Record-breaking turnout marks spring 2026 Student Research Symposium 

April 30, 2026

The event, held April 24 as the capstone of Research Week, drew the highest number of graduate submissions in the symposium's history.

The University of North Florida's Student Research Symposium closed out Research Week 2026 on a high note Friday, April 24, filling the Ballrooms of the John A. Delaney Student Union with the energy of students, faculty, and community members gathered to celebrate the breadth of research happening across campus.

This spring's symposium received 89 abstracts — a milestone for the long-running event. Graduate students accounted for 40 percent of total submissions, the highest proportion of graduate participation ever recorded. The turnout signals a growing culture of scholarly engagement at UNF, spanning disciplines from health sciences and data technology to the humanities and creative works.

A Week of Celebration

The symposium served as the closing event of Research Week 2026, held April 16–24. A university-wide celebration of research, creativity, and innovation, Research Week brought together showcases, workshops, award ceremonies, and symposia designed to highlight the work of UNF students, faculty, and staff. Members of the northeast Florida community were also invited to take part in the festivities.

The Student Research Symposium — formerly known as SOARS, ARISE, and U-GLIDE — has been a fixture of that celebration for years. Now held three times a year during the fall, spring, and summer semesters, it functions as an interdisciplinary conference where students at all levels can present work in any stage of development, from preliminary findings to completed studies.

The Research on Display

This spring's symposium was a showcase of the full range of scholarly and creative activity happening at UNF. Students presented their work in poster and oral presentation formats, with projects organized across three types: Research, which encompasses original inquiry and data-driven investigation; Creative and Scholarly Works, which highlights artistic, literary, and humanities-based scholarship; and Applied and Professional Practice, which showcases work with direct real-world application.

Those projects were further organized into four thematic areas reflecting the diversity of disciplines represented at UNF. Health and Clinical Research drew some of the symposium's strongest participation, with students addressing topics in public health, physical performance, behavioral health, and clinical science. Data, Technology, and Applied Science featured work at the intersection of computing, engineering, and quantitative methods. Human Experience and Society brought together projects rooted in history, sociology, culture, and the social sciences. And the Interdisciplinary and Other category made space for work that resists easy categorization — research that draws from multiple fields to ask questions no single discipline could answer alone.

Award Winners

Twelve students were recognized for outstanding work across the symposium's categories:

Alexis Hielscher, From Farm to Fork: The Impact of Animal Welfare on Food Safety

• Aiden Jones, Modern Monster Hunters: Cryptozoology, Culture, and Environmentalism in the Twentieth Century United States
• Daniel Fiannaca, NSDAP's Relationship with the Church: How the Nazis Interacted with Religious Institutions During Their Rise to Power
• Finleigh Fitton-Prange, Bilateral Comparison of Plantarflexion Strength and 30-Second Side-to-Side Hop Test Performance
• Gina Burroughs, Coercive Control Practices with Screens and Emotion Regulation in Preschoolers
• Hyerim Jeong, Social Media Use, Body Surveillance, and Body Shame Among Adult Women
• Jonathan O'Berry, Improving Robustness of Medical Large Language Models for Question Answering Through Prompt Engineering
• Joshua Mchaina, Identifying and Assessing Active Transportation Infrastructure Connectivity in Rural Residential Clusters: A Geospatial Analysis and a GIS-Based Prioritization Tool
• Kathleen Namey, Strengthening Florida's Respiratory Surveillance through APHL-CDC Fellowships
• Michael Gorbach, Eyes Closed Dominant Single-Leg Standing Balance Metrics Predict TUG Fast Turning Towards Dominant Side, and Its Ability to Predict Dynamic Stability and Mobility
• Rachel Cisneros, What Comment Sections Reveal About Food Related Content
• Vanessa Rose Bruno, Perceptions on Childcare Spending
• Research Week also brought recognition for the faculty who make student research possible. Dr. Elena Buzaianu, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, was named the Graduate Research Mentor of the Year — an honor awarded to a faculty member whose dedication to graduate student growth goes above and beyond. Read her full feature in the Grad School Newsroom.

A Place to Grow

Beyond the awards and the record numbers, the symposium is fundamentally designed to give students a supportive environment to develop as researchers and communicators. Whether presenting a poster or delivering an oral presentation, students at every stage of their research journey are welcome — the goal is growth, dialogue, and the kind of intellectual exchange that only happens when curious people share a room. All symposium programs are digitally archived through UNF's Digital Commons, ensuring that the work presented each semester becomes part of a lasting scholarly record.

For students inspired by what they saw Friday, there are two more opportunities this academic year to share their own work. The Summer 2026 Student Research Symposium (formerly known as ARISE) will be held on Friday, July 24, and the Fall 2026 Student Research Symposium (formerly known as U-GLIDE) will follow on Friday, December 4.

Students interested in participating are encouraged to connect with a faculty mentor early and to reach out to UNF's Writing Center for help along the way. Whether your work is just getting started or nearing completion, the Student Research Symposium welcomes it.

The Spring 2026 Student Research Symposium was held April 24, 2026, in the John A. Delaney Student Union Ballrooms at the University of North Florida.