Two PLS students win awards in the Diversity Research Showcase
February 3, 2026 - Karessa Weir
MSU PLS majors Alexandra Beck and Lowell Monis took home prizes in this year’s 9th Annual Diversity Research Showcase hosted by the MSU Honors College.
Beck won second prize and $600 in the oral presentation category with her research “Birth and Barriers: Examining Perinatal Mental Health and Opioid Crisis and Treatment Availability.” A third year student, Beck is also majoring in Public Policy and Lyman Briggs College - Neuroscience, and is a member of the Honors College. Her research mentor is Dr. Claire Margerison.
“For this project, I have developed a methodology to create a database of perinatal mental health providers in California based on the information from the Perinatal Mental Health Provider Directory,” Beck wrote. “Ultimately, multiple maps, with some examining the overlap and interaction between variables were produced. The relationships observed in the maps will drive further exploration and the development of quantitative representatives of the data.”
Monis won second prize and $600 in the poster presentation category with his research “The Chance to Buy an Illegal Drug: Disparities in Exposure Across Race-Ethnicity Subgroups Over Time, 2002–2024.” Monis is also a third-year student whose majors are Data Science, World Politics, and Computational & Applied Mathematics. He is a member of the Honors College and his research mentor is Dr. James C. Anthony.
“My main aim is to estimate the occurrence of drug purchase opportunities with attention to variation across United States Census Bureau-defined race-ethnicity subgroups,” Monis wrote. “The results reveal significant disparities in drug purchase opportunities. ... These findings suggest that the ‘chance to buy’ is a critical, though often neglected, environmental factor that governs variations in actual drug use. By focusing on this ‘agent exposure opportunity,’ this research provides a metric for understanding the structural and social availability of substances across different communities.”
You can see Monis’s poster and hear his description here: https://symposium.foragerone.com/drs2026/presentations/76884
The Diversity Research Showcase provides undergraduate students space to discuss their research with peers, faculty, and staff in a supportive and constructive atmosphere.
This year included roughly 40 undergraduate participants across poster and oral presentation categories. Both Honors and non-Honors students brought new perspectives on research topics such as: fast fashion, art as medicine, prenatal care, modern supply chains, and AI breast cancer detection, among others.
Also presenting this year was Political Science Pre-law third-year A’Nyah Banta whose research is “Policies That Can Effectively Address the Neglect of Mental Health Care Among Incarcerated Populations with research mentor Dr. John Waller.
Provost Laura Lee McIntyre, Ph.D., congratulated the presenters on “pushing the bounds of research and understanding, and leading the way to real-world impact.”
“Thank you to the Honors College and their campus-wide partners who have supported your work and helped make this opportunity possible,” said McIntyre in virtual remarks.
Erika Crews, the Honors College director of student success and community engagement, was a main organizer of the showcase.
“Diversity research helps us better understand the realities of our communities and the systems that shape them,” Crews said. “Especially now, funding this work is a meaningful investment in rigorous scholarship that informs practice and contributes to more equitable outcomes.”