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NSF Fellowships Will Propel Two Young Davidson Scientists Toward Ph.D.s
NSF Fellows (l-r) Susan Robison and Rachel Patton McCord
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4/19/2004
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
Two Davidson seniors have won National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships worth more than $130,000 for study toward earning Ph.D. degrees. Rachel Patton McCord of Knoxville, Tenn., will study biophysics at Harvard University, and Susan G. Robison of Sheridan, Wyo., will study psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University.
The grants reward the significant research both women have conducted at Davidson as undergraduates. The NSF gave 1,000 of the highly competitive grants nationwide, choosing recipients from both undergraduate and first and second year graduate students. The application process required a research proposal, description of past research experience, and other scientific credentials and awards.
McCord’s proposal builds on her work at Davidson with “optical tweezers,” a device that can trap cells with laser light so that their properties can be studied. She proposes to use optical tweezers to evaluate DNA microarrays, which are of tiny spots of all the genes in an organism exposed on a microscope slide. She explained, "When the group of expressed genes at any particular time is incubated with these spots of all possible genes, each expressed gene will bind to the DNA of its corresponding gene spot on the microarray. By analyzing the microarrays, you can determine what genes are being expressed under various conditions.”
However, while this technology has become widely used, there is a concern that strands of dissimilar DNA can bind to each other by just a few base pairs, giving a false positive reading.
McCord proposes using optical tweezers to measure the amount of binding in a process that would assure the validity of the microarray data. She noted, however, that her assignment at Harvard has not been established, and may differ from her proposal.
Robison’s proposal builds on her experience with research at Davidson. Kristi Multhaup, associate professor of psychology and Robison’s advisor, said Robison hit the ground running at Davidson. “She put a high school advanced placement credit to good use to enroll in a sophomore level course as a first year student, and started a research project that same year,” said Multhaup.
Robison’s passion is the area of cognitive neuroscience. “I’m interested in human memory,” she explained, “I really became hooked on neuroscience after taking a course here with Dr. Julio Ramirez.”
She gained further research experience in one summer working in the neuroscience lab of Sharon Thompson-Schill, a 1991 Davidson graduate now teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.
Robison plans to conduct research at Princeton on the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain known for its role in conflict-monitoring, decision-making, and organizing and retrieving memories. Her work should further develop neurobiologically-founded theoretical accounts of memory encoding and retrieval processes. She explained, “I will use a brain imaging technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging and other approaches such as computational modeling and behavioral studies, to develop and test theories of memory.”
She continued, “We know that numerous brain regions work together to produce the phenomenon of memory, but the dynamic interplay between these areas is not well understood, especially since these interaction patterns differ for different types of memory.”
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,600 students. Since its establishment in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine. Davidson is engaged in “Let Learning Be Cherished,” a $250 million campaign in support of student financial assistance, academic resources, and community life.
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