Friday, Sept. 19, the College of William and Mary’s Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium took place in the Earl Gregg Swem Library. This event was an opportunity for undergraduate students to present and discuss the research they have participated in on campus. Over 200 students shared their work at the event, which was well attended by students, faculty, staff and community members.
This event is hosted by the Roy R.Charles Center, the College of Arts and Sciences’ center for research, internships, honors programs and similar applied learning opportunities. Many of the presenters received funding from the Charles Center to conduct research this past summer. These grants offer dozens of students financial support to complete full-time work on their projects of interest over the summer.
“Getting the grant really allowed me to focus on this entirely over the summer,” Josie Koster ’26 said.
With the financial support from her honors fellowship, she spent the summer in Williamsburg conducting research necessary to write her honors thesis in the coming months.
“I don’t know if I would have been able to do this just in the year that I would have had for the honors thesis,” Koster said.
As a sociology major, Koster’s research focuses on how students at the College navigate political differences with their family members. As someone who has personally navigated these dynamics within her own family, she was curious to see how others approached them.
“I was talking about [my research] with more people, and everybody has a story. Everybody has their own experiences, and it’s so shaped by specific family situations,” she said.
Over the upcoming year, Koster plans to analyze the findings of the interviews she conducted over the summer and report them in her final honors thesis.
While Koster’s research was grounded in the social sciences, the symposium boasted a strong showing from student researchers in the STEM fields. For example, Aarthi Bharathan ’28 presented her research evaluating candidate genes for a role in E. coli cell division. With her first-year Monroe Scholar research grant, she spent a few weeks of her summer in Williamsburg conducting research under assistant professor of biology Sarah Anderson. She mentioned that the expansive research opportunities available to students were one of the main factors that drew her to apply to the College.
“Coming into William and Mary, one of my major reasons for coming here was because the research environment here is a huge thing. It’s very popular. And I’ve always wanted to do research,” she says.
Bharathan is not alone in this sentiment. Another student researcher, Brendan Anselmo ’26, told a similar story.
“I have been able to do research two separate times due to [the Monroe Scholars] program, once at the end of my freshman year and now at the end of my junior year, and it’s just been a really good opportunity,” he said. “And the opportunities for research was a big part of my decision to attend William and Mary over other universities, and it’s just been a great experience.”
Anselmo’s research focused on the benefits of carbon reduction initiatives for healthcare spending in the United States. He presented a variety of different approaches to mitigate carbon emissions, taking into account the perspectives of all major stakeholders in the issue: the public, private and healthcare sectors.
“I used what I’ve learned in the classroom about critical thinking and looking at problems from multiple disciplines, multiple perspectives, and it has been a really great opportunity for me to help solve problems and share that knowledge with other students and faculty,” Anselmo said.
Also in attendance at this event were dozens of professors who supported the presenters throughout their research. Associate chair and McLeod Tyler Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Doug Young showed up to support the four student researchers whom he supervised over the summer.
He expressed his appreciation for the Charles Center research funding as a critical source of support for emerging undergraduate researchers. He also noted the importance of the research symposium itself as a way to increase awareness of the research that goes on at the College.
“And this [event] is also really nice, just to see the diversity of research that happens,” Young said. “Because so many times, people think research is just in the sciences, and we mix our little beakers together. But in fact, almost every department does research, and it’s great for students just to see, even freshmen or sophomores who haven’t started that, to kind of figure out what is happening on campus and what’s interesting.”
