This year, eight GRS students and eight CAS alumni were among the 2,000 winners of National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. The fellowships, which offer three years of financial support for graduate students in science and engineering, provide valuable career boosts for young scientists deemed particularly promising in their fields. Congratulations to all CAS/GRS winners!
Sarabeth Buckley
Buckley is an Earth Science PhD candidate who is advised by Associate Professor Wally Fulweiler in the Fuilweiler Lab. She is now measuring sediment accretion rates, litter decomposition rates, and respiration rates in salt marshes around the Long Island Sound to determine whether they are keeping up with sea level rise. She is also interested in carbon sequestration and harmful algal blooms. Additionally, Buckley is on the officer board for BU’s Graduate Women in Science and Engineering, and is the lead coordinator for the Science Girl’s Club.
Andrew Christ
After spending a year conducting fieldwork aboard an icebreaker in the Antarctic Peninsula in 2013, Christ joined GRS to study paleoclimate and is now part of Professor of Earth & Environment David Marchant’s Antarctic Research Group. His research focus has shifted from glacial marine environments to the terrestrial realm to study past expansions of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) onto volcanic islands in McMurdo Sound and its contributions to global sea level rise during deglaciation. With help from the NSF grant, Christ will explore the nature, timing, and extent of fluctuations of the WAIS during the Last Glacial Maximum and earlier times during the Quaternary. He will be returning to the Antarctic’s volcanic islands in McMurdo Sound to continue his research.
Kayla Harrison Finch
Finch is currently a doctoral student in GRS’ Developmental Science program. Before attending BU, she completed a two-year research assistantship at the University of Maryland’s Child Development Lab. Finch’s research interests include language acquisition and the underlying neural mechanisms in both children with and without autism. At BU’s Center for Autism Research Excellence (CARE), she is involved with the Infant Sibling Project; this project aims to identify risk markers for autism spectrum disorders or language delays that may be present during the first year of life. Identifying high-risk infants at this early stage would allow for early intervention to begin much sooner than is currently possible, greatly increasing the potential for such treatments to have a lasting, positive impact on children and their families.
Kerilyn Omuro
Before studying neuroscience at BU, Omuro spent two years at San Diego State University doing research on transcription factor control of neural regeneration and stem cell regulation in planarians. She is interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of disease and neurodegeneration, pursuing translational research, and developing therapeutics. Her NSF grant proposal focused on microglial enhancement of neuronal differentiation and functional transplantation.
Paula Ortet
As a first-year graduate student in the Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry program, Ortet is taking part in an interdisciplinary research project aimed at developing small molecules capable of targeting challenging protein-protein interaction targets. She plans to use the NSF grant to disseminate her work by attending national and international conferences, as well as contribute to the BU community by mentoring undergraduates through the University’s UROP program and working to promote the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM research.
George Pantelopulos
Pantelopulos is expected to receive a BS in chemistry this May from Temple University, and will matriculate to BU in the fall to pursue his PhD in chemistry. His research specialties include theoretical and computational chemistry; more particularly, he uses molecular simulations to study how proteins fold, ligands bind, and cell membranes move. Pantelopulos is currently working on a revision of his first first-author publication.
Mustafa Saifuddin
Saifuddin is a PhD student in the Department of Biology’s Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution program and the Finzi Lab. His work involves looking at how microbial species respond to climate change, how soil microbes effect the amount of carbon stored in soils or respired to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and how soil microbes regulate nitrogen availability in forest ecosystems. Saifuddin plans to work on the development of a mechanistic model of decomposition representing belowground carbon and nitrogen processed by microbes to look at the relationships between microbial community composition and ecosystem processes. He will also study the variation in the distribution and abundance of a particular guild of soil microbes and nitrogen-fixing bacteria across forest biomes.
Emily Speranza
Sperenza is part of CAS’ Bioinformatics program and is currently working with Assistant Professor of Biology Cynthia Bradham. The Bradham Lab’s studies the embryogenesis of the sea urchin Lytechinus variegatus (Lv) from a systems level approach. The focus of Sperenza’s project is on developing a pipeline to isolate potential long non-coding RNAs or IncRNAs (long transcripts that have been shown to be important in gene regulation in development and human diseases) from the transcriptome and functionally analyze candidates. She aims to expand the knowledge of how IncRNA are functioning during development, and to annotate IncRNA in the sea urchin transcriptome.
Macayla Donegan (CAS’12)
As an undergraduate studying neuroscience, Donegan worked in the Laboratory for Cognitive Neurobiology under Dr. Howard Eichenbaum studying the role of the hippocampus learning and memory in the mammalian brain. She also worked with Dr. Doug Rosene, studying aging. Donegan received several UROP stipends, wrote for undergraduate neuroscience journal The Nerve, and taught neuroscience to Boston-area high schoolers through InterAxon and the NE 099 course provided on campus. She is currently a graduate student in neuroscience at Columbia University.
Denise Grunenfelder (CAS’10)
Grunenfelder was part of the Porco Research Group, which focused on chemical synthesis, while she studied chemistry at BU. Now a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, Grunenfelder conducts research in the field of natural product synthesis, with an emphasis on the development of new synthetic methods that facilitate the construction of complex molecules, in the Reisman Lab.
Grigori Guitchounts (CAS’11)
During his undergraduate career, Guitchounts majored in neuroscience and was an integral part of the department’s student journal, “The Nerve.” He worked as a technician at BU for two years after graduating and developed novel tools for electrophysiological recording in small behaving animals. Guitchounts is currently a first-year PhD student in the Program in Neuroscience at Harvard University, where he plans to continue investigating new ways to monitor neural activity while asking how neurons process information and contribute to behavior.
Samuel Leone (CAS/GRS’13)
Leone graduated from BU with a BA/MA in economics and Arabic. He was named a Harold S. Case Scholar, A Trustee Scholar, a College Scholar upon the recommendation of Nobel Prize winner and CAS faculty member Sheldon Glashow, and was given the College Prize for Excellence in Economics.
Eileen Nalley (CAS’09)
Nalley graduated cum laude from BU with a BA in environmental science and was a National Merit Scholar. Now a PhD student at the University of Hawaii Manoa’s Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, her research focuses on conservation. She is particularly interested in exploring how anthropogenic impacts in the Main Hawaiin Islands are driving shifts in dietary specialization in herbivorous reef fish, and if human-induced stress and habitat degradation will elicit different dietary responses.
Nicole Repina (CAS’13)
Repina received her BA in biochemistry and molecular biology at BU, where she received the College Prize for Excellence in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and the Harold C. Case Scholarship. She was an undergraduate researcher in the Gilmore Lab; her studies focused on the environmental stress response in the sea anemone Nematostella vectenis. Repina is currently a PhD student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate Program in Bioengineering. There, she is part of the Schaffer Lab and is currently working on her project, “Engineering optical tools for light-induced control of stem cell signaling pathways.”
Emma Rosenfeld (CAS’14)
While double majoring in physics and mathematics and BU, Rosenfeld received the College Prize in Physics, the Clare Booth Luce Scholar Award, and graduate summa cum laude. She was a student researcher for the Department of Physics, where she wrote Monte Carlo simulations of a new neutron detector technology for Homeland Security, among other things. Rosenfeld is now a PhD in Physics candidate at Harvard University, and is a student researcher in Dr. Ronald Walsworth’s group. There she is helping to pursue a novel approach to magnetometry and quantum science using electron spins associated with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers in diamond. She also received the An Wang Fellowshi, which is given to a STEM PhD student at Harvard on behalf of the recommendation of the department.
Anastasia Voevodin (CAS’14)
While she was studying chemistry as an undergraduate at BU, Voevodin was a researcher in the Beeler Research Group, a multidisciplinary research group with focus in areas of medicinal chemistry and photochemistry. Her projects explored the utilization of microfluidic platforms to enable photochemical reaction development in the preparation of targeted synthetic products. She is now a PhD candidate in chemistry at Columbia University.
In addition to these GRS students and CAS alumni, Jasmine Kwasa and Kyle Rollins Hansen—both biomedical engineering graduate students at BU—also received NSF Graduate Research Fellowships.