The Data Minions from Mount Holyoke College were named Best in Show at the 2026 ASA Five College DataFest on Sunday. This marks the second consecutive year that a team Mount Holyoke has won the award, and as a result the DataFest trophy is headed back to South Hadley.

The ASA Five College DataFest is a nationally-coordinated undergraduate data analysis competition. 120 students from across the Five Colleges registered for the event, which took place last weekend at the new School of Public Health building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. 20 teams gave a four-minute presentation on Sunday afternoon to a panel of judges. Four schools who are not part of the Five Colleges also contributed teams: Williams College, Elms College, Western New England University, and Holyoke Community College. Seven of those teams took home awards, as detailed below.

Best in Show

Data Minions: Isabella Delmonte, Sophie Kahn, Chloe Zhou (Mount Holyoke)

Best in Group (Panel A)

The UNConscious Statisticians: Benham Cobb, Irene Yang, Alex Choi, Maddy Wu, Ashley Kim (Williams)

Best in Group (Panel B)

LLMao: Shreyansh Misra, Jineshwar Nariani, Shivansh Soni, Fuming Zhang (UMass)

Best in Group (Panel C)

Data Minions: Isabella Delmonte, Sophie Kahn, Chloe Zhou (Mount Holyoke)

Most Topical Research Question

n = 4: Zoe Khan, Amber Zhang, Gemma Qu, Ace Carpenter (Smith)

Best Use of Survival Curve (a.k.a., the Kaplan-Meier Award)

Bebu’s Research Team: Tyler Karp, Erika Salvador, Helena Henson, Rania Adouim (Amherst)

Best Business Pitch

The Outliers: Ames Azogue Irigoyen, Kira Hou, Swikriti Dumre, Shengye Shen, Yuli Qin (Smith)

Best Storytelling with Data

Medtrics: Samantha Lau, Justin Fung, Ethan Au Yeung (UMass)