The 2026 Summer Science Symposium was held Friday, July 24, 2026.
This year’s Summer Science Symposium had record numbers of eighteen student speakers and 151 posters. We introduced three new prizes for a total of five distinct awards with twenty total prize winners and twenty-four honorable mentions, as well as seven students awarded named fellowships. The overall summer program included 210 student researchers, the great majority here on campus. Congratulations to all our fellows and mentors!
Please visit our online gallery at this link.
Prize Winners
Captivate (Best Title)
The Captivate title prize is awarded to the student who best balances the intellectual weight of their work with the creativity required to hook an audience.
1st Place, Carmela Carbone (McNair)
Attention, Please!: Multimodal Cue Use Across Language Modalities Prior to Joint Attention Instances
2nd Place, Will George (Hughes, Grant)
Heated Rivaldebris: A comparison of flux fitting methods in circumstellar protoplanetary disks
3rd Place, Felix Lam (Gonzalez-Pech, WesMaSS)
Old Habits Dye Hard: Solvothermal Synthesis of Nickel Oxide-Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticle Clusters with Dual Polymer Addition
3rd Place, Jacob Poore (Chang-Davidson, CoDES)
Can a Robot Color Inside the Lines? Continuous Toolpath Planning and Geometric Validation for CMT-WAAM
Honorable Mentions
- Morgan Conn and Zephyr Lepyansky (Thomas, Joe Webb Peoples Museum)
- I
Rocks: Fossils of the Connecticut River Valley
- I
- Yordanos Gebru (Roberts, Grant)
- Return of The Knit: Mass-producible Capacitive Sensor Sleeve for Simple Robotic Limb Integration
- Grace Lee (Tucker, QAC)
- Beyond the Snapshot: How Photography Shaped Legal Practice and Evidence Uses in American Courtrooms (1839-2025)
- Isabella Migliore (Chernoff, COE)
- Freaky Fish-day: Measuring Allometry of Rhinicthys atratulus Populations Using Truss Elements
- Bianca Morales (Sher, COE)
- Looking Towards Solar Energy: A Temporal Analysis of Perovskite Halide Segregation
- Kyle Quintana (Zimmeck, WesMaSS)
- How the Cookie Crumbles: Trends in Privacy Law Compliance Across US States
- Ines Rolan (Kilgard, CIS)
- Going Through a Phase: Probing X-ray Variability of Supernova Remnants in Nearby Galaxies
- April Rowe (Calter, CIS)
- Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who is the Purest of Them All: The synthesis and Purification of C74 a Precursor to Rocaglamide Analog OBM
- Dorcas Tawiah (Singer, CIS)
- The Scoop on Caterpillar Poop: How Previous Phloem Feeding Influences Host Plant Quality and Caterpillar Growth
- Ethan Valentino (Kottos, QAC)
- Computing with Chaos: a Compact Wave-Chaotic Neural Network
Insight (Image Prizes)
The Insight image prizes are awarded for the best visualization of summer student research work. There are two categories: Picture and Data Visualization.
Judges Amy MacQueen, Yuxuan Mei, Jennifer Mitchel
Picture
- 1st Place, Eric Sim (Hayes, Junior Fellows)
- 2nd Place, Elias Warner (Chen, COE)
- 3rd Place, Gillian Churchland (Johnson, QAC)
- 3rd Place, Abigail Lopez (Gonzalez-Pech, WesMaSS)
Data Visualization
- 1st Place, Yuki Yu (Roberts, CoDES)
- 2nd Place, Annabelle Hegarty (Mitchel, GISOS)
- 3rd Place, Keanu Feik Reinhart (Stewart, CIS)
- 3rd Place, Liam Forsythe (Redfield, GISOS)
Images may be viewed at our online gallery at this link.
Maureen Snow Poster Prize
for excellence in Science Communication
Judges Stef Dineen, Serena Plage, Mary Readinger, Shana Sperry
Winners
- 1st Place, Gillian Churchland (Johnson, QAC)
- 2nd Place, Arjun Menezes (Voth, CIS)
- 3rd Place, Solomon Grossman and Hannah Wang (Mei, CoDES)
Honorable Mentions
- Carmela Carbone (McNair)
- Annabelle Hegarty (Mitchel, GISOS)
- Noah Huckman (Tezek, Hume)
- Yeji Kim (Taylor, WesMaSS)
- Jake Klasky (Gooyabadi, QAC)
- Grace Lee (Tucker, GISOS)
- Paul Quach (Dubar, BAMA)
- Ramiro Quiñones (Miller, WesMaSS)
- Dorcas Taiwah (Singer, CIS)
- Yuki Yu (Roberts, CoDES)
Posters may be viewed at our online gallery at this link.
Summer Spark Prize (Oral Presentation)
Our summer researchers operate at an incredible pace, often packing a year’s worth of discovery into just eight weeks. The Spark prize was established to honor the student who best captures that momentum in a flash talk presented to their peers and mentors.
Winners
- 1st Gillian Churchland (Johnson, QAC)
- 2nd Catherine Sykes (Dubar, CIS)
- 3rd Zoe McDougal (Padilla-Benavides, CIS)
- 3rd Jianna Shao (Chang-Davidson, GISOS)
Honorable Mentions
- Liam Bloom (Thayer, CIS)
- Kate DiTullio (Northrop, GISOS)
- Kitty Edwards (Coolon, Hume)
- Miyuka Kawamura (Imai, QAC)
Named Fellowships
- 2026 Siegel Fellows
- Jacklyn Brozkha and Toshiki Kobayashi (O’Neil)
- 2026 Sonnenblick Fellows
- Arjun Menezes (Voth), Zoe McDougal (Padilla-Benavides), Nathan Weinstein (Hughes)
- 2026 Hume Fellows
- Kitty Edwards (Coolon), Noah Huckman (Tezak)