Mississippi State University doctoral student Mayra Vazquez-Nunez was one of only 60 graduate students in North America selected to attend the 2025 National X-ray School at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, this summer, where she explored advanced X-ray techniques to address challenges in green chemistry.

“I realized there are so many types of writing—you can write for a magazine, for essays, for news stories,” said Portia Agyapong, reflecting on her internship in Mississippi State’s College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office last summer. “Even though I initially struggled because I was stuck with an academic writing mindset, it was an amazing experience to learn different ways of writing during my internship. I really learned a lot from it.”

“Curiosity is the foundation for every scientist’s motivation to understand complex problems,” said Chandler Woo, a senior chemistry major at Mississippi State. “Exploring the uncharted and finding answers to a problem that has not been successfully solved is what excites me about research in general.”