UNIVERSITY

Boston University
CCBC
UMBC

An Undergraduate Science Education, Interrupted.

Biomedical Engineering at Boston University

I began my undergraduate journey at Boston University majoring in Biomedical Engineering.

I fell in love with the academic atmosphere of Cambridge, Boston, and surrounding areas.

I struggled in classes, as I had been able to achieve success in high school without refining my study skills.

My parents and extended family had graduated from high school but no one had enrolled at a four-year university before.

I volunteered to be the Freshman Class Representative to the Biomedical Engineering Society and was a member of the Society of Women Engineers.

In the first semester of my freshman year, I produced a poster detailing my research from the summer and presented it at our Undergraduate Research Symposium.

I continued to work with Dr. David Campbell and his group to produce a teaching resource for students studying Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos Theory for two years (uncredited).

Logistic Map, from Wolfram MathWorld.

My research with Dr. Campbell entailed writing information on the Logistic Map accompanied by executable code snippets in Mathematica Notebooks (similar to Python Jupyter notebooks).

My lab space at JHU BSI while working with Dr. Tsukamoto.

Some examples of the small molecular compounds I made (from the PDF publication).

Community College of Baltimore County

While working for a local web development agency, I began taking courses at the local community college, CCBC, to help refresh my scientific foundations.

I retook General Physics II, Multivariate Calculus, and explored new areas like Organic Chemistry.

My academic performance enabled me to apply for and ultimately receive an NIH-funded scholarship for STEM students at the community college level for the duration of my enrollment.

I became so enamored with organic and synthetic chemistry that I decided to major in Chemistry upon transferring to UMBC.

During this time, I also solicited a summer internship at Johns Hopkins University’s Brain Science Institute, working with mentors Takashi Tsukamoto, Ph.D., and Niyata Hin.

I spent the majority of my time synthesizing small molecular sulfuric compounds and analyzing their properties using common analytical techniques and equipment such as high-performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance, and mass spectrometry.

My work also was included in a publication by the group (as Megan K. Shanholtz).

University of Maryland at Baltimore County

After transferring to UMBC, I continued on the path of a chemistry major.

In the summer, I worked full-time with Dr. Michael Summers’s group, directly mentored by Sarah Monti, Ph.D. Our work focused on utilizing NMR spectroscopy and microbiology as a means to determine the structure of HIV’s DNA and mRNA molecules. I was trained in RNA replication and handling, bacterial replication, and other analytical techniques.

The work I completed in this research lab contributed to work published in Science (uncredited).

An example of the structure of the viral genetic material of HIV (from publication PDF).