By Sloane Barlow
Six hundred eighty-one Honors College students participated in the 2025 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF), making up almost 57% of the roughly 1,200 university participants.
The Breslin Center hosted eight hours of poster presentations on Friday, April 11, consisting of four cycles of participant groups to showcase their research.
This annual event helps undergraduate students gain research presentation experience and receive constructive feedback from roaming judges. One of the judges, recent Honors College alumna Destiny Kanning, is a two-time Diversity Research Showcase (DRS) awardee and part of the College of Osteopathic Medicine pursuing her Master of Science degree in global health.
“Especially at UURAF, I feel that this was my starting journey getting into undergraduate research and specifically presenting,” Kanning said. “It is such an honor to be coming back as a judge, and to kind of give a little bit of that wisdom back to the students.”
Fellow 2025 DRS awardee Benjamin Nketsiah also attended UURAF, presenting the same research that earned him third prize in the oral presentation category.
Nketsiah is a second-year Honors College student studying biochemistry and molecular biology through the College of Natural Science. His research – “Genetic Susceptibility to Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) Among Women of West African Ancestry” – aims to study and find targeted therapies for a highly aggressive subtype of breast cancer.
“This research is important because it shows how some diseases have a genetic foundation and some people are more susceptible to it based on their genes,” Nketsiah said. “If we are precise in our medicine, we can hone in on that fundamental genetic code, probably edit it out of the genome, and save potentially more lives.”
In addition to medical research like Nketsiah’s, UURAF also features a breadth of diverse research in the arts and humanities.
Fellow 2025 DRS competitor, Sydney Logsdon combined both ends of research in a project adapted from her senior Honors thesis, “Understanding the Power of Literature in Combatting Climate Change and Environmental Injustice”. In this research, Logsdon presents the growing need for alternative forms of scientific communication that convey urgency in a politically polarized American society.
“My project really tries to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities,” Logsdon said. “I think with a lot of ethological crises, with like climate change and biodiversity loss and national resource degradation, we’re very focused on the data we have about those issues and that is really good for telling us what is going on – but we also need people who are able to tell us why we should care and I think environmental literature is the way that we can do that.”
To view the full photo album of Honors students presenting at UURAF 2025, click here.
Interested in supporting Honors College student research? Contact Tonya Frisbey at frisbey2@msu.edu.