Georgetown students swept the Big East Undergraduate Research Poster Symposium, winning the top three prizes at the research showcase at Madison Square Garden on March 15.
A Georgetown senior and two juniors competed against 10 teams from the Big East conference, showcasing their research chops before the Big East men’s basketball championship game.
Evan Bianchi (C’25), a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences, won first place for her research on how changing schools between pre-K and kindergarten can negatively impact low-income students. College of Arts & Sciences junior Sophia Rose Monsalvo (C’26) placed second for her studies on community-based conservation efforts in Colombia; and School of Nursing junior Claire Auslander (N’26) took home third for her report on how a state’s religious populations influence its reproductive health care policies.
The students worked with the Center for Research & Fellowships to apply and present their findings in the academic competition, which featured 55 projects total. The three Hoyas, along with a University of Connecticut undergraduate who received an honorable mention, were recognized for their work during the St. John’s vs. Creighton championship game.
“We are proud of our Georgetown students whose ingenuity and creatively-executed research will have an impact on populations around the globe,” said David Edelstein, vice provost for education, incoming dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and a judge at the symposium. “We’re thrilled that their commitment to excellence has been recognized by the Big East.”
New Insights on Pre-K
Senior Evan Bianchi was awarded first place for her research that yielded new insights on early childhood education for low-income students. The study originated, in part, from Bianchi’s own experiences.
Bianchi grew up with a learning disability, which was discovered in preschool. If not for her early diagnosis and the resulting accommodations and support she received, she “wouldn’t be a student at Georgetown today, let alone conducting this research,” she said.
Her first year at Georgetown, she attended an alternative spring break trip to Appalachia, where she heard rural kindergarten teachers echo the importance of early childhood education.
Upon returning, she joined the university’s Context, Development & Social Policy Lab, where she learned that students who attended public preschools tended to outperform students who attended Head Start, a preschool program for low-income youth, at the beginning of kindergarten. But she wondered if there was more to this story.
“It occurred to me that the mechanism here may be the role of changing schools, as students who attend Head Start must transition schools between pre-K and kindergarten while their public pre-K attending peers can simply advance to kindergarten at the same school.”
She didn’t find any research on how transitioning schools impacts early childhood, particularly low-income students. So she got to work.
Using research from the lab’s longitudinal study, which follows children from low-income families in Tulsa, Oklahoma, from the age of three until fourth grade, she analyzed the role of school transitions on students’ social-emotional outcomes.
She found a range of negative outcomes on students’ emotional control, behavioral regulation, executive functioning and peer relationship quality, among other factors. The results suggested that co-locating public pre-K classrooms in elementary schools could help better support low-income children’s development.
Winning first place at the symposium for work she’s passionate about was a great experience, she said.
“But largely because it followed Georgetown already having won second and third place. Given that it was a collaborative effort to prepare with the Georgetown Big East team, it was incredible to see a Georgetown clean sweep that we could all take pride in being a part of.”
Other Georgetown Winners
Sophia Rose Monsalvo (C’26) was awarded second place for her research on conservation efforts in Colombia. Monsalvo, who is in the first class of environment and sustainability majors in the Earth Commons and the College of Arts & Sciences, spent last summer living in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, Colombia, conducting research as part of her Davis Fellowship. Here’s what she found:
The study: Monsalvo worked with a local nonprofit that engages community members to reforest endangered tree species in their areas. She conducted interviews with the nonprofit affiliates and community members to understand how the NGO’s efforts could help the community accomplish its social, economic and ecological goals.
The results: She found the nonprofit is indeed effective at meeting these goals through environmental conservation — particularly in the way they blended the community’s spiritual, ancestral and cultural understanding of the environment with scientific understandings of tree species. The nonprofit’s work acted as “environmental peacebuilding,” she said, by connecting people of all backgrounds to care for tree nurseries.
What’s next: Monsalvo will return to Colombia this summer. She plans to partner with the foundation and turn her findings into an educational curriculum and interactive guide to help volunteers, students, activities and others learn about environmental peacebuilding in the area. “I hope to continue to hold space for communities to share their knowledge of the earth and have it hold the same weight as the scientific and physical understandings of environmental systems as well,” she said.
Claire Auslander (N’26) won third place at the Big East symposium for her research on state policies on reproductive health care. She is a research assistant on Assistant Professor Roxanne Mirabal-Beltran’s WASH project, which conducts research at laundromats in DC to better understand barriers to reproductive health education for Black and Hispanic women. The project sparked her interest to dive deeper into reproductive health. Here’s what she found:
The study: As part of her research as a Laidlaw Scholar, Auslander used U.S. census data to map out populations with high and low numbers of people attending religious services across all 50 states and DC. She then analyzed the relationship between state religiosity and contraceptive policy for insured dependents.
The results: She found that states with higher religiosity are less likely to adopt contraceptive policies that promote access for insured dependents, reflecting, she said, “how religiosity may shape public health governance.”
What’s next: Auslander is working with Mirabel-Beltran to submit a manuscript on their work. She hopes one day to become an OB-GYN clinician and use her patient care experience to shape health policy. “The opportunities at Georgetown have allowed me to fulfill that more than I ever dreamed possible,” she said.
