Applicant to Medical School
In middle school, I wanted to be a physicist. It was only in Advanced Placement Biology during my junior year of high school that I began to see the excitement and potential in biology: in beginning from the physical and chemical underpinnings of life, working up through complex and finely-‐tuned biochemical pathways, then putting these pathways into systems and these systems into structures that formed organisms that fit together in ecosystems. It was during that same year that my best friend convinced me to join my high school’s FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics team. My experience on Dublin Coffman’s FIRST team inspired me to pursue a degree in engineering. With my love for biology and desire to pursue engineering, I chose to study chemical and biomolecular engineering at The Ohio State University. In addition to its strong program in engineering, the chance to major in piano performance here, taking lessons from a professor, was another incentive to attend Ohio State.
I began mentoring the Dublin FIRST team through OSU FIRST in 2007. FIRST focuses not just on the robotics competition itself, but also on reaching children and showing them the importance and relevance of science and technology in education and as potential careers. In 2009, I became the lead mentor for the Dublin FIRST team. In 2009, I joined Ohio State’s Engineer’s Council, a group of representatives from engineering student organizations that organizes an annual career fair, distributes the profits from the fair to member organizations, fosters cooperation between different organizations, and serves as a link between administrators and students in the College of Engineering, as OSU FIRST’s representative. I was elected the president of the Engineer’s Council in 2010. In addition, I began tutoring an inner-‐city high school student in the Autumn of 2010 through the Stowe Center in downtown Columbus, Ohio.
In the summer of 2008, I interned at DNV Columbus, a corrosion services company. While researching the effects of amines on carbon steel in their laboratories, I came to two important realizations. Research, and especially laboratory research into previously uninvestigated topics, is what I want for my career, but that I do not want to do it in a corporate environment, preferring academia’s emphasis on the pursuit of pure knowledge and then using that knowledge to improve lives. Therefore, in the fall of 2008, I began working with Dr. Michael Paulaitis, performing research on cellular microarrays, which have potential applications in cancer therapy and vaccine development. Working about 6 hours a week, I learned to culture cells and to work safely in a biological laboratory while developing video microscopy methods for imaging cells as they moved on and bound to microarrays.
In the spring of 2009, I won a Summer Research Fellowship from OSU to continue my research that summer. That summer, I developed a method for taking frame-‐by-‐frame videos of Jurkat cells as they moved over unprinted slides, slides printed with antiCD3 (to which they are expected to bind), and slides printed with antiCD19 (to which they are not supposed to bind). I then analyzed these videos, tracking cells on each surface. On the slides printed with antiCD3, cells were grouped by whether or not they began on a printed spot of between spots printed with antibody. Once 500 cells of each type had been tracked, they were analyzed in Excel to determine the diffusion coefficient, and the van Hove correlation functions were plotted in Minitab. The results showed that Jurkat cells are indeed less mobile when on aspot printed with antiCD3 then when on a bare slide or on a spot printed with antiCD19.
In the fall of 2009, I presented these results at Ohio State’s Fall Undergraduate Research Forum. Through the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, I repeated the video microscopy experiments with T cells on arrays printed with anti-‐IGLambda. The results showed that T cells bearing loaded monomers on their surfaces were 10 times less mobile on the printed spots than T cells not bearing loaded monomers on their surfaces or any T cell on an unprinted area of the slide. The loaded monomers bind specifically to anti-‐IGLambda. In the spring of 2010, I began performing Monte Carlo simulations of cells moving over microarrays, using the diffusion coefficients calculated from the laboratory. After that, I analyzed the results of the Monte Carlo simulations, comparing them to the results obtained by video microscopy.
After graduating from OSU in 2011, I joined Teach for America, a non-‐profit organization that places well-‐ qualified applicants in high-‐need, low-‐income schools around the country and helps them to become credentialed teachers. I chose to join TFA and delay enrolling in an engineering PhD program in order to help provide low-‐income students of color with access to the type of educational opportunities I received. After receiving an intern credential, I was placed at Animo Inglewood Charter High School in Inglewood, California, and have taught physics and math there for the last two and a half years. 90% of students at AICHS receive free/reduced price lunches, and 99% are either Hispanic or African-‐American. During my first year at AICHS, I helped a group of students found a FIRST Robotics Team, which has competed in the Los Angeles Regional for the last two years and will compete again in winter and spring of 2014. This team gives low-‐income students of color exposure to STEM, mentoring, and training that is not often available to demographically similar students. As their faculty advisor, I coordinate logistics and fundraising with students, administration, and parents and also serve as the primary technical mentor.
During my second year at AICHS, I was nominated for a Rising Star award, given to second-‐year teachers within the Green Dot Public Schools charter network that show outstanding growth and potential as educators. That year, I also helped AICHS double their proficiency rates in physics and reach a record 79% proficiency rate in Algebra 1. In my third year of teaching, I am working to make the FIRST team at AICHS financially sustainable, improving my practice, and helping to develop curriculum for algebra and physics for the transition to the Common Core standards.
In the summer of 2013, I applied for a NSF Research Experience for Teachers grant to work in Frances Arnold’s group at the California Institute of Technology. That summer, I worked in Dr. Arnold’s group helping to build and transform a protein library as part of a project developing P450 variants that will efficiently and selectively perform amination reactions. Through this experience, I learned the basic techniques of molecular cloning and directed evolution protein engineering, and have brought back to the classroom a deeper understanding of the cutting edge of biotechnology with which to inform my own instruction and the instruction of my colleagues.
Looking ahead as I finish my commitment to AICHS, I plan to pursue a doctorate in chemical engineering at Stanford. Stanford’s chemical engineering department is small, but every professor is at the top of his field. My research interests lie in biotechnology, immunology, protein engineering, and enzyme engineering. In particular, I am interested in Dr. Chaitan Khosla’s research in using enzymes to create novel antibiotics and to understand the pathology of Celiac’s disease and Dr. James Swartz’s research in cell-‐free protein synthesis. Working in one of these groups would allow me to learn from a pre-‐eminent expert in the field while working on projects that can include new drugs and treatments for a debilitating and common disease.
After obtaining my doctorate, I will stay in academia, pursuing a career as a professor, in which I will be able to continue my research as well as begin the careers of many younger scientists and engineers. The first step would be to obtain a post-‐doctoral position in a laboratory, spending several years honing my research, writing, and teaching skills before obtaining a professorship at a top research institution. It is my goal that my career deepens our ability to use biological, enzyme and protein-‐based methods to solve, thus-‐far intractable problems, all while helping younger researchers begin their own paths of discovery.