Congratulations to the recipients of the Biophysics program’s third annual student awards, recognizing the achievements of our outstanding graduate and undergraduate students.
We are pleased to offer these awards, made possible by the generous support of our friend and colleague Sam Krimm through the Krimm Endowment established by Sam in support of graduate students in Biophysics.
The Krimm Exceptional Dissertation Award recognizes a graduate student who defended their dissertation within the past two academic years. This year's Krimm Exceptional Dissertation award goes to Ziyuan Chen for his dissertation titled "Single-Molecule Mapping and Heterogeneous Dynamics of Epigenetic Modifications in Live Microbes." Ziyuan made impressive inroads as a student in Julie Biteen's lab while actively contributing to the graduate program.
The Krimm Exceptional Graduate Student Award recognizes mid-career graduate students who are actively working on dissertation projects. This year's Krimm Exceptional Graduate student award goes to Eilidh McClain. Eilidh's work in the Sension and Penner-Han labs is focused on understanding the ways in which the organometallic coenzyme adenosyl cobalamin (vitamin B12) interacts with the protein CarH (a DNA regulatory protein) in order to modulate the reactivity of CarH. Eilidh is a co-author on three papers with a fourth paper being submitted soon.
The Exceptional Undergraduate Student Award recognizes graduating biophysics majors or minors. The second annual Exceptional Undergraduate award is being shared by Natalie Heitman and Xiaolin (Lynn) Rong. Both students have made major contributions to research in their respective labs while being leaders in the Biophysics Club and other program activities.
Congratulations to our awardees and a big thanks to the members of the awards committee for their efforts.