studentspotlight

Student Researcher

April 19, 2022

Student Researcher Award

Elijah Counterman has been rewarded for his excellence in research by winning the College of Science University Student Researchers Award.

“This is a great honor for me and comes with significant recognition for my mentor’s work and the work I’ve been fortunate to do with him,” said Counterman. “I feel extremely grateful to receive such an award!”

Under the guidance of Sean Lawley, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Counterman has been working on answers to some fundamental questions in the area of pharmacokinetics, the branch of pharmacology concerned with the movement of drugs within the body. Counterman has focused on the following question: if a patient misses a dose of medication, and they realize it the following day, should they take one pill or two to compensate for the missed dose?

Elijah Counterman

“The mathematical models are interesting because of their direct implication to medicine and the health and well-being of a patient,”

 

“These models use random variables to mimic the unpredictability and forgetfulness of human beings.” said Counterman. The models Counterman used were developed from some of the work of renowned Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős and others in the 1930s.

“I’m interested in the research because I plan to graduate from the U next spring and attend medical school in the fall of 2023,” said Counterman. “Questions such as these—where math and medicine/biology overlap—are extremely applicable and interesting. I want to make an impact in the math world as a physician researcher. Mathematics seems to be one of the least utilized, yet potentially revolutionary fields, in the developing world of medical research.”

Counterman says he has always enjoyed studying math. He excelled in the subject in middle school, which allowed him to take undergraduate math classes at the U as a sophomore in high school. By the time he graduated from Highland High School in Salt Lake City, he was more than halfway through the coursework needed to obtain a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. “I love math because of its magnificently wide range of applications as well as its ability to answer fundamental questions,” he said.

Counterman has praise for the Math Department, noting that the professors are supportive, approachable, and easy to talk to. He has enjoyed the relatively small class size and the different teaching styles. He is impressed with the department’s research opportunities, teaching excellence, and reputation of the faculty.

Counterman’s entire college experience at the U has occurred during the pandemic. He has found online classes difficult because he thrives on interpersonal and face-to-face instruction.

Outside of math, Counterman makes the time to play violin and guitar. He enjoys running, hiking, skiing, and occasionally writing poetry. He is very involved with his local faith organization and in serving the community through those efforts.

Counterman’s awards from the U and at Highland High School

  • College of Science University Student Researchers Award: spring 2022
  • Calvin Wilcox Memorial Scholarship fall 2022 - spring 2023
  • Dean’s List: fall 2021
  • Mathematics Departmental Scholarship: fall 2021 - spring 2022
  • Dean’s List: spring 2021
  • Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program participant: spring 2021
  • Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program participant: fall 2020
  • Dean’s List: fall 2020
  • Mathematics Departmental Scholarship: fall 2020 - spring 2021
  • College of Science Freshman Scholarship in Science and Mathematics: fall 2020 - spring 2021
  • Utah Flagship Scholarship: fall 2020 - spring 2024
  • Mathematics Sterling Scholar: spring 2020
  • Valedictorian: spring 2020 Highland High School
  • High School University Program Participant: fall 2017 - spring 2020
  • National Honors Society: fall 2018 - spring 2019
  • Academic All State (Cross Country 2019)

by Michele Swaner, first published @ physics.utah.edu

 

Goldwater Scholar

April 1, 2022

Goldwater Scholar

Rock climbing in Southern Utah.

Alison Wang, a junior in chemistry, has been awarded a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship for 2022-23.

Alison enrolled at the U in 2019 and declared chemistry as her major, with her eyes set on going to medical school. However, her honors general chemistry professor, Luisa Whittaker-Brooks, encouraged her to seek a research opportunity in Caroline Saouma’s lab as a first-year-student.

Unfortunately the pandemic delayed Alison's start to lab work until fall of her sophomore year, but she came to love research – so much so that she now is planning to enroll in either an M.D./Ph.D. or Ph.D. program.

Her research is focused on mechanistic studies for the electrocatalytic reduction to CO2 to CO or formate at Mn centers. She was a UROP scholar (twice), and participated in the department of chemistry’s NSF-funded REU program last summer.

Alison Wang

These opportunities helped Alison gain valuable skills in communicating science, which she refined in February at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research (UCUR). She secured funding through the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) to present a poster at the spring national American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in San Diego in March, where she won the division of inorganic chemistry’s undergraduate poster award (one of only five!).

The conference also allowed her to explore other areas of chemistry, and has helped her hone in on the field of bioinorganic chemistry for her Ph.D. She clearly is a chemist who is off to a fantastic research career!

Alison is a first-generation Chinese American, having lived all over the US before graduating high school in Utah. In addition to her studies and research, Alison works at the Utah Lions Eye Bank and as a waitress. In her spare time, she enjoys rock climbing, eating at Osteria Amore, and is helping to train a guide dog.

In addition to the Goldwater scholarship Alison has also received the Laya F. Kesner and Leon Watters Memorial Award, and the Undergraduate Research Scholarship from the University of Utah Department of Chemistry.

Savannah Romney

March 30, 2022

Savannah Romney

Savannah Romney is a double-major in biology and math at the University of Utah.

Savannah participated in the ACCESS Scholars scholarship program for entering first-year students who are dedicated to expanding science education to all sectors of our society, including to women who traditionally have had a harder time breaking “the glass ceiling.” She appears to have shattered that ceiling (so wear your shoes … there’s glass everywhere!)

A Utah native, Savannah commutes to school every day from Draper where she works in the Parkinson lab studying e-coli.

“During my ACCESS year, I have gained confidence in my abilities as a student, leader and scientist,” she says. Savannah talks about how ACCESS connected her with peers who share her passion for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and learning in general. The ACCESS network now includes “Some of my best friends!” she says.

She reminds young people who are considering a university education that life at the U is “fast paced, so balancing academics with your personal life is so important.”

Her favorite ACCESS social was the Star Party at the U’s observatory atop the physics building where the night sky is brought into high relief for researchers and students alike.

“While transitioning to college can be intimidating,” she says, it is comforting to know you are not alone. ACCESS Scholars connected me with the very best advisors, mentors, and peers/friends I could ever hope for!”

To conclude, she says that “if you’re passionate about STEM and want to enhance your college experience, ACCESS Scholars is for you!”

 

by David Pace, first published @biology.utah.edu

Audrey Brown

March 25, 2022

Audrey Brown

Audrey Brown

“One of the biggest things that helped me was connecting with my loved ones.”

When the pandemic first emerged in early 2020 Audrey Brown, HBS’21, found that online classes were novel at first, “but I quickly found myself losing motivation and becoming depressed/anxious due to the day-to-day Zoom monotony and the never-ending doomsday news on social media.” As part of the covid or Zoom college generation, Brown could have put her academic career on hold, pivoted away from a college education… in short given up. But several supportive people, programs and institutions helped her navigate through this singular moment.

“One of the biggest things that helped me early on, the Bountiful native says, “was focusing on connecting with my loved ones. Even something so simple as getting out of my house to go on a walk with my mom was a huge help. I also had to learn to let go of things that were out of my control, and disconnect from the news that was feeding into my anxieties.” Needless to say, those anxieties extended beyond the coronavirus pandemic and included political and social strife unlike most of us can remember in the United States. Then there were challenges from the natural world: a devastating windstorm and the earthquake of 2020.

Aside from family, Brown found support from a bevy of awards and scholarships through the University, College and School of Biological Sciences. Yes, financial help was important, but so was the acknowledgment that came with awards like the AChemS Award for Undergraduate Research, Association for Chemoreception Sciences, 2020; the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Scholar award (UROP); and an Independent REU project award, Department of Mathematics where Brown had matriculated along with her major in biology.

A four-year Presidential scholarship, a Utah Regent’s Scholarship and a College of Science Dean’s scholarship both facilitated and rewarded her achievements, culminating in her graduation with honors, magna cum laude. She even received a marching band performance scholarship during the 2018/19 academic year.

The ACCESS cohort.

Another scholarship, however, was just the tip of an iceberg of networking opportunities and a kind of mentoring that can help young women in STEM, like Brown. That program was ACCESS Scholars, a College of Science initiative now in its thirty-fifth year that represents women and individuals from all dimensions of diversity who embody the program values of excellence, leadership, and gender equity.
Brown claims that the program “jumpstarted my research career and increased my appreciation for science as a whole.” The summer after graduating high school she took an interdisciplinary STEM course which introduced her to diverse scientific topics and where she gained an appreciation for the vast amount of research done at the University of Utah.

Today, she has stayed closely involved with the program and has served as a teaching assistant (TA), mentor, and curriculum developer. The ACCESS program places each student in a research lab where they gain firsthand scientific experience by completing a personal research project. Brown was placed with Dr. Alla Borisyuk, a professor in the Department of Mathematics, and studied the olfactory system. This was done in collaboration with and using the data from the Wachowiak lab at the University of Utah, a lab she joined a couple years later, and stayed in for the remainder of her undergraduate career. “I’m forever grateful that I had the opportunity to be exposed to research early on. I quickly fell in love with it and am excited to continue as I work on my PhD.”

That’s right. Brown is now a candidate for her doctorate in biology. She is just finishing up a rotation in which she gains experience in three different labs before deciding where she will spend the remainder of her career as a graduate student.

And the pandemic, of course, has turned into an endurance test for everyone, including Brown. Two years in and she’s added to her repertoire of coping mechanisms. “I try to remind myself of all the positive things that have happened in my life over these past two years, some of which (ironically) never would have happened if the world hadn’t shut down. Rather than dwell on what might have been, I’ve been pushing myself to look for the positives and be grateful for the good in my life. I think that my advice for anyone struggling to find motivation due to the pandemic (or otherwise) would be to focus on finding positives in life, and in connecting with the people in your own circle of influence.”

"I still play the flute as often as I can"

Brown also finds solace and refuge in music. She plays the flute and the piano. “Music is still one of my favorite hobbies, so I intend to make it a part of my future, though I am no longer in any formal ensembles. I still enjoy playing the flute as often as I can and learning new pieces. I have several family members that also play the flute and I enjoy playing with them on occasion. And I am constantly listening to music of all different genres.’

When she’s not rotating through a variety of Molecular, Cellular and Evolutionary Biology labs, she reads. She recently completed “A Pocket Full of Rye” by Agatha Christie, and “Howl’s Moving Castle,” the fantasy novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones, later made into a celebrated animated film. “Currently, I’m reading ‘Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst’ by Robert Sapolsky, in order to scratch a non-fiction itch I’ve had for a while.” But she concedes along with a whole generation (or two), “My favorite book(s) are the Harry Potter series. I’ve read them several times. They are my ‘go-to’ when I have run out of other things to read.”

Brown considers her grandfather to be her inspiration, even her hero. “My grandfather spent most of his career working for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) research service. He worked on broadening the genetic basis of sugar beet crops by breeding hybrids from wild sugar beet strains.” At the time, the genetic basis for most sugar beet crops was very narrow, making them susceptible to diseases and changing environmental conditions. “His goal was to develop strains with increased disease resistance,” Brown says, “and increased sugar yield. He also investigated the possibility of developing a ‘fuel beet’—a hybrid sugar beet used for making bioethanol.”

The legacy of a grandfather’s example and hard scientific work may not be genetically passed on to a grandchild, but it is, nevertheless, deeply influential for Audrey Brown as the first year of graduate school closes in.

By David Pace, first published @ biology.utah.edu

Are you a Science Alumni? Connect with us today!

 

Eliza Diggins

March 16, 2022

Eliza Diggins

Eliza Diggins is a sophomore working on a double major in applied mathematics and physics. As a freshman, she participated in the Science Research Initiative (SRI) program, sponsored by the College of Science. The SRI puts students in a lab to do research as soon as they arrive on campus. After Eliza was admitted to the program, she began working with Fred Adler, professor of mathematics and of biology in the Department of Mathematics and in the School of Biological Sciences.

We caught up with Eliza for a chat.

How did you become interested in both math and physics?
Math and physics have both had a special place in my heart for most of my life. Even back in elementary school, math and science always held my attention more than other subjects. I began to actively study physics in middle school and never looked back.

Could you tell us about the kind of research you did in the SRI program with Dr. Adler?
I worked with Professor Adler modeling how COVID-19 virions move in the human airway. We constructed mathematical descriptions of the fluid motion to predict how differences in lung physiology would affect the distribution of virion absorption and, consequently, the severity of infection.

What do you enjoy about being at the U and in the Math and Physics Departments?
I enjoy being a part of both departments because the classroom environment is very positive, and the professors are always willing to engage with students. In addition to my time spent in the classroom, I teach English as a Second Language to adult students at the Guadalupe School.

What has it been like to work on your degree during the pandemic?
Working on a degree during a pandemic has been both a blessing and a curse. I've had more time to focus on my research and learning on my own time, which has left me very well prepared for future endeavors from an academic standpoint. Unfortunately, that additional time comes at the expense of many of the quintessential experiences of college.

Any career plans after you graduate?
My short-term plans are largely focused on getting into a good graduate program to study theoretical physics. In the long run, I'd like to have a career in academia so that I can focus full time on my research interests.

Any hobbies or interests outside of math and physics?
Outside of academic pursuits, I spend a lot of time outdoors. I'm passionate about hiking and running and spend a lot of time white-water rafting with my family. I also have a passion for herpetology, and I own two poison dart frogs!

by Michele Swaner, first published @ math.utah.edu

Sarmishta Kannan

February 23, 2022

Sarmishta Kannan

In the entrance of the Eccles Health Sciences Education building.

For Sarmishta Diraviam Kannan, HBS’17, the journey to her “dream school” – the University’s School of Medicine – spanned about 25 years and some 8,780 miles.

Sarmishta was born in Tamil Nadu, India, which is located on the southern tip of the Indian sub-continent. In addition to the long history of the Tamil people, Tamil Nadu is famous for its temples, festivals, and celebration of the arts.

When Sarmishta was just nine years old, her family immigrated to the United States. They settled in Boston where her father worked for GE Healthcare. In 2008, the family moved to Salt Lake City, near the corporate headquarters of GE Healthcare, while her father continued his career with the company.

Sarmishta, who was then 12 years old and in junior high school, was still mastering English as a second language and adjusting to social norms and public education systems in America.

It was a difficult time for Sarmishta, but her “dream” was beginning to form.

Sarmishta graduated from Hillcrest High School, in Midvale, in 2013 with the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma.

“The IB diploma is a rigorous program, and I was the only one to take the higher-level courses in all three sciences of physics, chemistry and biology,” says Sarmishta. “It was through the IB program that I found my passion in the sciences, especially biological sciences, and completing the IB program prepared me well for college.”

Sarmishta decided to attend the U as an undergraduate because of the abundance of research opportunities and the Honors degree option in Biology which gave her the chance to perform long-term research that culminated with an Undergraduate Thesis. Plus, it put her in close proximity to the School of Medicine.

The “dream” was clear now and within reach.

“The Honors thesis requires involvement in research that finishes with writing a paper on a particular research project. That experience was valuable to me as I got the opportunity to be involved in a research project from start to finish,” says Sarmishta.

She worked with Dr. Kevin Jones at the Huntsman Cancer Institute to help discover the roles that lysosomes and autophagy play in alveolar soft parts sarcoma, clear cell sarcoma, and synovial sarcoma.

“In the Jones lab, it was fascinating for me to see how researchers used experimental data to understand cancer biology. So, I decided to pursue sarcoma research for my thesis,” says Sarmishta.

“I investigated the hypothesis that Alveolar Soft Parts Sarcoma (ASPS) and Clear Cell Sarcoma (CCS) morphology is attributed to lysosomes and that these cancers up-regulate autophagy genes using autophagy as a survival mechanism,” says Sarmishta.

“I learned to design investigations and troubleshoot various lab protocols to gather data and test the hypothesis. Critically analyzing the data supported the hypothesis that ASPS and CCS contain abundant autophagic lysosomes. However, it raised further questions indicating more research was necessary to better understand autophagy’s role in ASPS and CCS.”

“Writing my thesis taught me to build an evidence-based argument based on my data, critically analyze the work of others, synthesize new ideas for further research, and effectively communicate complex topics,” says Sarmishta.

Her thesis abstract was published in the 2016 University of Utah Undergraduate Research Journal. She also presented her thesis to Utah legislators at the Research on Capitol Hill event in 2017 and at Undergraduate Research Symposiums in 2016 and 2017.

After graduating with an Honors degree in Biology, she continued to work in the Jones lab as a full-time Lab Technician before starting medical school. She worked on various projects including writing a review manuscript on sarcomagenesis, titled Genetic Drivers and Cells of Origin in Sarcomagenesis, which was published in early 2021 in the Journal of Pathology.

She also worked on a project that focused on modeling synovial sarcoma metastasis in mouse models. Sarmishta was listed as a co-author on that paper and was published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

In the meantime, Sarmishta applied to the School of Medicine in 2019 and in 2020 and was accepted in 2020.

Finally, her “dream” was realized.

Today, Sarmishta is about halfway through her second year of the MD program at the University’s School of Medicine.

“It has been a very fulfilling experience so far! I am grateful to have the opportunity to follow my passion, learn about the human body, help and support people going through healthcare challenges. I am excited to start my clinical years where I get to rotate through various specialties in the hospital and apply all the knowledge I have been learning to patient care,” says Sarmishta.

In addition to school, she enjoys reading, painting, watching movies and singing.

In fact, Sarmishta is a classically-trained Carnatic singer. Carnatic music is a traditional system of music from India that provides a nearly limitless array of melodic patterns. It emphasizes vocal performance.

“I started singing when I was five and my parents enrolled me in Carnatic music classes in India. I continued my training after moving to the United States,” says Sarmishta.

“I perform publicly at the local Hindu Temple and at Indian festivals. One of my most cherished experiences was performing a Hindu song at the 6th Parliament of World Religions event, that was held in Salt Lake City.”

Sarmishta is scheduled to complete the MD program in 2024.

“A new dream is already forming,” she says.

 

Are you a Science Alumni? Connect with us today!

 

Sahar Kanishka

April 30, 2021

Undergraduate Research Award

Sahar Kanishka

Biology major receives 2021 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

Sahar Kanishka remembers daily where her family came from, where they are now, and what opportunity there is for her at the School of Biological Sciences (SBS).

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor ever since I was younger,” she recently explained in a video interview. “Because my family’s from Afghanistan and they actually fled from the Soviet invasion, they were telling me how the medical resources over there were very scarce when they were escaping. Like things we take for granted here [in the United States]. I want to be able to give back in some way. And that’s my way of giving back, becoming a doctor and contributing what I’ve learned here.”

What Kanishka, now in her junior year as an honors student, is learning happens largely in the Gagnon lab at the SBS where she and her colleagues are studying vertebrate lineage and cell fate choice along with cell signaling and genome engineering. Their subject model is the living zebrafish with which they are attempting to answer the question of how biology builds an animal with millions of cells. The question is complicated by the fact that those millions of cells are continually sharing information while shape-shifting at the same time.

Zebrafish

A living organism is the culmination of science turning chaos and cacophony into a kind of marvelous symphony. Using CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology, the Gagnon lab is busy marking cells with a genetic barcode that could later be used to trace the lineage of cells that in the zebrafish are similar to other vertebrates, including humans.

The micro “scissors” of CRISPR is no longer just being used to decode the genome, but to make a version, readable to humans, of what cells are doing in real time and how. It’s research that’s contributing to a sea change in genomic studies, and Kanishka is there at the bench experiencing it firsthand. The way Jamie Gagnon, Principal Investigator who holds the Mario Cappechi Endowed Chair at SBS, puts it, the research Kanishka is doing “may lead to a holy grail method for developmental biology—the ability to record developmental history, in living animals, with molecular and spatial resolution.”

Little wonder then that the Undergraduate Research Program at the University of Utah chose Kanishka for this year’s award. In his nomination letter Gagnon, who referred to Kanishka as having “transitioned quickly into an independent scientist," also wrote that he has been “impressed with Sahar’s poise, focus and commitment to research over the last year, which has been particularly challenging for our undergraduate researchers… . Sahar is already the face of STEM research in the College.”

Kanishka’s journey at the U threaded through ACCESS, a signature program of the College of Science. It was a scholarship and mentorship experience that led to re-figuring what research could be. Instead of working primarily on a computer in isolation and doing anatomy lessons from a book, ACCESS and SBS provided her with a hands-on approach in its full cadaver lab. As a pre-med student hoping to earn a joint medical degree and doctorate, Kanishka’s turn as a teaching assistant to professor Mark Nielsen gave her added invaluable experience. ACCESS also gave her a practical skill set, like creating her first research poster and then presenting it publicly.

The ACCESS program

The same has been true in the Gagnon lab where she says you are free to mold your research experience to your own expectations. Research at the U “fosters an environment of curiosity of real research. It’s really beautiful,” she says, “to have someone [like Gagnon] believe in you like that.” This, she concedes, in spite of feeling at times like an imposter as the child of an immigrant family and as a woman. She’s had to “learn through lots of struggles.”

Some lessons from those struggles have been hard won. “You can’t just put science in a box and tell it what to do,” she explains. “I have to allow it the freedom to seek to understand the world rather than to just understand me.” Her joint undergraduate degree in business administration speaks to Kanishka’s sense of the intersectionality of all learning. She was especially impressed with a recent visit by Reshma Shetty, the inaugural SBS Distinguished Lab Alumni who worked with Baldomera “Toto” Olivera in his lab and is a co-founder of Boston-based Gingko Bioworks, a bio-engineering start-up.

But the ballast in Kanishka’s life--both that of her academic career’s and that of her personal story’s--continues to be family. That includes not only her younger sister and parents here in Utah, but also her extended family in Afghanistan and beyond. “I hate that we’re separated by distance,” she says, referring to her overseas cousins, aunts and uncles as “my other parents and siblings. I owe everything to them. They mean everything to me.”

Until she and her extended family are all at least on the same side of the globe, Kanishka has both advice and a caution for her undergraduate colleagues. “Figure out if you want to do something by actually doing it,” she advises, recommending internships for high schoolers not bound for college, including through a program she helps facilitate as a volunteer called Talent Ready Utah. “College can be a business,” she warns, “pumping out students” for a job market they may not resonate with or even prosper in.

But Sahar Kanishka is optimistic about things as well. When asked about the pandemic and the social and economic upheaval, she proffers a winning smile, while adding, “I’m excited to see how college will change and adapt.”

 
by David Pace
 

Beckman Abstract

  • Lineage tracing in zebrafish with CRISPR prime editing (S. Kanishka)
    All embryos develop from a single cell. We use lineage tracing to map the relationships between individual cells and back to the initial founding cell. These lineage trees can help us understand how cells acquire their fates during normal development, and how that can go wrong in human disease. An emerging method for lineage tracing in embryos uses cellular barcodes. Cellular barcodes individually tag cells with a unique set of mutations specific to that cell. As cell divisions occur, the barcode is passed on to the progeny cells and a lineage tree can constructed based on cells that share similar barcodes. The CRISPR-Cas9 system for gene editing is an ideal tool for creating a huge diversity of cellular barcodes in embryos. However there are limitations with CRISPR-Cas9, including unpredictable indel formation and difficulties in recovering barcodes from cells. In this project, a modified CRISPR system known as prime editing will be applied in zebrafish, and utilized for lineage tracing. Prime editing allows for precise genome editing by inserting user-specified genetic sequences at a target site in the genome. I hypothesize that we can use prime editing to insert a huge library of user-specified barcodes into the genome of developing zebrafish. Because these barcodes are defined by the experimenter, they can be recovered at the end of the experiment using RNA in situ hybridization. In principle, lineage tracing with prime editing will allow us to discover the spatial arrangement of related cells in intact embryos and tissues. We hope to use lineage tracing with prime editing to understand the mechanisms of heart regeneration in zebrafish.

2021 Churchill Scholar

April 8, 2021

Six in a Row!

Isaac Martin brings home the U's sixth straight Churchill Scholarship.

For the sixth consecutive year a College of Science student has received the prestigious Churchill Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Isaac Martin, a senior honors student majoring in mathematics and physics, is one of only 17 students nationally to receive the award this year.

Martin’s designation ties Harvard’s six-year run of consecutive Churchill Scholars (1987-1992) and is second only to Princeton’s seven-year streak (1994-2000).

“Isaac’s recognition as a Churchill Scholar is the result of years of remarkable discipline and dedication to a field of study that he loves,” said Dan Reed, senior vice president for Academic Affairs.

Martin decided to apply for a Churchill Scholarship as a freshman, after meeting for lunch with Michael Zhao, a 2017 Churchill Scholar who unexpectedly passed away in 2018.

“I am positively delighted and quite flabbergasted to receive the scholarship,” Martin says, “but I wish I could phone Michael to thank him for making the opportunity known to me. His legacy lives on in the undergraduate program of the math department here at Utah, where many others like me have greatly benefited from the example he set.”

Martin, a recipient of an Eccles Scholarship and a 2020 Barry Goldwater Scholarship, remembers as a kindergartener trying to write down the biggest number in existence and, as an eighth grader, suddenly understanding trigonometry after hours of reading on Wikipedia.

“That sensation of understanding, the feeling that some tiny secret of the universe was suddenly laid bare before me – that’s something I’ve only felt while studying math and physics, and it’s a high I will continue to chase for the rest of my life,” he says.

Books by Carl Sagan and Jim Baggott also kindled his love of math and physics, and after several years of self-directed study in middle and high school and a year at Salt Lake Community College, Martin enrolled at the U as a mathematics and physics double major.

After early undergraduate experiences in the research labs of physics professors Vikram Deshpande and Yue Zhao, Martin found himself gravitating more toward mathematics. He completed a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at UC Santa Barbara studying almost Abelian Lie groups, which have applications in cosmology and crystallography, under Zhirayr Avetisyan. This experience resulted in Martin’s first research paper. He later completed another REU at the University of Chicago.

“This research was incredibly rewarding because while it applied to physics, the work itself was firmly rooted in the realm of pure math.” Martin says.

Returning to Utah, Martin worked with professors Karl Schwede and Thomas Polstra to study F-singularities, and developed this work into a single-author paper and his currently-in-progress honors thesis with professor Anurag Singh.

“I would not be where I am today without the incredible faculty at Utah and their willingness to devote time to undergraduates,” Martin says.

At Cambridge, Martin hopes to study algebraic geometry, number theory and representation theory (“in that order,” he says) in pursuit of a master’s degree in pure mathematics.

“I’m particularly interested in learning as much as I can about mirror symmetry, which I intend to make my essay topic,” he adds. “I also plan to drink a lot of tea and to buy one of those Sherlock Holmes coats. I will also begrudgingly begin using the term ‘maths’ but I promise to stop the instant I board a plane back to the U.S. in 2022.”

After he returns from Cambridge, Martin plans to earn a doctoral degree in pure mathematics and enter academia, using his experiences in many different educational systems including U.S. and British public schools, homeschooling and online learning, to broaden opportunities for students from a diversity of backgrounds.

“My past has molded me into who I am today,” he says, “and I hope I can use my experiences to create programs in STEM for opportunity-starved students, whether they are held back due to non-traditional schooling or to socio-economic factors.”

 

by Paul Gabrielsen - First Published in @theU

Related Posts

 

2021 Research Scholar

March 31, 2021

2021 Research Scholar

For Karrin Tennant, recipient of the 2021 College of Science Research Scholar Award, the never-ending story of environmental science has plenty of plot twists. A member of the Anderegg lab in the School of Biological Sciences (SBS) which studies the intersection of ecosystems and climate change, Tennant has been busy working in the area of nighttime water loss in plants. The work tests a major hypothesis in the field and has the potential to greatly advance our understanding of plant physiology. The award is given annually to the College’s most outstanding senior undergraduate researcher. Tennant will be honored at the College Convocation May 6th and receive a $1,000 award, a plaque commemorating this achievement, and a one-year membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which includes a one-year subscription to Science.

In his letter of support, Assistant Professor Bill Anderegg and Principal Investigator says, “Karrin has blown me away with her incredible independence, creativity, dedication, initiative, and intellectual maturity. Her Biology Honors research is incredibly exciting, eminently publishable, and on par with advanced and successful Ph.D. students I have mentored.”

Karrin Tennant

One of those plot twists includes nighttime transpiration through tiny pores known as stomata on the underside of tree leaves. Photosynthesis, the process by which green plants and some other organisms use sunlight to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water, clearly happens during the day. But why and how do trees like the Black Cottonwood in the Pacific Northwest, continue to draw H20 from the ground at night? "What's the ecological value of this happening?" Tennant asks. At night "can trees pull water from underground like a straw away from competitors?"

Answers to these questions have implications about how forests survive and thrive, especially during drought as the earth continues to warm globally. Tennant sees her work as multi-faceted ... and multi-disciplinary--narrative threads that tell the broader story of not only life systems, as in forests, but even larger systems, and not only ecological.

Tennant's minor in Ecology & Legacy Humanities, introduced to her by adjunct biology professor and Dean of the Honors College Sylvia Torti, extends the questions Tennant is addressing both in the field and in the lab. The intersection between biology and the humanities fosters empathy for the natural world that can inform public discourse as well as public policy that extends beyond scientific inquiry. This "leaning into the interdisciplinary," says Tennant, is what propels her learning at the University of Utah and what appears to be the foundation of an auspicious career later in forest ecology and related fields.

In the meantime Tennant pivots between a growth chamber adjacent to the SBS greenhouses and the lab downstairs. The samples she collects come from as many as thirty-five trees in various degrees of competition with each other for water. Using a Licor LI-6800 photosynthesis system which measures gas exchanges and fluorescence, she determines the flow of C02, O2 and H20 in and out of the leaf through the stomata. She and her team also conduct statistical tests using research software, initiating how the micro affects the macro of ecological systems.

A Texas native, Tennant was attracted to the U because of family in the area and, of course, the mountain environment. Along with her passion for science, she says, "they're what kept me here." Her ambition is to be a research professor someday, to "spread my knowledge and education as far as I can," and "to apply focused research to a much broader discussion."

That discussion has added to the story that Tennant is helping to author, and it seems to move with extraordinary balance and ease between more than one campus lab (she also works with SBS's Bryn Dentinger's fungi lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah), the forest field and the broad community contours represented by the humanities.

In her citation for the award, Dean Peter Trapa talked about Tennant's demonstrated "genuine wonder of the world around" her and her "thirst for knowledge." Her response to the award? "I am honored to be a woman in STEM and to follow the footsteps of other trailblazing female researchers."

 
by David Pace
 

Josh Carroll

February 23, 2021

 

Josh Carroll

Veteran To Janitor To Physicist, Via YouTube.

Josh Carroll volunteered for the U.S. Army before he finished high school. He did three tours of duty in Afghanistan. He worked as a janitor, among other jobs, between those tours. And in the library of the school he was cleaning, he found one book that rekindled his love of science and set his career on a new path.

The book?

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

“I began reading that every night just piece by piece, and it just slowly started to re-sink in, like just, oh my goodness, I’ve really missed this,” Carroll told me in a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. “This is like, I love learning about it.”

That book re-opened his eyes.

And that love of learning was essential to Carroll’s path to achieving his dream.

Because Carroll had a problem. While as a kid he had always loved space and learning about the stars, he did not have the math and physics background to pursue a career studying them. Thanks to volunteering for three tours of duty, he had a 10th-grade math education and none of the prerequisites for advanced college courses in physics or astronomy. So after starting a general studies degree at New River Community College in Virginia he decided to do something radical about his passion: teach it to himself.

And, as featured by YouTube recently where I heard his story for the first time, Carroll’s teacher became videos. In a subsequent job as a security guard, online lectures in calculus and trigonometry filled the long hours between patrol rounds. Khan Academy helped, of course, and online lessons from college-prof-turned-internet-academic PatrickJMT (read Patrick: Just Math Tutorials) filled his nights.

Typically, however, as can be the case with many self-taught people, one critical thing slipped through the cracks. And it was only after he learned enough to apply for advanced studies at another university that Carroll discovered it.

“I went and applied to go to Radford University to get into their physics program and found out that I was missing the entire field, the entire course of trigonometry, which I didn’t even know … I didn’t know about it,” Carroll told me. “And so when I went to apply, they were like, ‘Oh, you didn’t take trig, you won’t be able to do our physics program.’”

That was three or four weeks before the semester started.

Carroll begged for an exception and promised to learn trigonometry in those three weeks, which the university granted. Then he crammed those weeks full of trig courses and videos, and ended up near the top of his class.

But it wasn’t without some adrenaline-pumping experiences.

“It was terrifying and exhilarating ... there were still some gaps,” Carroll says. “There was still some stuff at that time that I just didn’t know the rules, because I never had to apply them before. So it was also a lot of on-the-job training sort of a thing, where I would answer the question and then I’d ask one of my classmates, ‘Did I do this right?’ And they’d be like, ‘No, you need to do this with the sine function’ or something.’”

The result was a Bachelor of Science in physics and graduation from Radford University, and now Carroll divides his time between being a research and development engineer at Booz Allen and a master’s program in science and technology at the University of Utah that focuses on computational science and applied mathematics.

Not bad for someone working in post-school life as a janitor and security guard, and picking up a copy of A Brief History of Time by of the most famous physicists in history.

The most impressive part, of course, is the way that Carroll took control of his education and learned the knowledge that he needed on his own ... with the help of innumerable people who have shared their expertise online.

“I’m a big proponent of what I call the ‘democratization of learning,’ the decentralization of certain skill sets that you can learn, especially with computer science and coding, there’s so many things out there,” he says. “It’s a culture in computer science and coding. There’s GitHub and there’s online resources you can go to and absolutely pick skills up without the degree stamp.”

 - by John Koetsier first published by the Forbes.com