders, Earth and environmental sciences, forensics, human development and family science, languages, literatures, and linguistics, mathematics, neuroscience, philosophy, physics, and psychology.

To see interviews with student researchers, visit: