Original research by Hope students on nearly 200 different topics will be highlighted during the college’s 25th annual A. Paul and Carol C. Schaap Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity on Friday, April 17, starting at 2:30 p.m. at the Richard and Helen DeVos Fieldhouse on the Hope College campus in Holland. The public is invited and admission is free.
The celebration is designed to spotlight the quality and importance of student-faculty collaborative research at the college. This year’s event will address topics ranging from drinking water quality in Zambia, to optimizing protein digestion methods, understanding the impact of windmill designs on migrating birds to studying patient handling techniques to reduce caregiver injuries.
The April 17 celebration will feature 195 research projects presented by 363 Hope students, who conducted the work with 105 faculty mentors at Hope as well as off-campus. The students and their projects will represent 26 departments and programs across all of the college’s academic divisions — the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural and applied sciences. For the fiscal 2025 year, Hope College faculty, staff, and students received $2,873,765 in external funding to support 36 research, outreach, public service and educational awards.
The event timeline is as follows:
- Celebration Kickoff from 2:30–2:45 p.m. at the DeVos Fieldhouse
- Poster & Laptop Presentations from 2:45–4:15 p.m. at the DeVos Fieldhouse
- Senior Exhibition from 3–4 p.m. at the DePree Art Center
- Oral Presentations from 3:30–5:05 p.m. at the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication
- Performing Arts Presentations from 3:30–5:05 p.m. at the Jim and Eileen Heeringa Dance Wing
Hundreds of Hope students engage in research with faculty mentors part-time during the school year and full-time for several weeks each summer. In addition, Hope students regularly present their research at regional and national conferences (74 times this academic year) and publish their research as co-authors with their faculty mentors. This academic year, students also published 30 articles or scholarly chapters and submitted eight papers for publication.
Most of the presentations will feature posters illustrating the projects, with students on-hand to discuss their work. The displays fill the courts and concourse of the fieldhouse. About two dozen of the students will also make brief oral presentations about their research in either the Martha Miller Center (3:30-5:05 p.m.) and the Jim and Eileen Heeringa Dance Wing at the DeWitt Theatre from 3:30-5:05 p.m.
Hope first held the celebration in 2001. Underwritten by Gentex Corporation for the last three years, the event was named in honor of A. Paul and Carol Schaap, who have long been ardent supporters of Hope and the sciences. Hope schedules this annual event before National Undergraduate Research Week — designated by the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) — which is April 20-24.
To inquire about accessibility or if you need accommodations to fully participate in the event, please email accommodations@hope.edu. Updates related to events are posted when available at hope.edu/calendar in the individual listings.
About Collaborative Faculty-Student Research at Hope
Research has a long and storied history at Hope. More than 100 years ago, biologist Dr. Samuel O. Mast designed research laboratory space for the college’s Van Raalte Hall, which opened in 1903. The late Dr. Gerrit Van Zyl, who taught chemistry at the college from 1923 to 1964, was widely recognized for developing research-based learning at Hope in its modern sense.
Hope has received national recognition in a variety of ways through the years for its success in teaching through collaborative faculty-student research and for the high quality of the research itself. The 2026 Best Colleges guide published by U.S. News & World Report, boosted Hope’s 2025 ranking from #31 to #22 nationwide this year among all of the country’s 4,000 degree-granting postsecondary institutions — including institutions such as Yale, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and the University of Michigan — for undergraduate research and creative projects, reflecting Hope’s deep commitment to student-faculty collaboration and hands-on discovery. Hope is also one of 28 undergraduate-only institutions recognized in the “research colleges and universities” category by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Among other acclaim historically, in 1994 Project Kaleidoscope named the program in the natural applied sciences a “Whole Program That Works” — a model for other institutions to emulate, and in 1998 Hope was one of only 10 liberal arts institutions in the nation to be recognized for innovation and excellence in science instruction by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with an “Award for the Integration of Research and Education” (AIRE). Based on the college’s proven history of excellence, CUR chose Hope to present the national webinar “Transformational Learning through Undergraduate Research and Creative Performance” in April 2011. In 2017, Hope was one of only three colleges or universities nationwide to receive a Campus-Wide Award for Undergraduate Research Accomplishments (AURA) from CUR and one of only nine to have received the recognition since the award was established in 2015.