Library News & Updates

11 Students Awarded Funding to Present Their Research at National Conferences

This winter quarter, the Lemieux Library and McGoldrick Learning Commons provided 11 undergraduate students with funding to help cover the cost of presenting at a national conference. Presenting either a poster or an oral presentation, the 11 students will be traveling across the US or internationally to share the research they conducted with an SU faculty member to other researchers and scholars in the field. Presentation topics vary from loneliness in older adults to water wave experiments to determining urban walkability. 

In its second year, we received a record number of applications for our conference travel awards this quarter, as well as provided funding to the largest number of recipients in one quarter. Previous award winners and their reflections can be viewed on the library’s ScholarWorks page. 

Congratulations to this quarter’s conference travel award recipients! 

Recipients: 

Emily “Milo” Chaffe (senior, cell and molecular biology chemistry) and Eric Thomure (senior, biochemistry) 

• Presenting a poster titled, “Predicting fates of aquatic pollutants: Developing quantitative structure-activity relationships for triplet-sensitized photochemical reactions” at the American Chemical Society Spring Meeting, March 23-27 in San Diego, CA. 

• Faculty mentor: Dr. Doug Latch (chemistry) 

Eabha Finn (senior, biochemistry) 

• Presenting a poster titled, “Behind the Mask: Understanding and detecting adulteration in immunoassay-based urine drug testing for tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) with benzalkonium chloride” at the American Chemical Society Spring Meeting, March 23-27 in San Diego, CA. 

• Faculty mentor: Dr. Kristen Skogerboe (chemistry) 

Reed Odette (senior, psychology) 

• Presenting a poster titled, “The Impact of Environmental Framing on Eco-anxiety, Well-being, Hope, and Eco-guilt” at the Western Psychological Association Conference, May 1-4 in Las Vegas, NV. 

• Faculty mentor: Dr. Le Xuan Hy (psychology) 

Eric Olson (junior, mechanical engineering) 

• Presenting a poster titled, “Design and Fabrication of a Party Blower-Inspired  Soft Robotic Extensor for Finger Rehabilitation” at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2025), April 23-26 in Lausanne, Switzerland. 

• Faculty mentor: Yen-Lin Han (mechanical engineering) 

Audrey Surdell (senior, cell and molecular biology chemistry) 

• Presenting a poster titled, "Sustainable Polyesters from CO2 and Butadiene: Synthesis and Polymerization of EVP-Derived Monomers" at the American Chemical Society Spring Meeting, March 23-27 in San Diego, CA. 

• Faculty mentor: Dr. Doug Latch (chemistry) 

Rohan Sethi (senior, pre-health) 

• Presenting a poster titled, “Impact of Exercise Training on Cardiovascular Disease in Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” at the American Physiology Summit, April 24-27 in Baltimore, MD. 

• Faculty mentor: Dr. Stephen Luckey (biology) 

Joanna Van Liew (senior, mechanical engineering) 

• Presenting an oral presentation titled, “Modeling Broad-Frequency-Band Water-Wave Experiments” at the International Conference on Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Wave Phenomena, April 14-16 in Athens, GA. 

• Faculty mentor: Dr. John Carter (mathematics) 

Grace White (senior, psychology) 

• Presenting a poster titled, “Investigating Successful Regulation When Lonely; How Individual Differences Moderate Repertoire Size in Older Adulthood” at the Society for Affective Science Annual Conference, March 20-22 in Portland, OR. 

• Faculty mentor: Dr. Eva Dicker (psychology) 

Alivia Zhao (junior, computer science) and Garland Lau (senior, computer science) 

• Presenting a poster titled, “Assessing Urban Walkability Using Deep Learning Approaches: Large Language Models and Contrastive-Language Image Pretraining” at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), April 7-9 in Pittsburgh, PA. 

• Faculty mentor: Dr. Wan Bae (computer science)