Contact: Carl Smith

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State’s Graduate Student Association is honoring 41 winners of the university’s 22nd Graduate Student Research Symposium.

More than 100 students recently showcased oral and poster presentations to a panel of MSU faculty members and researchers during the symposium. Approximately 45 faculty judges and 20 graduate student volunteers assisted with the event. Projects were divided across four categories—education, arts and sciences, and business; forest resources and veterinary medicine; agriculture and life sciences; and engineering. Winners received monetary awards—first place, $150; second place, $75; and third place, $50.

Winners include (by category):

POSTERS

AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES DOCTORAL STUDENTS

FIRST—Ramandeep Kumar Sharma, a plant and soil sciences/agronomy doctoral student from India, for “Crop-climate link in the southeastern USA: A case study on oats and sorghum.”

SECOND—Li-Dunn Chen, a life sciences/animal physiology doctoral student from Omaha, Nebraska, for “A toad is a toad—or is it? Shedding light on the biochemical differences of three anurans using near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).”

THIRD—Varsha Singh, a plant and soil sciences/weed science doctoral student from India, for “Weed-suppressing potential of sweet potato varieties under field conditions.”

AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES MASTER’S STUDENTS

FIRST—Ranadheer Reddy Vennam, a plant and soil sciences/agronomy master’s student from India, for “Post-silking water-deficit stress impact on physiology and yield in corn.”

SECOND—Sadikshya Poudel, a plant and soil sciences/agronomy master’s student from Nepal, for “Phenotyping of soybean cultivars for interactive drought and heat stress tolerance.”

THIRD—Courtney Wynn, an agricultural life sciences/biochemistry master’s student from Hull, Alabama, for “‘Sweet’ silk glands: A glucose-conjugating enzyme is highly expressed in the silk glands of moths.”

EDUCATION, ARTS AND SCIENCES, AND BUSINESS DOCTORAL STUDENTS

FIRST—Bipin Lamichhane, a physics doctoral student from Nepal, for “Oxidation resistance of atomically flat Cu (111) surface: A First-principles study.”

SECOND—Hashani P. Abeysinghe, a chemistry doctoral student from Sri Lanka, for “Sorption of aqueous arsenic (V) by an iron oxide/rice husk biochar composite adsorbent.”

THIRD—Brantley K. Ballenge, a kinesiology/exercise science doctoral student from Hoover, Alabama, for “Moderation and mediation of body composition on the relationship between physical activity and arterial health.”

EDUCATION, ARTS AND SCIENCES, AND BUSINESS MASTER’S STUDENTS

FIRST—Jennifer Ani, an education/school psychology educational specialist and educational psychology/psychometry master’s student from Pleasant Grove, Alabama, for “The effects of self-monitoring on increasing performance on early numeracy skills.”

SECOND—Moshood Fagbolade, a biological sciences master’s student from Nigeria, for “Examining occidiofungin targeting of fungal actin orthologs using the S. cerevisiae shuffle strategy.”

ENGINEERING DOCTORAL STUDENTS

FIRST—Sabyasachi Biswas, an electrical and computer engineering doctoral student from Bangladesh, for “Multi-target activity classification with MIMO radar.”

SECOND—Mahathir Mohammad Bappy, an industrial and systems engineering doctoral student from Bangladesh, for “Morphological dynamics-based anomaly detection towards in-situ layer-wise certification for directed energy deposition processes.”

THIRD—Madhubhashini Lakdusinghe, an engineering/chemical engineering doctoral student from Sri Lanka, for “Nanoscale self-assembly of poly(3-hexylthiophene) assisted by a low-molecular-weight gelator toward large-scale fabrication of electrically conductive networks.”

ENGINEERING MASTER’S STUDENTS

FIRST—Lorena Chavarro-Chaux, a civil engineering master’s student from Colombia, for “Best management practices effectiveness on stream water quality in livestock management areas.”

SECOND—Subodh Poudel, a civil engineering master’s student from Nepal, for “Application of the HEC-HMS Model for runoff simulation of Catalpa Creek Watershed, Mississippi: Calibration, validation and model performance evaluation.”

THIRD—Reese Dunne, a mechanical engineering accelerated master’s student from Starkville, for “Development and implementation of a magnesium-based finite element degradation model for hydroxyapatite-coated orthopedic implants.”

FOREST RESOURCES AND VETERINARY MEDICINE DOCTORAL STUDENTS

FIRST—Oluwabori Adekanye, a veterinary and biomedical sciences/veterinary medical research doctoral student from Nigeria, for “Carboxylesterase 1 modifies the proinflammatory phenotype of human THP-1 macrophages.”

FOREST RESOURCES AND VETERINARY MEDICINE MASTER’S STUDENTS

FIRST—Kyle Dues, a forestry master’s student from Kettering, Ohio, for “A machine learning approach to stand dynamics in a threatened forest ecosystem.”

ORAL PRESENTATIONS

AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES DOCTORAL STUDENTS

FIRST—Josiane Argenta, a plant and soil sciences/weed science doctoral student from Brazil, for “Effect of melatonin in cotton sprayed with sublethal doses of 2, 4-D.”

SECOND—Tingjun Lei, an electrical and computer engineering doctoral student from China, for “An informative planning-based multi-layer robot navigation system as applied in a poultry barn.”

THIRD—Sena Isbili, a life sciences/entomology doctoral student from Turkey, for “Molecular cloning, mutation frequency analysis, and expression profiling of insect ryanodine receptor in soybean looper, Chrysodeixis includens.”

AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES MASTER’S STUDENTS

FIRST—Dylan Lesak, a food science, nutrition and health promotion/food science and technology master’s student from Batavia, Illinois, for “Buffered dry vinegar decreases bacterial growth of refrigerated pork breakfast sausage.”

SECOND—Lovepreet Singh, a plant and soil sciences/agronomy master’s student from India, for “Genotyping-by-sequencing revealed extensive genomic diversity in bermudagrass (Cynodon spp.).”

THIRD (Tie)—Alyssa Lea Miller, a plant and soil sciences/weed science master’s student from Starkville, for “The suppressive ability of different cover crop production systems on troublesome weed species in cotton.”

Third (Tie)—Sadikshya Poudel, a plant and soil sciences/agronomy master’s student from Nepal, for “Detrimental effects of high daytime temperature on physiology and yield in soybean.”

EDUCATION, ARTS AND SCIENCES, AND BUSINESS DOCTORAL STUDENTS

FIRST—Sapan Luitel, a physics doctoral student from Nepal, for “E17011 experimental setup, and efficiency comparison between simulated and experimental results.”

SECOND—Saja Teeti, a physics doctoral student from Saudi Arabia, for “Rotating proton rich nuclei: the birth of proton bound rotational bands, high-spin giant proton halos and rotation induced extension of nuclear landscape.”

THIRD—Hoang Pham, a chemistry doctoral student from Vietnam, for “Synthesis of a CCC-NHC pincer Re complex: An air stable catalyst for coupling ketones with primary alcohols via borrowing hydrogen.”

ENGINEERING DOCTORAL STUDENTS

FIRST—Jing Yang, an electrical and computer engineering doctoral student from China, for “A hybrid routing method in energy harvesting wireless sensor networks.”

SECOND—Anh Vo, a biomedical engineering doctoral student from Vietnam, for “Impact of lipid composition on mechanoporation and failure of complex bilayer membranes.”

THIRD—Ayantha Senanayaka, an industrial and systems engineering doctoral student from Sri Lanka, for “Similarity-based multi-source transfer learning approach for time series classification.”

ENGINEERING MASTER’S STUDENTS

FIRST—William Downs, a mechanical engineering accelerated master’s student from Carrollton, for “Examining ULTEM 9085 by fused deposition modelling with a thermo-mechanical finite element analysis.”

SECOND—Lichang Zhu, a mechanical engineering master’s student from China, for “Two-dimensional simulation of flow in porous media using lattice Boltzmann method.”

THIRD—Javier F. Mendez Monroy, a civil engineering master’s student from Colombia, for “Best professional judgment (BPJ) evaluation considering an APEX uncertainty analysis (UA) in the Mississippi Delta region.”

FOREST RESOURCES AND VETERINARY MEDICINE DOCTORAL STUDENTS

FIRST—Ian Pereira Sartorio, a forest resources/forestry doctoral student from Brazil, for “Reacting to hurricane disturbances: Optimizing forest resources with a supply chain model.”

SECOND—Emma Schultz, a forest resources/wildlife, fisheries and aquaculture doctoral student from Jackson, for “On the move: How animal and small unoccupied aircraft system (sUAS) movements influence survey error.”

THIRD—Krista Ruppert, a forest resources/wildlife, fisheries and aquaculture doctoral student from Kingwood, Texas, for “Post-breeding movement and microhabitat selection of Gopher Frogs (Rana [Lithobates] capito) on the Conecuh National Forest.”

FOREST RESOURCES AND VETERINARY MEDICINE MASTER’S STUDENTS

FIRST—Maxwell Schrimpf, a forestry master’s student from Beavercreek, Ohio, for “Harnessing the power of CT scanning to identify changes in relative density of Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda).”

SECOND (Tie)—Bradly Thornton, a wildlife, fisheries and aquaculture master’s student from Savannah, Missouri, for “Modeling avian species distributions in open pine forests in the Southeastern United States.”

SECOND (Tie)—Sakar Nepal, a forestry master’s student from Nepal, for “Mississippi’s timber severance tax and its contribution to the economy.”

THIRD—James N. Helferich, a wildlife, fisheries and aquaculture master’s student from Broadalbin, New York, for “Effects of climate change on individual growth rates in a threatened pit viper.”

For more information about the MSU Graduate Student Association, visit www.grad.msstate.edu/students/graduate-student-development/graduate-student-association.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.