MSU College of Arts and Sciences honors outstanding graduate students
By Kaitlyn Yeatman
STARKVILLE, Miss. –Mississippi State University’s College of Arts and Sciences is celebrating the exceptional achievements of its graduate students, recognizing them for their academic excellence, research contributions and leadership within the university and beyond.
“The college has many, many outstanding graduate students across a range of programs and disciplines,” said Mitchell Berman, assistant dean for graduate academic affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences. “It was an honor to bestow these awards on the best of the best. These students contribute in so many ways to the university and the community, through their scholarship, teaching, service and leadership roles. Our graduate students are essential to the mission of our university and deserve much credit for making Mississippi State a world-class university.”
Honorees were selected through a rigorous evaluation process led by a committee of college deans, who sought students demonstrating excellence across various disciplines.
“We looked for students who had demonstrated excellence in research, teaching and service/leadership,” Berman said. “This could include teaching multiple different undergraduate classes, teaching awards, research awards, peer-reviewed publications, winning grants to support their research, leadership roles in their department, service to the college and university, and more. Almost all excelled in multiple areas.”
Among the distinguished awardees is Samuel David Juárez Escamilla, a chemistry major, who earned a place in the Graduate Student Hall of Fame—one of the highest honors for graduate students at MSU.
Other top awards include:
Research Ambassador Award: Yukai Ai, an engineering and applied physics major.
Outstanding Doctoral Student Award: Michayla D. Mack, a sociology major.
Outstanding Master’s Student Award: Joel Mensah Asmah, a foreign language major.
Additionally, graduate students from each department were recognized with Outstanding Graduate Student honors for their academic and research excellence.
Portia Agyapong
Outstanding Graduate Student, Department of English
Major: English
Charles Ethan Jones
Outstanding Graduate Students in the Humanities
Major: History
Brandon McDaniel
Outstanding Graduate Student, Department of Geosciences
Major: Geoscience, Professional Meteorology and Climatology
Oscar Ramirez Perez
Outstanding Graduate Student in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Major: Applied Psychology
Brock Price
Outstanding Graduate Student, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Major: Mathematical Sciences
Taylor Nicole Pritchett
Outstanding Graduate Student, Department of Communication
Major: Communication
Samuel A. Schmid
Outstanding Graduate Student in the Physical and Life Sciences
Major: Biological Sciences
These awards highlight the extraordinary impact of MSU’s graduate students, whose dedication to scholarship and service continues to elevate the university’s reputation on a national and global scale.
For more details about MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, visit www.cas.msstate.edu.
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