Born in Odessa, Ukraine, Viktoriia Vozharenko moved to Lancaster with her family in 2018. Despite living in the U.S. for a short time before graduating from high school, she was accepted to all the colleges to which she applied, but she said that Penn State was her first choice.
Many students at Penn State Berks take advantage of the opportunity to conduct research, working one-on-one with faculty members on campus. To celebrate these students’ success, Penn State Berks recently held its first Berks Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium on April 25. The next day, students presented at the Higher Education Council of Berks County Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference, hosted by Reading Area Community College.
Penn State Berks hosted the “Symposium on Community-Based Participatory Research: Food Security and Access for Healthy Futures” on March 19. The objective was to determine how institutions of higher education and community partners can collaborate more effectively to address challenges related to food access and nutritional health. This symposium is part of the “Food Bank Operations Optimization: Data-driven Societal Impact Approach (FOODSIA)” project.
Three Penn State Berks students — Samantha Acker, Kimberly Nicholas and Michelle Surine — received accolades and honors for their research presentation at the Eastern States Communication Association (ECA) in Buffalo, New York, from March 27 to 30.
Editor's note: This program has been postponed and will be rescheduled at a later date. The Penn State Berks global studies program will host a global forum titled "From Penn State to the Field and Back Again: Reflections on a Career in International Research for Development," presented by Katie Tavenner on Monday, April 7.
Sadan Kulturel-Konak, professor of management information systems and the director of the Flemming Creativity, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development Center at Penn State Berks, has been selected as VentureWell Ecosystem Futures Fellows for the inaugural 2025 cohort.
Faculty librarians conduct scholarly research across disciplines and with far-reaching impacts. Penn State University Libraries faculty librarians’ research is not only impactful, it is highly productive, as evidenced by a study published in the July 2023 issue of College & Research Libraries, the official, peer-reviewed scholarly research journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Diana Stoltzfus has certainly made the most of her college experience at Penn State Berks, from conducting research on the effects of virtual reality on exercise, to earning a 4.0 GPA, to being a star player on the women’s volleyball team. She will graduate as student marshal during Berks' fall 2024 commencement ceremony, set for 10 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 21, at the Santander Arena in Reading. The title of her commencement speech is "The Power of Perseverance."
The benefits of virtual reality (VR) appear to extend beyond video games, according to Penn State Berks senior kinesiology major Diana Stoltzfus and Associate Professor of Kinesiology Praveen Veerabhadrappa. They recently found that using VR during exercise can improve the experience and reduce the perceived effort for college students.
A Penn State faculty project team has received a two-year Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant totaling $104,771 to create and host a National Forum for Privacy Literacy Standards and Competencies. The forum will be held March 10-11, 2025, at the Penn Stater Hotel and Conference Center and online.
