Congratulations to the recipients of the 2026 IFER Ethical Research Poster Awards! These awards recognize outstanding undergraduate and high school students whose research demonstrates innovation, scientific excellence, and a commitment to ethical research practices. Each winner received a $350 award in recognition of their work.
Undergraduate Winners
Julia Sullivan, In Vitro Modeling of Military Burn Pit Smoke Exposure Using a 3D Airway Organ Tissue Equivalent (OTE)
Gauri Mishra, Investigating the Physiological and Functional Effects of Microgravity on Heart Spheroids
Gianna Elie, Development of an In Vitro Assay for Detecting Environmental Chemical-Induced Carcinogenesis
Blake Tumpey, Vascularized Endometrium-on-a-Chip for Modeling Reproductive Toxicology
Hayeon Yun, Flexible, 3D Electronic Framework for Electromechanical Monitoring and Stretching of Engineered Heart Tissues
High School Winners
Bhavya Ramakrishnan, The Effect of miR-1 Loaded Extracellular Vesicles on Combating Neural Cell-Associated Senescence
Bhuvan Krishnamohan and Prajval Balakavi (Team), Allosteric Modulation of Dysregulated MMP-1 in OSCC: Structure Based Computational-Experimental Drug Discovery
Raina Gu, Characterizing Cellular Senescence Through Integrated Morphological and Epigenetic Profiling
Harshitha Smriti Prabakar, Computational Modeling of Multineurotransmitter Perturbations in Mesolimbic Reward Pathway
Paxton Kim-Tang, Jacob Wang, and Tina Yu (Team), Real-Time Evaluation of Airway Epithelial Barrier Disruption Induced by Smoking-Related Agents Using Impedance-Based Live-Cell Analysis