UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Hundreds of students participated in the 2025 Undergraduate Exhibition, both online from April 14-16 and in person at the HUB-Robeson Center at Penn State University Park, on April 16.
The annual Undergraduate Exhibition welcomes students from all academic disciplines to present and be judged on their research. For some students, the exhibition is their first opportunity to present their research to someone unfamiliar with it, a crucial skill in many disciplines and professions. It’s also the culmination of countless hours spent in the field, lab or studio, in collaboration with others or in solitary work.
Kaden Kelly-Pojar, of Warren, presented his research on the formation and evolution of exoplanets, conducted with the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. Kelly-Pojar’s work centers around the creation of models for the simulation of exoplanet systems, based on observations made by the Kepler Space Telescope of multi-planet systems. For his research project, he and his co-researchers simulated 100 exoplanet systems. The size of each “embryo” planet is determined by flow isolation, and each simulation represents 30 million years. They can observe how big these planets would likely become and how those planets then fall into different orbits.
Kelly-Pojar said undergraduate research cemented his college and future plans, and that when he started doing research last summer, he fell in love with it. He said he enjoys the opportunity to make a discovery that no one else has.
“Here at Penn State, we are making tangible progress towards revolutionizing our understanding of both the solar system and systems around other stars and how they formed and how they got to be like what we see them today,” he said.
Many students have followed a path of inquiry driven by their interests, sometimes dating back through primary and secondary school. Kelly-Pojar said as a child he was fascinated by the idea of aliens. As he entered Penn State, he became interested in the emerging scholarship on exoplanets, which have only been observed in the last few decades.
For others, their academic work and research is connected to something of paramount importance to them, their families and loved ones. Victor Latsanych, of Kyiv, Ukraine, is a Penn State senior majoring in international relations with a minor in business. His research focuses on the assessment of psychological and behavioral effects of war on university students, based on data from the national 2022-23 Healthy Minds Study, which surveyed 76,000 college students across the U.S. on mental health, substance use and academic performance. Students were grouped by national origin in the survey.
Latsanych said he divided up students into three groups: domestic students from the U.S., international students from countries at peace and international students from countries of conflict. He then ran models to examine the data, and looked at depression, anxiety, smoking frequency, alcohol abuse and academic impact due to emotional and mental well-being. Some findings were contradictory to his hypothesis: Students from countries of conflict reported the lowest levels of depression, anxiety and smoking frequency. However, they did report the highest amounts of alcohol abuse and the highest academic impact due to mental and emotional distress compared to their international peers. Latsanych said there were many factors at play, such as to whom students are comparing themselves when they respond to the survey and the general nature of self-reporting.
“I write off a lot of the depression and anxiety values being lower due to the fact that their perception of their personal depression and/or anxiety is considerably lower because they're not comparing to their peers at their institution,” he said. “They're more so comparing to their peers at home.”
He went on to explain that what he finds to be the true metric is the academic impact, because it indirectly signals to these students that there is an impact due to their emotional state. Latsanych said he hopes to conduct his own survey that addresses these specific issues.
Undergraduate research experiences often change a student’s trajectory. Loren Foster, of Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, is a fourth-year biology major with a minor in global health and a Millenium Scholar. Foster said she initially wanted to go straight to medical school, but undergraduate research and her minor in global health has led her to pursue a master’s in global health and consider a path to a doctorate in epidemiology.
Her research looked at the effects of chronic adolescent stress on the SOCS3 gene expression, which has been associated with depressive- and anxiety-like behaviors and disorders, in mice.