Nearly 500 Aggies Showcase Research at Annual Student Symposium

LOGAN, Utah — Utah State University’s annual Student Research Symposium returned April 7 and 8, drawing close to 500 participants across the full spectrum of academic experience. Undergraduate first-year students presenting their first scholarly work stood alongside doctoral candidates defending years of investigation, a pairing that has become one of the event’s defining features.

The symposium featured both poster sessions — where researchers displayed findings and fielded questions in an open-floor format — and oral presentation sessions, in which students delivered formal talks before panels of faculty evaluators and peers.

This year’s turnout continues an upward trend. After COVID-19 disrupted the symposium tradition beginning in 2020, participation has climbed steadily since the event’s revival in 2021, with each year bringing new departments, new disciplines and a growing number of student researchers.

Among the symposium’s standout features was Child’s Play, an exhibition of book arts created by students in Tamryn McDermott’s art education course. The display offered a tactile and visual counterpoint to data-heavy poster boards nearby, demonstrating that creative inquiry is every bit as rigorous as empirical investigation.

In the humanities, a suite of posters on vampire literature drew considerable interest. Students from Christine Cooper-Rompato’s course presented original literary analyses tracing the cultural, historical, and psychological dimensions of the vampire figure across centuries of fiction — evidence that undergraduate humanities scholarship is alive (or is it undead?) and well at USU.

The Honors Capstone showcase offered some of the symposium’s most consequential work. Projects ranged widely: one study aimed at improving training programs for local emergency services professionals, with findings that could directly benefit Cache Valley first responders; another offered an analysis of the past and potential future impacts of Utah hosting the Winter Olympic Games, a topic of particular relevance as the state looks toward 2034.

STEM fields were strongly represented throughout, with students presenting original research on advances in electric vehicle technology, strategies for managing Utah’s chronic water scarcity, and innovations in human and animal health — areas where USU researchers have established national and international reputations.

Students whose work was recognized as particularly outstanding by evaluators are listed on the SRS website. The Office of Research thanked all the library staff, faculty, postdocs and graduate students who volunteered to moderate or evaluate presentations, and to the dozens of Undergraduate Research Fellow volunteers who ensured the smooth operation of the event.