Mississippi State University faculty, staff and students brought home top awards at the recent Southern Public Relations Federation Lantern Awards ceremony in Biloxi.

“Curiosity is the foundation for every scientist’s motivation to understand complex problems,” said Chandler Woo, a senior chemistry major at Mississippi State. “Exploring the uncharted and finding answers to a problem that has not been successfully solved is what excites me about research in general.”

Mississippi State University is part of a European-American collaboration studying how human activities, like fertilizer use and polluting, are impacting nitrogen-fixing plants which are crucial for maintaining healthy ecosystems by adding nitrogen to the soil.