Nik Rajkovic / news@whmi.com

Pinckney High School science teacher Stacy Trosin was surprised Tuesday morning with a $12,000 check to further her project called "Antibiotic Resistance in Soil."

The funds come from the Voya Foundation's Unsung Heroes Project.

Trosin's research is a collaboration with Tufts University, where students act as citizen scientists, collecting and analyzing samples from areas they suspect may harbor resistant bacteria.

"The money will provide for polymeras thermocyclers is what they're called, and they do the polymeras chain reaction. They amplify the DNA, the thermocyclers do, and then the students will take that amplified DNA and run it through a gel electrophoresis to separate the bands in the DNA so we can decide or look at the data to see what it tells us about antibiotic resistant bacteria," Trosin told WHMI News.

Trosin's project is one of the top three winners of the 2025 national Voya Unsung Heroes program, and the $10,000 grant is in addition to a $2,000 grant announced last month when state winners were selected.

"We send out applications, it's on our website. A lot of our Voya employees and advisors that work in the K-12 market space, they also market the program to let schools know we have a lot clients we work with, but we're really big in education. We have over 14 million customers and a lot of them are educators," said Millard Coleman, regional vice president for Voya Financial.

Details of Voya's Unsung Heroes program is linked below.