Fifteen University of Mississippi students will receive funding for their research and projects through the Stamps Impact Prize.
The prize, awarded each semester to select students, was created in 2023 in partnership with the Stamps Family Charitable Foundation for the purpose of supporting student-initiated research, creative works and other projects. The award allots up to a maximum of $5,000 to the winning students.
This semester, the prize winners are Jana Abuirshaid, Maria Fernanda Argote de la Torre, Darryl Bonds, Emma Broemmer, Benton Donahue, John Griffith, Ann Grigsby, Sydney Guntharp, Jacob King, Lindsey McGee, Camille Newman, Compton Ross, Jackson Sevin, Kate Tibbs and Abi Turner.
The award grew out of the Stamps family’s desire to encourage scholarship beyond their existing Stamps Scholarship Program, according to Kenneth Sufka, the director of the Stamps Impact Prize.
“The Stamps Scholarship Program is the premier scholarship program at the University of Mississippi. It’s a full ride,” Sufka said. “One of the things that the family had talked with university administrators about is they were curious as to why they weren’t seeing some of these Stamps Scholars making high impact research or creative achievement or community service type projects, and they wanted to support a program like that.”
The Stamps Impact Prize was created from a $100,000 donation from the Stamps family, as well as additional support and funding from the Office of the Provost.
According to Sufka, the burgeoning program is seeing success in the volume of projects it is able to fund.
“We can fund around 10 to 15 impact prizes per semester,” Sufka said. “We have two cycles, fall and spring, and so the 15 from this April are our fourth group of students. We have funded about 51 student projects so far over its inception. The beauty of it is it’s really a student opportunity to take something of their own creation and run with it.”
The prize winners come from a variety of backgrounds, with projects corresponding to their own niche interests.
Tibbs, a junior majoring in exercise science, plans to use the money to buy equipment for her research.
“What I’m going to be doing is looking at the effects of palm cooling, specifically on cognition and perception,” Tibbs said. “With the funds, I’ll be getting things we don’t already have in the lab.”
For Newman, a junior mechanical engineering major, the money she received from the Stamps Impact Prize will go toward creating a prototype for her project, which she plans to begin building in the fall.
“I’m trying to design a new recycling system for the moon,” Newman said. “This way you can take all of your plastic, waste, food and trash, if you’re on a hypothetical base on the moon, and then use those plastics to make new tools, new items.”
King, a junior biomedical engineering major, plans to use the funding to study sea elegans.
“My project is on nematodes, which are a breed of sea elegan. I’ll be using a bioluminescence strand of E. coli to measure their feeding rates,” King said.
The projects not only reflect personal interests, but can have real world impact for other people. For King, the award supports a project with personal meaning for him.
“This (project) gives me a lot of valuable experience to potentially use in the future,” King said. “I have an aunt who has multiple sclerosis, for instance, and maybe I can use some of this experience in the future to study some genetic factors that go into that progressive disease and hopefully make some advancements in that with this experience.”
Argote de la Torre, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering, hopes to make medical advancements with her research as well.
“My project wants to identify genes important for heart development, and the way that I’m trying to do that is by developing a CRISPR-Cas9 screen in zebrafish,” Argote de la Torre said. “Zebrafish are really helpful because they’re easy to work with. They have short spawn times, and they’re very close genetically to humans, so we can translate what we find in zebrafish to humans.”
Argote de la Torre hopes to shed light on the workings of the human body, specifically the heart, through her project.
“Congenital heart diseases are a very big cause of infant mortality in the states, and a lot of it is just the fact that we don’t understand the mechanisms behind how the heart comes to be,” Argote de la Torre said. “I wanted to be a part of something that would push to understand this all a little bit better and hopefully lay the groundwork for other people to then use this information and kind of tackle these defects.”
Abuirshaid, a junior majoring in public health and Arabic, also hopes to make a real world impact with her research. Abuirshad is focused on helping Arabic-speaking immigrant communities in Mississippi get better access to healthcare by overcoming the language barriers they face.
“A lot of people don’t realize that in places like Mississippi there aren’t many Arabic-speaking doctors or medical interpreters, and many translation tools don’t work well with different Arabic dialects,” Abuirshaid said. “That means patients sometimes can’t describe their symptoms properly or misunderstand important medical instructions.”
Like King and other Stamps Impact Prize winners, Abuirshaid derived the project’s aims through personal meaning.
“Growing up, I saw how hard it was for people, especially immigrants, to get good healthcare when language and trust were barriers,” Abuirshaid said. “It’s heartbreaking when someone’s health suffers just because they can’t communicate. Being able to step in and use my skills to make a difference feels like the most meaningful thing I could do.”
Abuirshaid shared how the Stamps Impact Prize is helping her reach her goal.
“The Stamps Impact Prize money is essential for this work,” Abuirshaid said. “It’s helping us fund professional audio recordings, conduct community surveys to make sure we’re meeting people’s needs, build the app with the right technology team and run outreach programs so these tools reach the families who need them.”
