Congratulations to Arnaldo Franco, a Biology with Specialization in Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, and Genetics (CMG) major, who was recently selected as a Barry Goldwater Scholar! Arnaldo is one of four BU students this year to receive a Goldwater scholarship, a national honor awarded to students based on a strong commitment to, and potential for, a research career in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. The award will provide scholarship funds for Arnaldo during his senior year.
Arnaldo has performed research with multiple laboratories during his time at BU including Dr. Kathleen Morgan’s lab in BU’s Sargent College learning lab techniques and about cardiovascular research, Dr. Khalid Shah’s lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital creating primary and metastatic mouse melanoma models for stem cell-based immunotherapy, and Dr. Sylvette Ayala’s pharmacology and toxicology lab in the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Science Campus researching how Huntington’s disease impairs mitochondrial DNA repair in mouse models. This past academic year, Arnaldo worked with Dr. Horacio Frydman in the Biology Department, developing in vivo fly and mosquito models to use in bacterial transfection with Wolbachia. Wolbachia is a bacterium that has been shown to prevent transmission of dengue, Zika, and other mosquito-borne diseases. In the upcoming fall semester, Arnaldo is planning to return to Dr. Shah’s lab to continue his work in melanoma research. For career goals, Arnaldo is working to become a surgical, clinical, and research oncologist. Currently, he is shadowing an oncologist at Hospital Oncologico in the University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences Campus to learn about the clinical side of oncology. We wish Arnaldo the best of luck with his academic and career goals. Congratulations to him again on his outstanding achievements and his well-earned selection as a Barry Goldwater Scholar.