Delta State biology students, faculty present research at national conference

Olivia Pharr put the Mississippi Delta into a scientific conversation well beyond Cleveland County with a poster on “Testing of Manmade Chemicals on Mississippi Delta Plants,” work she presented at the 2025 Mississippi IDeA/EPSCoR Conference. The environmental science and biology major’s project was based on research led by Dr. Nina Baghai-Riding, professor of biology and environmental science at Delta State University.

That presentation fits the way Delta State says its biology program is built. The Division of Mathematics and Sciences, part of the College of Nursing, Health, and Sciences, offers a Bachelor of Science in Biology with General Biology and Pre-Health Biology concentrations, and says students have opportunities to participate in research and present at conferences. The university also describes a 14:1 student-to-faculty ratio, a scale that gives faculty room to mentor students closely as they move from lab work to public presentation.

Delta State has already shown that conference participation is not a one-off. In 2025, the university said 12 undergraduate students and seven faculty members from the Division of Mathematics and Sciences attended the 89th Annual Meeting of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences in Biloxi. Their work included three oral presentations and 14 poster presentations, a sizable showing for a campus in Cleveland that regularly ties classroom learning to public scholarship.

For Cleveland County, the value goes beyond campus pride. Research on manmade chemicals in Mississippi Delta plants connects directly to the region’s environment, where questions about land, crops and contamination have everyday consequences. It also feeds into careers that matter locally, especially through Delta State’s pre-health track, where students can build experience for medicine, public health and other health-related fields.

The university’s biology emphasis on research and conference participation gives students a route into those fields while keeping faculty at the center of the process. In Olivia Pharr’s case, the subject was rooted in the Delta itself, but the presentation gave that work a wider audience and placed Cleveland’s university among the institutions contributing to scientific discussion beyond Mississippi.