Presenting my poster with my thesis data!
Author: Breanna McCall | Major: Psychology | Semester: Fall 2025
My name is Breanna McCall, and I am a senior Psychology major with a Medical Humanities minor at the University of Arkansas. My current work for my undergraduate thesis is relating early adversity/stressors, hippocampal volume, and PLEs (psychotic-like experiences). With a heavily increasing prevalence of early stressors and adversity, the field of understanding how early life stressors contribute to negative health outcomes is becoming more important by the day. When experiencing a type of early adversity (Ex. Abuse, neglect, household violence ETC.) there are significant impacts on not only brain structures but also future health outcomes.
From September 2nd-6th I was lucky enough to attend the ISPNE (International Society of PsychoNeuroEndocrinology) conference in New Orleans, LA. I attended this conference with a few other current and former honors members of the A SCAN lab at the university as well as our advisor Dr. Grant Shields. All students attending, including myself, presented a poster with data collected within the lab as personal thesis projects, or thesis projects with data from other datasets. This was the first time I had ever presented data at a conference, and I was presenting data from my own thesis project that I am currently doing further data analyses for.
The attendees there are some pretty big faces in the field of psychology and neuroscience, although there were a lot of attendees there for other topics outside of stress that were very interesting. I got some questions and feedback from several people. Many people had various questions about the statistical methods I used (which were not very complicated for my current level) and wanted to know more about the reason I chose to do those analyses. Some of these questions I was unsure of how to answer so then I asked them to elaborate on those processes and why they were important to include in the future. Several people also offered compliments for the layout and design for my poster which I inspired from Dr. Shields posters in the past. There were also other presenters from the UofA in the graduate program, and it was awesome to see their progress on their doctoral theses.
Dr. Shields introduced us to several of his own collaborators which were also in the field of stress work, and it was incredible to meet all these collaborators from around the world that had amazing presentations. For example, I met a woman that Dr. Shields has collaborated with from Germany and talked to her about the ISPNE 2026 conference which is being held in Germany, as well as practice the German speaking skills I had been learning on the side. Dr. Shields has also asked if I would be interested in attending the ISPNE conference next year in Germany with him! As of now, I am not 100% sure if I can attend that conference but if I can I’m sure it would be an equally enriching experience to travel to the conference again.
If I had to offer some advice for other honors students interested in attending conferences, it would be to not be so nervous and stressed about presenting. Even though many people at the conference had years of experience working and conducting studies in the Psychoneuroendocrinology field, they were still very understanding of the progress of undergraduate students and were not trying to trick me or make me scared. They are genuinely interested in your work and want you to be the future of that research. Be proud to show your work and don’t compare yourself to people who have more experience than you!