By Sally Ann Flecker

Universities can submit as many as four nominations for Goldwater scholarships, which reward outstanding undergraduate students in engineering, mathematics, and the natural sciences. All four Carnegie Mellon nominees, each from the Mellon College of Science, were selected.

Samantha Spath (S’08) spent the past two summers and intervening school year as a Beckman scholar, working with sea urchin eggs and embryos in the laboratory of developmental biologist Chuck Ettensohn. Spath investigates the Wnt signaling pathway, which is involved in the development of embryos. She is trying to find the molecule that controls the axis of an embryo. “We haven’t had the big ‘Aha’ moment yet,” she says. “But it’s nice every step along the way that works.”

Jonathan Stahlman (S’08) has a penchant for the most difficult science and mathematics classes, something not shared by many students at his small rural high school. But all that changed when he attended Pennsylvania’s Governor’s School for the Sciences during the summer before his senior year in high school. “I was surrounded by 90 other kids from Pennsylvania who were excited to do science, who liked doing hard subjects, and who liked putting effort into school. It was really exciting for me because I hadn’t seen that before.” Science, he decided then and there, would be his career. This summer, he headed to California for a nine-week internship at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Summer Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program, where his research focused on the long-term stability of the U02 compound.

Lauren Thorpe (S’08) spent the summer of 2006 as an intern in a virology research lab at the Institute of Biology at Lille on the campus of the famed Pasteur Institute in Lille, France. There, she studied mutations of hepatitis C. Thorpe was excited to work in a field that was completely new for her. The experience piqued her interest in virology. “There’s a clear medical link,” she says. “You can pretty much immediately see how it could be useful to lots of people.” At Carnegie Mellon, through a fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, she works in the lab of biology professor Brooke McCartney, studying a gene in fruit flies that may offer insight into how colon cancer develops. “It’s exciting to continue my research long-term here. I can work for a very long time on the same project and really get into and take on an aspect of the project myself,” she says.

Gregory Newby (S’09) was attracted to Carnegie Mellon because of its reputation for providing significant research opportunities for undergraduate students. He hasn’t been disappointed. By the end of his first month here, Newby had a part-time job as a lab assistant in biology professor Brooke McCartney’s lab in the Mellon Institute. That set the stage for a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research internship last summer, followed by a Small Undergraduate Research Grant. This summer, Newby was able to switch gears to broaden his experience by working in molecular biology professor Peter Berget’s lab on the creation of a fluorogenic biosensor to track changes within a cell. “It would be helpful to have these single chain variable fragment biosensors because eventually they could be done inside a living cell,” he says. “Then we could examine it without harming the cell. And that’s something unique.”