91Ô­´´

Every summer, the David T. Kearns Center hosts the Summer Research Symposium to celebrate the achievements of dozens of incredible research scholars. The scholars—who come from institutions all across the country—live on campus and spend the summer engaged in groundbreaking research at the Rochester.

This summer Scholars are participating in the following undergraduate research programs: The Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program (McNair), The National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) in Physics, Astrophysics and Optics, Department of Physics and Astronomy (Physics and Astronomy), NSF REU in Nanophotonics, Quantum Photonics, and Vision/Biomedical Optics, The Institute of Optics (Photonics), NSF REU in Computational Methods for Understanding Music, Media, and Minds (MMM). Scholars from the U91Ô­´´ Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Program will also be presenting their research during poster presentations on Day 1.

The Symposium resembles a conference style format, really giving these research scholars a chance to show off their hard work. “What I'm most excited about is seeing the culmination of the last 10 weeks,” says Kearns Center Director Dr. Antonio Williams. “For some of these students, when they came in, they were a little nervous initially. We asked them to trust us and just believe that we were going to support them along the way. To finally get to see all the work that they have put in the last 10 weeks at the Research Symposium is going to be a great thing to see. So, I hope people come out and get to experience it with us as well.”

Check out the event schedule below.

Event Schedule

DAY 1: Wednesday, July 29, 2026—Feldman Ballroom, Douglass Commons

• 10 am: Opening remarks
• 10:15 am: Keynote Address (student speaker)
• 10:30 am: Keynote Address (featured speaker)
• 11 am-Noon: Panel Presentations
• Noon: Lunch
• 1-3 pm: Poster Presentations
• 3 pm: Closing

DAY 2: Thursday, July 30, 2026—Various campus locations

• 9 am-3 pm: Day 2 begins at various campus locations (Bausch and Lomb 106, Humanities D in Rush Rhees Library, 1400 Auditorium in Wegmans Hall, Hawkins-Carlson Room in Rush Rhees Library
• 3-4 pm: Reception, Welles-Brown Room

(Check out the for more specific times.)

2026 Research Project Titles and Program Participants

Program participants and the names of their projects have been listed below. The students are listed by program and in alphabetical order by last name.

1. Hungarian Acceptability for Logical Form Induction
Levente Gurmai, Mentor: Dr. Aaron Steven White (Linguistics REU)

2. Honeyhunting Terminology in the East African Hadza Community
Victoria Day, Mentors: Dr. Jeremy Coburn & Dr. Andrew Harvey (McNair) 

3. Electro-Optics Sampling for Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy
Agustina Duarte, Mentor: Dr. Roman Sobolewski (McNair)

4. Food Access in 91Ô­´´
Alex Eggers, Mentor: Dr. Anu Ahmed (McNair)

5. The Relationship Between Social Support and Frailty Among Adolescents and Young Adults with Cancer
Talia Favourite, Mentor: Dr. AnnaLynn M. Williams (McNair) 

6. Design, Optimization, and Alignment of a Folded 4F Pulse Shaper
Yahel Grullon, Mentor: Dr. Michele Cotrufo (McNair)

7. Chinese Economic Investment in West Africa and the Caribbean
Sierra Jefferson, Mentor: Dr. Pablo M. Sierra Silva (McNair)\

8. Association Between Markers of Immune Dysfunction and Fatigue, Weakness, Physical Activity, and Walking Speed Among Older Patients with Breast Cancer Receiving Chemotherapy
Kadiatou Kante, Mentor: Dr. Nikesha Gilmore (McNair)

9. Particle Mixing in a Planetary Ball Mill for Dry Lithium-Ion Battery Cathode Manufacturing Using DEM
Saniya Khalil, Mentor: Dr. Pooja Bhalode (McNair)

10. Multi-Channel Heterodyne Frequency-Domain Diffuse Optical Spectroscopy
Anthony LaFemina, Mentor: Dr. Regine Choe (McNair)

11. Runtime and Memory Tradeoffs in Higher-Order Automatic Differentiation
Ethan Luvisia, Mentor: Dr. Jiaming Liang (McNair) 

12. Wavenet Phase I: Ambient Noise Cross-Correlation Pipeline for Surface Wave Dispersion Extraction
Christopher Angel Peña Gonzalez, Mentor: Dr. Tolulope Olugboji (McNair)

13. Listening as Policy: Centering Black Student Voice, Belonging, and Joy
Sammy Randle III, Mentor: Dr. William O’Neil-White (McNair)

14. The Differential Effects of Early Family-Based Deprivation and Threat on Children's School Readiness
Khia Williams, Mentor: Dr. Patrick Davies (McNair)

15. Reconstructing Pregnancy Episodes using All of Us CDRv8
Joyce Zhang, Mentor: Dr. Caitlin Dreisbach (McNair)

16. Social Determinants of Health and Nasogastric Tube Use in Adolescent Eating Disorder Care: A Scoping Review
Madison Zeng, Mentor: Dr. Meredith Kells (McNair)

17. Optimizing the Distribution of Attention in an AR Museum Tour
Mika Adler, Mentor: Dr. Yukang Yan (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

17. Optimizing the Distribution of Attention in an AR Museum Tour
Sophia Yang, Mentor: Dr. Yukang Yan (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

18. Reading Your Mind: Theory of Mind and Repair in Child-AI Interactions
Luca Dstasio, Mentor: Dr. Zhen Bai (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

19. Symbolic Music Motif Discovery with Self-Supervised Learning
Jonathan Henson, Mentors: Dr. Zhiyao Duan, Dr. Matthew Brown and Dr. David Temperley (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

19. Symbolic Music Motif Discovery with Self-Supervised Learning
Connor La Bianco, Mentors: Dr. Zhiyao Duan, Dr. Matthew Brown and Dr. David Temperley (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

20. Music Retrieval from EEG Using Contrastive Learning
Griffin Keeler, Mentor: Dr. Mujdat Cetin (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

20. Music Retrieval from EEG Using Contrastive Learning
Evan Szypulski, Mentor: Dr. Mujdat Cetin (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

21. ClassiSpace: A Visualization Tool for Exploring ASL Classifiers
Devyn Lewis, Mentor: Dr. Zhen Bai (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

22. LLM-Assisted Analysis of Twitter User Sentiments and Engagements with IQOS
Xizhe (Jasper) Liu, Mentors: Dr. Dongmei Li, Dr. Zidian Xie, & Dr. Hangfeng He (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

23. Applying Large Multimodal Models to Analyze Engagement Factors in IQOS-Related Instagram Image Posts
Konstantinos Paparrizos, Mentors: Dr. Dongmei Li, Dr. Zidian Xie, & Dr. Hangfeng He (Music, Media, & Minds REU)

24. Raman spectroscopy for in vivo osteoporosis pre-screening
Courtney Duong, Mentor: Dr. Andrew Berger (Photonics REU)

24. Raman spectroscopy for in vivo osteoporosis pre-screening
Emma Wong-Woo, Mentor: Dr. Andrew Berger (Photonics REU)

25. Designing an FPGA Pulse Generator for Realization of Squeezed States in a Levitated Optomechanical Phonon Laser
Ryan Harriger, Mentor: Dr. Nick Vamivakas (Photonics REU) 

26. Epi-Illuminated Stimulated Brillouin Scattering for Biological Imaging
Kyle Hussey, Mentor: Dr. William Renninger (Photonics REU)

27. Intraocular Pressure System with Single Channel Insertion for Vision Research
Emily Lavoie, Mentor: Dr. Jannick Rolland (Photonics REU)

28. Super-Resolution Parameter Estimation: SPADE vs. Direct Imaging - Hologram Quality
Jaysen Llenas, Mentor: Dr. Valeria Viteri-Pflucker (Photonics REU)

29. Measurement of Joint Nonclassical Statistics with a Photon-Number-Resolving Camera
Alejandro Navarrete, Mentor: Dr. Robert Boyd (Photonics REU)

30. Calibrating the Wavelength Dependence of Mechanical Stress Engineered Optics
Saira Ramakrishnan, Mentors: Dr. Eileen Otte (Photonics REU)

31. Analyzing Fibrous Structures in Tissue by the 3D Coherence Matrix and Degree of Polarization
Cathrine Sakin, Mentor: Dr. Eileen Otte (Photonics REU)

32. Nanophotonic Imaging for Measuring Neural Activity During Naturalistic Behavior
Kendra Scheele, Mentor: Dr. Jaime Cardenas (Photonics REU)

33. Femtosecond Laser Writing of Photoluminescent Defects in SiN Thin Film
Olivia Stitt, Mentor: Dr. Michele Cotrufo (Photonics REU)

34. Comparing Sensory Eye Dominance Using a Traditional Method and Visual Simulators
Brigit Len Tabuena, Mentor: Dr. Susana Marcos (Photonics REU)

35. Towards a Raman Spectroscopy-Based Cell Permeability Assay for Microphysiological Systems
Ethan Zabka, Mentor: Dr. Benjamin Miller (Photonics REU)

36. Optimal Control Pulses for Resonator-Induced Entangling Gates in Transmon Qudits
Casey Alexander, Mentor: Dr. Machiel Blok (Physics & Astronomy REU)

37. Measuring galactic rotation curves in the DESI Peculiar Velocity Survey
Daniel Bustos, Mentor: Dr. Kelly Douglass (Physics & Astronomy REU)

38. Deprojecting Protostellar Outflows to Search for Rotation
Miles Chaney, Mentor: Dr. Tristan Bachmann (Physics & Astronomy REU)

39. Critical Phenomena of the Ising and NEC Models
Devin Doherty, Mentor: Dr. Chaitanya Murthy (Physics & Astronomy REU)

40. An Objective Trigger Model for Offline Head and Neck Radiotherapy
Caleb E. Fredrick, Mentor: Dr. Alexander Podgorsak (Physics & Astronomy REU)

41. Building an 852nm External Cavity Diode Laser for Optical Trapping
Marissa R. Godoy, Mentor: Dr. Nicholas P. Bigelow (Physics & Astronomy REU)

42. Exploring Dielectric Loss as a Mechanism for Charge Noise in Semiconductor Qubits
Tylon Kondowe, Mentor: Dr. John Nichol (Physics & Astronomy REU)

42. Exploring Dielectric Loss as a Mechanism for Charge Noise in Semiconductor Qubits
Atharv Kulkarni, Mentor: Dr. John Nichol (Physics & Astronomy REU)

43. Planetary Debris Beyond the Main Sequence: Gaseous Disks Orbiting White Dwarfs
Josephine McCullough, Mentors: Dr. Taylor Kutra & Dr. Dominique Segura-Cox (Physics & Astronomy REU)

44. Gauge Invariant Treatment of Electron Transmission Through a Saddle Potential in a Magnetic Field
Douglas Miller, Mentor: Dr. Chaitanya Murthy (Physics & Astronomy REU)

45. Nothing to See Here: Searching for Axion-Like Particles using Neutrino Disappearance in Core-Collapse Supernovae
Casey Rush, Mentor: Dr. Segev BenZvi (Physics & Astronomy REU)

46. Applications of Machine Learning in Measuring Charged Particle Momenta in Neutrino Detectors
Calliope Ruskin, Mentor: Dr. Chris Marshall (Physics & Astronomy REU) 

47. Developing Logic Gates using Vortex States in a Spinor BEC
Nickolaus B. Shaw, Mentor: Dr. Nicholas P. Bigelow (Physics & Astronomy REU)

48. Using Machine Learning to Classify Galaxy Morphology in SGA-2025
Quillan Shimp, Mentor: Dr. Kelly Douglass (Physics & Astronomy REU)

49. Lumped Element LC Resonator Development and Fabrication
Alexandra Ziegler, Mentor: Dr. Machiel Blok (Physics & Astronomy REU)

50. Effects of Macromolecule Accumulation on the Mechanical Properties of Porcine Costal Cartilage
Jada Adkisson, Mentor: Dr. Mark Buckley (SURF)

51. Protease Overlay Assay Assessing Fibrinogen Cleavage Around Staphylococcal Abscess Communities
Kiliian Bailey Shea, Mentor: Edward Schwarz (SURF)

52. Enhancing HPV Vaccine Access Through A Supplemental Interactive AI Digital Ally: A Developmental Study
Rai Cyron Antonio, Mentor: Victor Clark (SURF)

53. Health Disparities in Pediatric Retinoblastoma: A Scoping Literature Review on How Social Determinants of Health Impact Diagnosis, Treatment, and Outcomes
Emily DiCesare, Mentor: Karen Allison (SURF)

54. The Elixhauser Comorbidity Index and Post-Stroke Upper Extremity Recovery
Giovanna Fisher, Mentor: Ania Busza (SURF)

55. Examining the Link Between Balance and the Warm-Up Effect in the Achilles Tendon
Eden Johnson, Mentor: Mark Buckley (SURF)

56. Can a Virtual Reality Educational Game Improve Student Knowledge of Shared Resources?
Jeremiah Nwaiga, Mentor: Tracie McGinnity (SURF)

57. The Impact of Fatigue on Force Development During Box Step Ups
Dalu Obi, Mentor: Cherice Hill (SURF)

58. Virtual Reality Tours for Community Education on Cancer Research
Sinead O'Omeara, Mentor: Tracie McGinnity (SURF)

59. Loss of IGFBP-3 Remodels the Tumor Microenvironment to Promote Angiogenesis in Murine Models of Pancreatic Cancer
Isabel Porterfield, Mentor: Calvin Cole (SURF)

60. Young Adult Cancer Survivors' Experience of Sexual Wellness: A Rapid Scoping Review Cadance Price, Mentor: Victor Clark (SURF)

61. How Social Determinants of Health Impact Overall Survival and Treatment Outcomes of Glioblastoma Patients: a Scoping Literature Review
Laila Pruitt, Mentor: Karen Allison (SURF)

62. Rural Voices in Cancer Care
Isabella Valenta, Mentor: Diane Morse (SURF)

63. The effects of Non-Invasive on Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability and Integrity: a Scoping Review
Jenny Zhu, Mentor: Paulo Lizano (SURF)