Three Elizabethtown College Biochemistry and Molecular Biology majors were recently awarded grants from the TriBeta Biological Honor Society to support their research.
Ashley Burger ’24, Tristan Mabee ’24, and Emily Harding ’23 were each awarded Beta Beta Beta Research Scholarship Foundation Fund Grants to financially support their continued undergraduate research.
“Science is best learned by performing it,” Mabee said. “By funding undergraduate research, Tri-Beta is helping college students like me learn more about biology while simultaneously contributing to new discoveries.”
The Beta Beta Beta Research Foundation provides research grants to TriBeta Biological Honors Society members for meritorious undergraduate research proposals. The grant program was designed to introduce undergraduate students to the basic process of research and research funding.
Mabee has been completing synthetic chemistry research to develop new tools designed to study noncoding RNA for molecular biologists.
Burger has been completing research directed toward making chemical compounds that can bind to insulin receptors on the cell membrane, which will allow glucose to be taken into cells even under conditions of insulin resistance.
“I perform this research under my research advisor Dr. Jeffrey Rood, who has been nothing but supportive and patient as we undertake this extensive project,” Burger said. “This grant will help fund the supplies needed to keep our cell line alive for experimentation, as well as the chemicals we need to make these vanadium complexes.”
Harding conducts synthetic organic chemistry research to synthesize modified nucleobases for the recognition of double-helical RNA. She says this grant will help to fund her current project focused on the recognition of the U-A base pair of RNA.
