STARKVILLE, Miss.—Two master’s students and one doctoral student are winners of the Mississippi State University Graduate School’s Image of Research Competition.

The event is a chance for students to creatively engage with their research by sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses into their processes or portraying their academic studies in visual form. Participants are asked to submit an image and provide a title of less than 10 words, along with a 100 to 150-word narrative articulating the connection between the image and their research.

“We appreciate our graduate students for making this a successful event with a lot of engagement and interesting submissions,” said Lilli Harris, program coordinator for MSU’s Graduate School.

Judges selected 15 submitted images for a two-week exhibition recently held at the Colvard Student Union Art Gallery. From those, judges chose first and second place winners and a People’s Choice Award recipient.

Winners include:

First Place—Kristy M. McAndrew of Starkville, agricultural life sciences/entomology master’s student, Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Entomology and Plant Pathology, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, for “A picture’s worth 16,659 bugs”

Second Place—Jessica N. Leesburg of Starkville, geosciences/environmental geosciences master’s student, Department of Geosciences, College of Arts and Sciences, for “A Photographic Journey through the Beauty that is Sweeting’s Pond”

People’s Choice—Jannatul Ferdush of Starkville, earth and atmospheric sciences doctoral student, Department of Geosciences, College of Arts and Sciences, for “Hypothetical consequences of elevated CO₂ under different factors in soil”

For more on MSU’s Graduate School and the Image of Research Competition, visit www.grad.msstate.edu.