Undergraduate Research Day 2026 and Excellence in Research Awards

On Wednesday, April 22, 2026, the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) hosted Undergraduate Research Day in the Grand Ballroom of the Stamp Student Union. Approximately 550 undergraduates shared posters related to their scholarly and creative projects at the event, with 282 projects presented over the course of the event’s two sessions. Presenters represented a wide range of disciplines and UMD colleges, schools, and programs.

OUR sincerely thanks the student researchers who shared their work at Undergraduate Research Day, the research advisors who helped them prepare for the event, and the many UMD community members who joined us there. We are particularly grateful to the evaluators for our Excellence in Research Awards, each of whom thoughtfully engaged with several award nominees during the event. A list of the award recipients is provided below. 

Lists of the presenters in the first and second sessions can be found on the event website, while photos of the event are available in OUR's photo repository. A subset of the presenters have shared their posters in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland's Undergraduate Research Day 2026 collection.

2026 Excellence in Research Awards

During Undergraduate Research Day, evaluators for the Excellence in Research Awards engaged in conversations with students nominated by their faculty advisors for the awards. These awards recognize Undergraduate Research Day presenters who have undertaken projects that meaningfully advance key conversations in their field and who have demonstrated creativity and resilience in the research process and a strong capacity to communicate across fields.

The following students received 2026 Excellence in Research Awards and granted us permission to share news of their awards:

• Harshil Agarwal ‘26, Computer Science (Co-presenter, “Developing Remote Electrical Engineering Labs”) 

• Zoe Baber ‘27, Environmental Science and Technology (Co-presenter, “Effectiveness of Drinking Water Quality Workshops in Varanasi, India”)

• Jason Berdia ‘27, Bioengineering (Co-presenter, “Detecting Microplastics with Aptamer-Initiated HCR and AuNPs”; also co-presenter, “Portable miRNA Detection with Ligation-Initiated Transcription and CRISPR/Cas12a”)

• Grace Cai ‘26, Computer Science and Physics (Presenter, “GM3: A General Physical Model for Micro-Mobility Vehicles”)

• Abjini Chattopadhyay ‘28, Computer Science and Mathematics (Co-presenter, “Angle vs. Amplitude Encoding for Quantum Binary Image Classification”)

• Hannah Eisenfeld ‘26, Hearing and Speech Sciences and Human Development (Presenter, “What’s That: Whole Object and Taxonomic Constraint in Children with Autism”)

• Jenna Eylanbekov ‘26, Neuroscience (Presenter, “Studying the Development of Effortful Control Through Infant Temperament and EEG”) 

• Vasisht Ishwar ‘27, Biological Sciences and Economics (Co-presenter, “The AISER Dashboard: A Hybrid Deep Learning Approach to COVID-19 Forecasting”)

• Katherlyn Le ‘26, Psychology (Co-presenter, “Self-Perceptions of Social Status: The Role of Self-Esteem and Gender”)

• Jonathon Meyer ‘26, Biological Sciences (Presenter, “Characterization of Enterobacteria and Vibrio spp. Occurrence in Aquatic Systems”; also co-presenter, “Optimization of an In-House Cell-Free Protein and Biosensor Expression System”) 

• Imani Timity ‘28, Psychology (Presenter, “Utilizing FFR to Assess Speech in Noise Difficulty in Middle-Aged Adults”)

• Alec Zhang ‘29, Computer Science (Presenter, “Scalar-on-Tensor Regression with Unbalanced Tensor Predictors”)

Warmest congratulations to the award recipients and all of the presenters, and many thanks to all who participated in the event.