Two Enterprising Undergraduate Researchers Win Goldwater Scholarships
Two biology students involved in high-level research on novel therapies for COVID-19 and other diseases were named 2021 Goldwater scholars this year by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. The scholarship is recognized as the country’s most prestigious for STEM undergraduates pursuing research careers.
Sreya Sanyal ’22, (below) a double major in biology and history and member of the Albert Dorman Honors College, plans to apply to M.D./Ph.D. programs to become a translational medical researcher who investigates cancer biology and develops new clinical treatments. Her goal is to spend 75% of her time conducting research and the remaining 25% with patients to identify patterns and gaps in cancer treatment.
“In order to investigate novel drug delivery methods for chemotherapeutic agents, I will need to know intimately how people are experiencing existing therapies,” Sanyal said. “I will be able to observe, for example, the failure of a specific chemotherapy type after a stage III progression of the disease, and then use my training with oncological biomarkers to devise and test a novel targeting method that slows disease progression even at later stages.”
Abdul-Rahman Azizogli ’23, a biology major with minors in applied mathematics and applied physics and member of the Albert Dorman Honors College, plans to become a computational biologist who analyzes drug interactions and develops therapeutics. Azizogli said he was motivated in part to pursue computational biology by his experiences as an emergency responder.
“As an EMT, I have seen how medicine works, and I’m inspired to study how medications interact with the intricate biological mechanisms of the human body. Prior to becoming a researcher and EMT, I was not aware of the vast number of drugs and the high specificity in their target macromolecules,” he noted. “Now, I enjoy reading research papers to familiarize myself with the medications I encounter on EMT calls.”
Sanyal and Azizogli were among 409 Goldwater scholars chosen for the 2021-2022 academic year from 1,256 natural science, engineering and mathematics students nominated by 438 academic institutions from a much larger pool of applicants. Scholars each earn a prize of up to $7,500 per year for up to two years to support their education and research.
NJIT’s three-year record of securing eight scholarships, including four in 2020 alone, is the best in the state.
“We are one of only 41 campuses in the country and one of only 12 small and medium-sized institutions with this many Goldwater Scholarships,” said Louis Hamilton, dean of the Albert Dorman Honors College, who credited NJIT’s success to its students’ exposure to research and careful fellowship advising soon after they arrive on campus.
“We encourage students to get involved in immersive research their first year,” Hamilton noted.
Lorna Ronald, the associate director for Prestigious Fellowships and Honors Advising added, "Our students are brilliant research scientists and fellowship advising helps them to clearly articulate their research goals and see it in a broader context."
“By sophomore year,” Hamilton continued, “they have a clear conception of their own research agenda and intellectual path going forward.”
Both students recently won Provost Summer Research Fellowship grants to work in Vivek Kumar’s Biomaterial Drug Development, Discovery and Delivery Laboratory. Kumar is the Dhiraj Shah '00 Honors Faculty Fellow.
Sanyal will research cost-effective antiviral therapies to bridge the gap between still-spreading infections and the uneven vaccine rollout. Her team’s strategy relies on a self-assembling peptide, a unique therapy delivery mechanism developed in Kumar’s lab that binds to the virus’s spike protein, preventing it from attaching to a receptor in lung cells and targeting it for immune destruction.
“I plan to characterize the formulation through various mechanistic studies, then test the dosage toxicity and, finally, evaluate the drug’s cellular efficacy,” Sanyal explained.
Over the past year, she also worked on the development of an enzyme inhibiting cholesterol-lowering drug that has slow-release characteristics to maximize its efficacy.
Kumar called Sanyal “a superstar in my lab who has already published research and helped drive this project.”
Over the past year, Azizogli (below) focused on the interactions of viral nonstructural proteins in COVID-19, working with research scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and the Public Health Research Institute at New Jersey Medical School to translate his computational research into a viable therapeutic. From deriving protein structures to testing the efficacy of inhibitors in vivo, he took part in all aspects of preclinical drug research.
“The COVID-19 pandemic motivated me to learn about computational modeling and its use in identifying potential therapeutics,” he said. “I became inspired to start a COVID-19 computational modeling project with my friends in order to contribute to the research into SARS-CoV-2 from home. We used computational modeling software to determine the structures of nonstructural proteins in SARS-CoV-2, which were understudied relative to the Spike protein, and analyze how they interact in infected cells. Through this project, I examined the intracellular mechanism of nonstructural proteins, found inhibitors for these interactions, and became passionate about computational biology.”
This summer, he will switch gears to investigate a hydrogel-based therapy to modulate chronic inflammation that can lead to neurodegeneration, among other disorders, and improve inflammatory conditions such as chronic wound healing.
“Abdul has a computational background and he has expanded the work we do in the lab,” Kumar said, adding, “I’m excited to see them both work on computationally derived peptides for treatment of a number of diseases and for the progress they will make, including potential collaborations with industry.”
Professor John Carpinelli, NJIT's campus representative for the Goldwater program who has overseen the scholar nominee selections since 2010, called the scholarships a career-boosting validation for graduate school-bound students who will be competing for admission to top programs.
He noted, “It shows they are committed to research, that they are really good at research and that they are nationally recognized as among the top undergraduate researchers in the country.”
