UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Thirty-one graduate students received awards at the 2025 Graduate Exhibition, hosted by the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School on Friday, March 28, on the University Park campus.
The event, celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025, is a professional development activity that challenges students to communicate their research and creative scholarship to a general audience in five minutes. Community volunteers serve as judges, evaluating exhibits and presentations, and providing constructive feedback.
Awards are given in each of the Graduate Exhibition’s five categories: Design, Performance, Research Poster, Video and Visual Arts. Two special awards are given for research and scholarship that addresses issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and a data visualization award sponsored by the University Libraries. The 2025 Graduate Exhibition also included a People’s Choice award, sponsored by the Graduate and Professional Student Association, in both the Performance and Visual Arts categories.
2025 award recipients, whose abstracts can be found on the Graduate Exhibition website, are:
Design Category
- First Place: Shreyas Nagaraj, Engineering Design, “Designed to Crash, Built to Survive: An Additive Manufacturing Approach”
- Second Place: Michael Ciaramitaro, Theatre, “Only Funny Business: Designing the Costumes for ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ ”
- Third Place: Stephanie Bowles, Learning, Design, and Technology, “Humanistic and AI-Assisted Design of a Learning Platform”
Performance Category
- First Place: Christopher Amado Arceo, Music, Performance and Pedagogy, “Urnong - a cycle of folksongs from the Philippines’ Bicol Region”
- Second Place: Michael Holtzapple, Music, Performance, “Beethoven Sonata No. 4 in A minor Movement 1. Presto”
- Third Place: Winnie Yang, Piano Performance, “Clementi's Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. 24, No. 2”
- People's Choice: Dante Tramontin de Paula, Performance, “Latin American Music in Modern Double Bass”
Research Poster Category — Arts and Humanities
- First Place: Zachary Clark, History, “Arbiters of the Borderlands: Warlords, Municipalities, and State-Making in Sino-Tibet, 1905-1955”
- Second Place: Courtney Murray Ross, English, “Thinking with(in) the Hold: The Slave Ship & Its Afterlives in Nineteenth-Century Black Literary and Print Reproduction”
- Third Place: Nicolas Verdejo, Architecture, “Architecture Education Under the Iron Fist. The Pinochet Dictatorship and the Depoliticization of Chile's Architecture Schools, 1973 - 1990”
Research Poster Category —Engineering
- First Place: Leo Lonzarich, Civil Engineering, “Harmonizing Operational Model Deployment with a Model-agnostic Differentiable Modeling Machine-learning Framework”
- Second Place: Prakash Poudel, Civil Engineering, “Safety Performance of Passing Zone Segments on Two-lane Rural Highways in Pennsylvania: Comparing Crash Modification Factors using Causal Inference and Unobserved Heterogeneity Models”
- Third Place: Shakshi Sekar, Energy and Mineral Engineering, “A Comparative Study on the Graphitization Behavior of Waste Plastics using Templating Agent”
Research Poster Category — Health and Life Sciences
- First Place: Abdulkareem Alshaheeb, Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Molecular Biology, “From Reproduction to Aging: Investigating the Physiological Roles of NAD+ Metabolism and Signaling”
- Second Place: Alana Lee, Animal Science, “A scoping review of research validating precision wearable sensors for monitoring dairy cattle behavior”
- Third Place: Sujay Manoj Paranjape, Entomology, “Everything That Kills Me Makes Me Feel Alive: The Paradox of Plant Defense and Insect Preference”
Research Poster Category — Physical Sciences and Mathematics
- First Place: Cyril Chu Fubin Kumachang, Materials Science and Engineering, “Ambient-Processed Semitransparent Perovskite Solar Cells from Environmentally Benign Solvents”
- Second Place: Kelle Hart, Chemistry, “Upside-Down Adsorption: The Counterintuitive Influences of Surface Entropy and Surface Hydroxyl Density on Hydrogen Spillover”
- Third Place: Shio Sakon, Physics, “Low-latency Detection of Gravitational Wave Signals”
Research Poster Category — Social and Behavioral Sciences
- First Place: Nhung Vu, Communication Arts and Sciences, “Connected by moods: The influence of individual mood, mood similarity, and mood convergence in supportive interactions”
- Second Place: Matthew Picarelli-Kombert, Anthropology, “Comparing Oyster Harvesting Practices over a 500-Year Period on Ossabaw Island, Georgia, USA”
- Third Place: Zina Zhang, Information Sciences and Technology - Informatics, “Casual Competition by Design”
Video Category
- First Place: Keegan Peterson, Kinesiology, “Increasing Physical Activity among LGBTQ+ Adults: A Socio-Ecological Approach”
- Second Place: Carolin Jolitz, German, “Exploring the Effectiveness of Captioned and Non-Captioned Video Homework Assignments on Second Language Phonological Acquisition”
- Third Place: Triveni Gangadari, Energy and Mineral Engineering, “Development of Solid Phase Extraction Process for Selective Separation of Scandium and Iron from Aqueous solutions”
Visual Arts Category
- First Place: Adwar Oguttuh, Art, “Don’t Blink”
- Second Place: Elaheh Babaei, Art, “Fashion Accessories: Tokmeh Couture”
- Third Place: Venus Bayat, Art, “The Women Who Keep History Alive”
- People's Choice: Adwar Oguttuh, “Don’t Blink”
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award
- First Place: Sujay Manoj Paranjape, Entomology, “Everything That Kills Me Makes Me Feel Alive: The Paradox of Plant Defense and Insect Preference”
- Second Place: Adwar Oguttuh, Art, “Don’t Blink”
- Third Place: Roua Daas, Psychology, “Concordance Between Minoritized Status and Identity Importance: Relationship with Life Satisfaction and Depression”
Data Visualization Award (Sponsored by the University Libraries)
- First Place: Sahil Pawar, Entomology, “The impact of salinity on plant-insect interactions”
- Second Place: Sujay Manoj Paranjape, Entomology, “Everything That Kills Me Makes Me Feel Alive: The Paradox of Plant Defense and Insect Preference”
- Honorable Mention: Jacob Seiler, Architectural Engineering, “Energy Dispatch Optimization for Controlled Environment Agriculture with Combined Heat and Power”