MANRRS 2024

By: Dr. Zakiya H. Leggett

We were fortunate enough to take 4 high school students, 2 undergraduates (Dominic James and Andrea Casallas) and 2 graduate students (Summer Lauder and Darius Ledbetter) to represent CNR at the MANRRS 2024 conference in Chicago. The 4 high school students will form the Executive Board for our new Triangle Area Junior MANRRS chapter.

Even though we had one of the smallest and newest Junior MANRRS chapters (some chapters brought over 50 high school students), all four of our students competed in the Conference National Competitions (2 in the essay contest and 2 in the Impromptu Speech contest). While none of them placed in the top 3 this year we did have one student (Ethan Boggs) selected for the MANRRS CHS Scholarship for Seniors. He will be attending NCSU majoring in Wildlife with a minor in Forest Management in the Fall. Ethan has participated in our High School Summer Research Program over the last 2 summers and is super excited about joining CNR.

We had one undergraduate student (Andrea Casallas) and one graduate student (Summer Lauder) participate in the National Conference Competitions and they both placed. Summer placed first in the Graduate Poster Competition and Andrea placed second in the Undergraduate Oral Research Competition. Andrea is one of our former high school summer research students that has continued doing undergrad research working with doctoral student (Tyrik Cooper).