Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

5 Carnegie Mellon seniors (Mariela Zeledón, Geeta Shroff, Henry Deyoung, Melissa Bartel, and Arbob Ahmad) received graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Zeledón’s [photo on left] research deals with the PBN1 gene found in budding yeast. Yeast cells cannot survive without this gene, but scientists’ knowledge of the gene’s function does not explain this necessity. Zeledón’s research focuses on figuring out a second function of the gene that is necessary for the survival of the cell.

Zeledón plans to continue her research in the field of genetics, her current focus being human genetics. She is particularly interested in psychiatric genetics, which she will be studying at Johns Hopkins University, where she has been admitted into the Ph.D. program.
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Shroff [photo on right] found her passion in developing technology for diabetics and the disabled, and is currently working on two projects based on this idea. The first consists of developing a device that will help diabetics monitor their diets, while the second aims to help the blind with their transportation needs. Shroff said that she wants to study how technology can be used positively in developing countries like India and Africa.
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Currently focused on research in logic and programming language design, Deyoung [photo on left] plans to invest his fellowship into exploring distinct methods in web security. “If a file is protected, it can be accessed by a user only if he proves that he has access to it,” said Deyoung, a computer science major. The statement given by the user is compared to the security policies, and the user will only be allowed access if the answer complies with security, Deyoung explained.
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A chemical and biomedical engineering double major, Bartel’s [photo on right] NSF fellowship goes toward a different area of science, as she studies organic compounds found inside the human body. A number of organic compounds in organisms contain “chiral” carbon atoms, atoms with four different groups or atoms attached to them. “Different arrangements of the atoms around the central carbon can produce pairs of molecules which are non-superimposable mirror images of each other, called a pair of enantiomers,” Bartel explained.

The human body contains only one enantiomer of each pair for most compounds. If the wrong enantiomer enters the human body, the results can be fatal. Many pharmaceutical drugs contain both enantiomers, which have to be separated before humans can take the drugs. Bartel is using nanotechnology to develop a fast and efficient technique for the separation process.

Recently, Bartel proved that gold nanoparticles coated with the amino acid cysteine were capable of separating a mixture of propylene oxide enantiomers. Bartel intends to incorporate nanotechnology into biology and medicine. She has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley, and plans to continue her research there next fall.

Ahmad [no photo], a computer science and mathematics double major and the fifth recipient of the NSF fellowship, said, “I would encourage students to look for research opportunities early in their college careers. This helped me determine that I wanted to go to graduate school and improved my applications for fellowships and graduate schools.”

Ahmad’s research involves programming languages. His research aims to develop a programming language that allows users to efficiently write correct programs. “My project seeks to give an algorithm for deciding equality of terms in a simple language,” Ahmad said.

Photo: Geeta Shroff