A Health Science major, Ava Cresto will establish a Care Closet at Prisma Health’s Greenville Memorial Emergency Department to provide patients with basic necessities and small gestures of encouragement.

The idea developed while Cresto was shadowing physicians through Furman’s MacDonald Medicine Program. During that experience, she observed a man being treated for trench foot — a painful but preventable condition caused by a lack of shoes and prolonged exposure to harsh conditions.Thishighlighted one of the many hard realities faced by patients who lack basic necessities, demonstrating the need ofr a care closet to support a patient’s comfort and dignity alongside their direct medical care.

Working with Prisma Health Volunteer Services,ED leadership, and current USCSOM medical students, Cresto plans to open the closet in the fall and restock it throughout the year. She is also designing the project to be sustained by future Furman students, particularly through IACH.

The project complements Cresto’s long-term goal of becoming a physician who values and cares for the whole person, not just the illness one faces.

A double major in History and Politics & International Affairs, Nathan Johnson is interested in pursuing a future in AI governance and policy.  He will spend his senior year creating the Greenville AI Initiative for Nonprofits, or GAIN, with the goal of helping Greenville nonprofits explore practical applications for artificial intelligence.

Through GAIN, Johnson will serve as a pro bono AI consultant for local non-profits to help organizations  identify operational challenges where AI tools could be useful, develop solutions tailored to those needs and document the work as case studies that can be shared with the broader nonprofit community.

The project grew from Johnson’s internships with Greater Good Greenville, the Nicholtown Child and Family Collaborative and the Greenville County Historical Society. Across those experiences, he found that nonprofit staff often recognized the potential of AI but were uncertain about how the technology could apply to their organizations.

Johnson will spend the fall conducting focus groups and interviews with nonprofit staff before launching GAIN and beginning to accept pro-bono clients in the spring.

An Elementary Education major, Alie Mason will create a free, rotating literacy trail that combines reading, technology and community participation.

The trail,  to be located around the Furman lake and at Conestee Nature Preserve, will feature QR codes linking visitors to recordings of community members reading children’s books. The books will explore themes such as Black History Month, empathy, inclusion and disability awareness. Each station will also connect to a family scavenger hunt tied to that month’s featured book.

The project grew from Mason’s summer teaching experience with multilingual children at YouthBASE, where she observed the challenges created by summer literacy gaps when children do not have regular opportunities to be read to at home.

Mason is working with her literacy methods professor, local libraries and Furman computer science students to develop a project that requires minimal upkeep and can continue beyond her senior year. The trail could also be adapted by other schools or parks.

The project aligns with Mason’s plans to pursue Furman’s Master of Arts in Literacy and her goal of expanding access to literacy opportunities.

A Mathematics-Economics major, Anastasiia Savchenko, will pilot workshops that provide low-income parents in Greenville County research-based strategies for creating stronger learning environments at home for young children. At the same time, she will study the impact of those workshops on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The project brings together her interests in early childhood development, economics and access to opportunity.

The workshops will focus on practical activities such as language-rich interaction, reading routines and structured play. Families with children ages 3 to 5 will be randomly assigned to either attend the workshops or serve as a comparison group, allowing Savchenko to measure the program’s effect with the same rigor used in clinical and economic research.

The project builds on research Savchenko conducted through Furman’s Humanities Lab, which found a highly positive and significant relationship between cognitive stimulation during early childhood and later educational and economic outcomes, and also work that she did as part of a research fellowship in economist John List’s lab at the University of Chicago, where she studied the Chicago Heights Early Childhood Center model.

Ultimately, Savchenko’s project aims to reframe the policy conversation around children’s outcomes – shifting the focus away from fixed parental characteristics like income or education, and toward parenting practices that can be taught, adopted, and scaled at low cost. Savchenko plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Economics after graduating from Furman, and sees this project –  from designing the intervention to running the analysis – as hands-on preparation for the kind of field research she hopes to build a career on.

A Sustainability Science major with minors in Data Analytics and Latin American Studies, Nabila Wilson will produce a series of documentary shorts exploring how people across the Carolinas experienced Hurricane Helene and how they relate to the natural world around them.

Wilson, who grew up in Houston and experienced major flooding herself, developed the project as a way to explore climate change through personal and local stories. Rather than focusing primarily on statistics or political debate, the series will center on conversations about people, their communities and their relationships with the places they call home.

Working with Furman’s Communication Studies Department, which is providing filming equipment and mentorship, and the Shi Institute, which will assist with community connections, Wilson plans to release several episodes throughout the academic year. A longtime storyteller who has run a YouTube channel and interned with Citizens Climate Lobby, Wilson plans to build on the documentary experience as she pursues a career in climate communications.