New Discoveries Fueled by Undergraduate Researchers at UVA

For many students in the College of Arts & Sciences, research is an important part of the undergraduate experience. Working alongside faculty mentors, graduate students and research staff, undergraduates contribute to projects that advance knowledge across a wide range of disciplines while gaining hands-on experience that expose them to new ways of thinking and doing and will give them a significant headstart in their careers. 

These research opportunities are becoming a defining feature of an Arts & Sciences education. Whether conducting experiments in laboratories, analyzing historical archives, developing independent scholarship or contributing to collaborative creative activity, students learn how new knowledge is created and disseminated while building the skills employers and graduate programs increasingly seek: critical thinking, problem solving, communication and intellectual curiosity. 

"Our unique ability to integrate undergraduates directly into groundbreaking research is central to who we are,” said Sarah Kucenas, A&S Associate Dean for Research and UVA’s Owen R. Cheatham Professor of the Sciences. “The contributions these students make by partnering with faculty, graduate students and research staff are essential to our collective impact. We view it as our core responsibility to train, support and launch these young researchers because they are the leaders and innovators of tomorrow.”

The experiences of these Class of ’26 graduates demonstrate just how transformative undergraduate research can be. 

Ava Arvand

A psychology major who graduated with a Bachelor of Science in behavioral neuroscience, Arvand worked on projects researching the biological underpinnings that underlie psychology as well as efforts in clinical psychology to develop mental health interventions.

She spent three years as an undergraduate researcher in Prof. Kucenas’s lab, which studies the cellular and molecular mechanisms that drive the development of glia (non-neuronal cells of the brain and nervous system) and investigates how glia engineer neural development. Arvand also worked two years as a senior research assistant for Psychology Professor Bethany Teachman’s Thriving Youth in a Digital Environment (TYDE) project, a pan-University initiative supporting research on youth mental health and digital technology. The TYDE “Hackathons” she organized for high school and university students to brainstorm on ideas for apps for healthier social media use that would help teens forge more positive social connections served as the subject of her distinguished major thesis.

Arvand accepted a two-year position as a clinical research coordinator at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School at the Center for Digital Mental Health and plans to apply to a clinical Ph.D. program in the future.

Shannan McCance

A double major in history and archaeology, McCance served as a research assistant for sociology professor Fiona Greenland, who has done extensive fieldwork in wartime Ukraine in recent years to document Russian attacks on Ukrainian cultural heritage sites. McCance pulled together and summarized English-language reporting from Ukrainian publications relevant to Greenland’s book project, To Kill a Nation, as well as for policy reports funded by the UVA Environmental Institute about managed retreat, a community-level response to climate change.

McCance also worked closely with Kyrill Kunakhovich, an assistant professor of history who served as her advisor on her Distinguished Majors Program thesis exploring identity and Eastern European art.

Following graduation, McCance has continued her internship with the Washington, D.C.-based Antiquities Coalition, an international effort against the illicit trade in ancient art and artifacts.

Simone Minor 

A pre-med student who majored in global public health and sociology, Minor was the inaugural winner of the UVA Women’s Center’s Spirit of 1974 Award recognizing an undergraduate student in the College of Arts & Sciences who exemplifies the courage, leadership and vision of UVA’s first fully coeducational class.

For her global public health major’s capstone project, Minor studied peer-reviewed, evidence-based literature on uterine fibroids, the most common non-cancerous tumors among people with uteruses. Minor concluded that genetics alone do not explain the degree of disparity across race. Examining the intersection of biology, policy and factors of inequality, her project proposed a treatment model that redesigns current approaches to promote reproductive health equity.

Assistant professor Liana Richardson, a transdisciplinary health scholar in the Department of African American and African Studies, and Gertrude Fraser, an associate professor of anthropology, served as Minor’s A&S faculty advisors on independent studies projects related to her interest in community health and the social determinants and consequences of racial inequalities in maternal and child health. Minor designed an independent study project exploring the biological, cultural and social aspects of pregnancy, birthing and the post-partum period and examining the potential role of doula programming at local and state hospitals.

Minor received a Rotary Scholarship to pursue a master’s in women’s and children’s health at King’s College London this fall. She plans on applying to medical school after that.

Seamus Oliver 

A Jefferson Scholar and political philosophy, policy and law major, Oliver examined the University of Virginia’s presidential search process that led to the Board of Visitors’ appointment of Darden School of Business Dean Scott Beardsley last December. Working with his advisor, Claudrena Harold, Associate Dean for the Social Sciences and UVA’s Edward Stettinius Professor of History, Oliver examined how large institutions like UVA use confidentiality as an important tool for managing optics, limiting organizational liability and running processes like executive searches.

But as Oliver wrote, those same confidentiality policies can leave key stakeholder groups feeling like they lack the information to make fully informed decisions in moments of crisis and to adopt particular strategies to address their uncertainty, according to Oliver.

Seamus concluded that while the main strategies relied upon by stakeholder groups could be effective in guiding decision making in the face of confidentiality restrictions, they also incentivized actions likely to damage community trust in the long term. Seamus also generalized these results to the American political environment, questioning whether even legitimate policies of confidentiality could weaken the conditions necessary for effective deliberative democracy.

Oliver also majored in mathematics. Following graduation, he began working as a field organizer for U.S. Sen. Mark Warner.

Naomi Spencer 

A chemistry major, Spencer worked two years as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratory of chemistry professor Marcos Pires, helping advance work on peptide-based therapeutics and earning co-authorship on a scientific manuscript — a rare achievement for an undergraduate. Spencer independently synthesized a technically demanding series of GLP-1 receptor agonist peptides (related to therapeutics like Ozempic), a project that routinely challenges experienced graduate students. Her work helped to open the possibility of making different changes to improve its overall drug properties.

Spencer’s undergraduate thesis was awarded “highest distinction,” and she won the Department of Chemistry’s Award for Excellence at Final Exercises. She will continue her UVA education this fall as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemistry’s graduate program and plans to continue her work on peptide drugs, which has expanded into researching how these biochemical interactions influence other immunological responses.

Kieran Wall 

An Echols and College Science Scholar, Wall majored in physics and minored in philosophy. Wall served as an undergraduate research assistant in UVA’s High Energy Physics Lab, working with Professor Craig Group for three years. Wall also served as an undergraduate research assistant with Professor Robert Jones, working with UVA’s Ultrafast Laser Lab on precision measurement techniques and contributed to multiple published studies in high-energy physics and astronomy.

Wall won the award for Best Undergraduate Oral Presentation at the October 2025 meetings of the Southeastern Section of the American Physical Society. Wall was scheduled to begin his Ph.D. studies in experimental particle physics at MIT as a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Kaleigh West 

A neuroscience major who also minored in biology and data science, West began working in UVA neuroscientist Ali D. Güler’s lab at the beginning of her second year. She contributed to a research team led by Güler that published major findings in the journal Nature examining how GLP-1 drugs affect the brain. That experience enabled West to complete a distinguished majors thesis examining the reward-seeking, behavioral effects of new pill-based GLP-1 drugs such as the recently FDA-approved Foundayo.

“When I first joined the lab, I remember feeling overwhelmed and wondering if I would ever be able to contribute in a meaningful way,” West said. “My graduate student mentor, Isabelle Sajonia, had a huge impact. She worked closely with me — she gave me feedback on my writing and taught me everything I know. She literally helped me every step of the way.

“And over time, by going to lab meetings, reading papers and going to seminars, I learned how to do literature reviews, connect those to what our lab had previously done and learn to analyze my own data and put it all together into a coherent story.”

West earned a Future Leaders Summer Fellowship in 2025 from the UVA Brain Institute. This fall, she will begin her graduate studies at UVA’s School of Medicine, where she will pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience.