Rapid Fire Research 2025 Delivers Science at Speed, Cash Prizes

Being brief can be a challenge for people knee-deep in a science topic. Being brief and engaging? That’s a taller order still. But participants in this year’s Rapid Fire Research event were up to the task, delivering synopses of wide-ranging research topics with just four slides in four minutes or less.

“Communicating science and making it accessible to people is getting really important,” said Breanna Cahoon, science senator for the College of Arts and Sciences and organizer of this year’s event. Whether students plan to apply for graduate school, need funding for a project or are building public support, they need to be able to translate what they know into something they can share, she said.

And this event offered another kind of motivation for effective science communication — three $500 prizes offered by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources leadership, awarded based on a student’s ability to make a topic accessible in the short time allotted, their public speaking skills, creativity and the design of the four presentation slides.

“There's so much information you need to digest as a researcher, it can be a challenge to step back and talk about it in a new way, especially when you've been looking at that information for so long,” said Elijah Manwill from the Department of Environment and Society.

The audience at Wednesday’s event experienced an array of presentations from across campus units, including undergraduate and graduate work — from the impact of ultraviolet light on the quality of dehydrated food, presented by Sajad Karami, to Mufti Ahmed’s take on Utahns’ migration patterns under climate change.

Manwill, a geography major, took a third place win with a succinct explanation about tracking food resources to predict military action. Second place went to Surbhi Verma from the Department of Plants, Soils and Climate Science who concisely described ways to pick a healthier tomato. First place went to Sarah McBride, majoring in family and consumer sciences education, who summed up the ways a financial education impacts the lives of young adults.

Rapid Fire Research is a tradition the College of Arts and Sciences intends to pull forward from the merger, Cahoon said. She is grateful leadership from both participating colleges was so enthusiastic about supporting and participating, she said.

This event at USU was initiated in Fall 2021 by Utah State alum Manuel Santana, who got the idea after participating in a similar gathering at another university.

“It’s hard to make an impact with your research,” Santana said, “if you can’t properly communicate your ideas and results. With Rapid Fire, I envisioned an opportunity where students could practice publicly presenting their research in a casual, relaxed atmosphere, while learning about all the different kinds of research Aggies are pursuing throughout the university.”