University of Arkansas

Three U of A School of Journalism and Strategic Media students have received spots in the selective Dow Jones News Fund program, a record for the school. Keelin Fisher, Cooper Gant and Casey Mann were among 79 college students chosen out of more than 800 applicants for the training and paid summer internship program.

Nine students and alumni from the University of Arkansas have received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and one was recognized as an honorable mention. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is one of the nation's most competitive and prestigious awards for graduate students pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees.

"Around one in four students at the University of Arkansas are first-generation students," says Miceala Morano, a senior from West Fork. "I'm proud to be a part of that one in four, especially since my path to Senior Walk began with literal pennies.

Jacob Holmes, a senior in the Department of Industrial Engineering, has been named the 2026 College of Engineering Outstanding Senior at the U of A. The college presents this honor each year to a graduating senior whose dedication to campus and the engineering profession reflect the values of the college.

The University of Arkansas Libraries, Honors College and Division of Research and Innovation are pleased to announce the winners of this year's Undergraduate Research Week competition in each of the research categories.

A graduating senior in Italian, Carson Hamilton (Italian minor), has been selected for the Study Intercultural Training Experience (SITE) Fellowship, a prestigious international opportunity for recent U.S. graduates. Hamilton will spend the 2026-27 academic year in Gavirate, near Varese in Italy's Lombardy region, serving as an English-language teaching assistant in a local high school under the guidance of a faculty mentor.

The Division of Student Affairs is celebrating two seniors whose leadership has left a lasting mark on campus. Yannick Tchio Tiombo and Anna Morrow were named recipients of the Spring 2026 Henry Woods Student Leadership Award, an annual honor recognizing two graduating seniors demonstrating outstanding records of leadership. Each student received a $1,500 scholarship.

Each year, Apparel Merchandising and Product Development students are tasked with creating original designs for the Enclothe fashion show. When junior Lillyanna Gigerich began developing her garment for the show, she wanted the project to call attention to suicide awareness and prevention. To bring that vision to life, she turned to the University of Arkansas Libraries for help connecting research with design.

University of Arkansas students are transforming their college experiences into powerful digital portfolios that showcase their readiness for the workforce - and some are earning top honors for their work. Through reflection, storytelling and design, these award-winning ePortfolios demonstrate how students are connecting what they've done in college to where they are going next.

The College of Education and Health Professions recognized more than 100 students at its annual awards ceremony, celebrating their academic success along with the effort, mindset and commitment it took to make these achievements possible. Dean Kate Mamiseishvili applauded their determination, quoting New York Times best-selling author Koby Yamada's children's book, Finding Muchness: "How you do one thing is how you do everything. And anything worth doing is worth doing well."

Satchel Flammang, a U of A student with a passion for research and language learning, will head to Europe this fall after earning the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship to pursue graduate studies in biomembrane science. Flammang was one of 21 students selected from an applicant pool of 3,100 global applicants for the MemBioMed Erasmus Mundus master's program, an international graduate program focused on biomembranes and their applications in neuroscience, biochemistry and pharmaceutical sciences.

Thirty students were named Senior Scholars for 2025-26, and each department in U of A's Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences has named its outstanding students for the year. Seventeen students are First-Ranked Senior Scholars, signifying a 4.0 grade point average with all coursework completed at the U of A, and 13 are Senior Scholars, signifying students with the highest GPA (also all 4.0s) with at least half of their coursework completed at the U of A.

The U of A Department of Industrial Engineering celebrated the achievements of its students during the annual Capstone Symposium and Student Awards Banquet at the Arkansas Union Verizon Ballroom. The full day of events highlighted a year of hard work, innovation and collaboration between students, faculty and industry partners. Industrial Engineering Department Chair Chase Rainwater said, "The Capstone Symposium and Student Awards Banquet are among our department's most important events of the academic year. They showcase not only the technical excellence of our students, but also their ability to create impact for industry partners."

U of A alumni Sherman Black and Lynnette Reeder Black have announced this year's recipients of the Black and Reeder Scholarship, which is awarded to Greenwood High School students and U of A students from Greenwood seeking degrees in engineering or business. Caden Slate will graduate from Greenwood High School in May and plans to study marketing at the Sam M. Walton College of Business. She will be a first-generation college student. Ben Pschier, a senior in electrical engineering from Greenwood, will also receive the Black and Reeder Scholarship for the 2026-2027 academic year. Pschier said high school experiences with soldering, robotics competitions and coding classes led him to the field.

The Alpha of Arkansas Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa held its annual initiation ceremony in May at Hillside Auditorium. The chapter inducted 94 new members from this year's graduating class at the university. Each new initiate signed the book, which has been used for the last 94 years to record names of Phi Beta Kappa members at the U of A, and promised to have paramount regard for moral character and scholarly attainment in the election of future members. They each received a certificate along with a light blue and pink cord to wear at commencement. Provost Indrajeet Chaubey addressed the new initiates and their families as the keynote speaker.

Fulbright College senior Jenna Klewsaat knows that persistence pays off in the end. Klewsaat, who is originally from Colorado, came to the University of Arkansas in 2020 and has overcome numerous obstacles, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Klewsaat persisted, never giving up on her dream of graduating and seeing her name on Senior Walk.

When Katie McKay walks across the graduation stage this May, she'll be the third McKay sibling to earn a degree from the U of A College of Engineering. Her older brothers pursued computer engineering and computer science, but she took a different path, one that would lead her to discover a passion she never expected.

One student's goal to get more involved outside of academics paid off with two internships after getting connected with the Office of Entrepreneurship & Innovation (OEI).

Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and doctoral student Federico Tiberini recently showcased their research on Italian American culture at the annual conference of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), held in Austin, Texas, and co-sponsored by the University of Texas-Austin and Southern Methodist University.

Fifty-eight 2026 honors graduates were recently recognized at a reception as University of Arkansas's Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences honored students at its yearly academic awards reception.

Faculty and students from the Department of Mathematical Sciences recently represented the U of A at two regional conferences focused on mathematics and mathematics education, highlighting innovative approaches to teaching and research. Their presentations emphasized strategies for reducing student anxiety, enhancing engagement and improving student experiences in mathematics classrooms.

U of A startups earned more than $40,000 at the 25th annual Arkansas Governor's Cup, a startup competition open to students in seven states across the mid-south with a $141,000 cash prize pool. Altaris MedTech, which is developing a spray-based strep test that eliminates the need for traditional throat swabs, earned first place in the High Growth/Technology Graduate division to take home $20,000.

University Recreation and Wellness hosted its annual End of Year Celebration. The celebration recognizes the academic and occupational success of UREC's student employees and club sport officers, acknowledging students for university honors, awards and graduation.

The UARK Speech and Debate Society, traveled to Middle Tennessee State University to compete in the International Public Debate Association's National Tournament and Convention. The students involved brought home many accolades, including a 2nd Place Scholastic Sweepstakes, which represents all divisions containing undergraduate students combined. Season-long, the team had its most successful run to date, earning a total of 248 awards in a single season, including a national champion speaker in the varsity division.

Several undergraduate students from the University of Arkansas Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSDI) program recently presented research projects at the annual Arkansas Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ArkSHA) Convention, highlighting student-led work focused on clinical practice, research and community resources in speech-language pathology.

Altaris MedTech, a University of Arkansas student startup developing an innovative pain-free strep test, won fourth place at the prestigious Rice Business Plan Competition, earning U of A's best since 2018. Altaris was one of just 42 teams to qualify for the competition, which describes itself as the "world's largest and richest intercollegiate graduate student startup competition." Hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the competition offers more than $1 million in investment and cash prizes.

As an active transportation coordinator in the Office for Sustainability on campus, Emma Armendariz spends every day working to make the U of A and Fayetteville more sustainable. Yet she found the university's Environmental Resiliency program still pushed her to deepen her understanding of sustainability and rethink how she approaches the work.

Several graduating Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design students at the University of Arkansas reflected on the experiences that have shaped their time in school and prepared them for what is next as they begin their careers. These spotlights feature six design students with diverse paths, perspectives and passions who share the growth, creativity and unique insights they have gained throughout their journey at the Fay Jones School and the U of A. Their reflections offer a closer look at their dedication as students and the positive impact they hope to make after graduation.

The largest cohort in the history of the McMillon Innovation Studio presented their projects last week at Demo Day, the bi-annual capstone that showcases a semester's worth of learning in the studio.The spring 2026 cohort included 16 design teams, which allow students to harness human-centered design principles to solve problems in an array of industries, and two product teams, which focus on teams producing a product that has a viable go-to-market strategy.

British by birth, Abel Fenwick's unlikely journey to studying cowboy literature at the U of A began in a hotel room in New Jersey binging Robert DuVall movies with a friend. That marathon included the Lonesome Dove miniseries, based off the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Larry McMurtry.