School of Molecular Sciences celebrates high-achieving grad students
Recently several School of Molecular Sciences graduate students have received important fellowships. Xinyi Tu, who works for professors Hao Yan and Nicholas Stephanopoulos, has received a PhRMA Foundation Fellowship. Jordyn Robare and Kate Weeks who both work for professor Everett Shock have received Focus on Finishing your Degree (FFYD) Awards. Kira DeVore and Michael Sauer have been named as ARCS Fellowship finalists. Devore is a graduate student in Po-Lin Chiu's laboratory and Sauer works for professors Mark Hayes and Mattias Heyden.
In the fall of 1962, in the wake of the thalidomide tragedy, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (the trade association now known as PhRMA) established the Commission on Drug Safety to bring together the best available talent to rebuild public trust in medicine, coordinate U.S. drug safety information, and make recommendations on areas in need of attention.
Among its many recommendations, the commission suggested establishing a foundation for “the promotion of the public health through the study and development of the science of therapeutics.” On May 31, 1965, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association Foundation was established.
“I’m really honored to be awarded the PhRMA Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship, which could definitely help me build my research career,” says Tu.
Tu’s current research focuses on using programmable nucleic acid nanostructures, especially single-stranded RNA origami, as an immune modulator to evoke host innate immune response as well as designing nucleic acid/peptide hybrid material to address the limitations of current issues in both fundamental science and disease therapeutics.
Tu hopes to help develop a self-adjuvanting nanovaccine for cancer therapy with enhanced antigen presentation efficiency, dual-epitope functionality, and potentially a stronger and more durable immune response. She hopes to develop an easy and convenient method for fabricating the nanovaccine with various antigen epitopes to meet the need for personalized cancer therapeutics.
The Focus on Finishing Your Degree (FFYD) Award (ASU Graduate College) is a fellowship supporting degree completion of PhD and DMA doctoral students who have finished the required coursework and credentials for candidacy status two or more years ago. The intention of the award is to support “All but Dissertation” (ABD) students in finishing their program in the awarded term.
“I am honored to be among the graduate students who were awarded the FFYD Fellowship this semester,” explains Robare.
The fellowship will allow Robare to focus on her dissertation projects without distraction. She plans to wrap up several projects including an investigation into the chemical energy supplies available to organisms within the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, an investigation into the cell membrane lipids used by organisms in the hot springs, and a project for estimating the thermodynamic properties of cell membrane lipids, so that she can model them in the environments from which they were sampled.
“I am incredibly grateful for receiving the FFYD, so I can focus on completing my research and writing my dissertation this semester,” says Kate Weeks.
Weeks works at the intersection of geochemistry and microbiology to characterize microbial communities in extreme environments and to expand what’s known about the current limits of life. I have worked both in Yellowstone National Park and on the forearc of the Mariana Trench. By receiving the FFYD grant, I will be able to finish my work on extremophiles- microorganisms living in extreme environments.
More specifically, Weeks’s final project is the investigation of the effects of metal concentrations on the growth of extremophilic ammonia-oxidizing archaea. Her focus on ammonia-oxidizing archaea has been spurred by their critical role within the nitrogen cycle and their role in producing nitrous oxide, a major greenhouse gas.
The ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Foundation advances science and technology in the United States by providing financial awards to academically outstanding students who are US citizens studying to complete degrees in science, engineering, math, technology, and medical research.
“ While I am an ARCS Fellowship finalist, I won't hear back from the Phoenix Chapter about whether I have been awarded the fellowship until early March,” explains DeVore. “I am ecstatic to have made it this far and hope that I will be selected to receive the fellowship!”
DeVore is investigating Alzheimer's Disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disorder affecting nearly 7 million people in the U.S., which remains poorly understood, with its molecular mechanisms largely unexplored.
DeVore’s research focuses on the sortilin-p75NTR-pro-NGF complex, which mediates neuronal cell death linked to AD progression. The ultimate goal is to resolve the complex's high-resolution structure using cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to understand pro-NGF-triggered neuronal death and identify novel therapeutic targets. Additionally, DeVore’s work aims to enhance single-particle cryo-EM reconstructions by addressing phase distortions caused by lens aberrations, defocus, and tilt. Currently, DeVore is refining a tilted contrast imaging function (TCIF) to simulate electron images of tilted specimens, with initial efforts focused on apoferritin.
This work will inform the development of more accurate contrast transfer function refinement approaches to improve resolution and advance the field of structural biology.
Sauer also expresses that he is incredibly grateful to be named a finalist for the ARCS fellowship.
“ It’s an exciting opportunity, and I deeply appreciate the support of my advisors, Mark Hayes and Matthias Heyden, and my colleagues who have helped me along the way.”
Sauer’s goal is to design a high-throughput computational workflow to study the dynamic motion of artificially engineered enzymes. He aims to use this workflow to identify functionally relevant regions of interest and artificially engineer enzymes with enhanced catalytic behavior.
Overall, the group’s computational protein design workflow provides a novel, high-throughput methodology that considers the dynamic behavior of enzymes, allowing us to design structurally and functionally optimized proteins that are compatible with industrial-scale chemical workflows.