Thirty-one graduate students received awards at the 2026 Graduate Exhibition, hosted by the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School on Friday, March 27, on the University Park campus. Credit: Nichole Lupo / Penn State.
Three engineering graduate students receive awards at the 2026 Graduate Exhibition
Apr 9, 2026
Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared on Penn State News.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Three Penn State graduate students from the College of Engineering were among the 31 graduate students to earn awards at the 2026 Graduate Exhibition, hosted by the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School on Friday, March 27, on the University Park campus.
The Graduate Exhibition is the premier annual community showcase for graduate student research, scholarship and creative activity across the University. Graduate students from all Penn State campuses are invited to create an exhibit to explain their scholarship and its impact in five minutes or less to a general audience. Exhibits can take the form of a research presentation poster, video, design explanation poster, art piece (open to students pursuing degrees in the visual arts only) or musical performance (open to School of Music students only).
Community volunteers serve as judges, evaluating student exhibits and presentations, and providing feedback to help them communicate complex topics to a non-specialist audience more effectively.
Awards are presented to the judges’ highest-scoring student projects in each of the Graduate Exhibition’s categories and subcategories. In addition, the University Libraries sponsors a data visualization award, and the Graduate and Professional Student Association funds a People’s Choice Award in both the Performance and Visual Arts categories.
The three engineering recipients are:
- Antara Verma, biomedical engineering, who received first place in the category of “Research Poster: Engineering” for the project “Axonal Transport of Nanoplastics by Kinesin”
- Mohammad Javad Hassan Zada, civil engineering, who received third place in the category of “Research Project: Engineering” for the project “Intersection Crash Frequency Analysis via Bayesian Beta-Mixture Negative Binomial Models”
- MD Mashfiqur Rahman, engineering science and mechanics, who received second place in the “Video Category” for the project “How Materials Science Reveals the Hidden Side of Climate Change”
The full list of recipients can be found here, and their abstracts can be found on the Graduate Exhibition website.
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