For Immediate Release
April 14, 2004

TCNJ Student Receives Goldwater Scholarship

Ewing, NJ—Katherine Uyhazi (Lawrenceville, NJ), a junior biology major at The College of New Jersey was recently honored with a $7,500 Goldwater Scholarship Award.

Of the 1,113 mathematics, science and engineering students nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide, only 310 Goldwater Scholarships were awarded.

Katherine credits the Biology Department for her scholarship. “The fact that TCNJ has had four Goldwater Scholars in the past five years isn’t a coincidence; it’s a reflection of the caliber of the bio faculty and the dedication of the scholarship coordinator, Dr. [Donald] Lovett [Ewing],” she said.

Last summer, in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Connecticut, Katherine conducted research in the lab of Dr. David Papermaster where she used molecular biology techniques to investigate the role of a protein involved in vision in frogs. She has already presented the findings at a research symposium at the University of Connecticut Health Center and will present them again on April 24 at the Beta Beta Beta Biological Honors Society’s District Convention in Jersey City. She coauthored the abstract of this work which was submitted for the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. The full work will be submitted later to a journal for publication.

After getting a taste of what research was like in a professional laboratory, Katherine was hooked. During the upcoming summer, she will travel to Switzerland to participate in a research internship. There she will work with Dr. Walter Gehring, a world-renowned biologist whose pioneering work established the field of evolutionary developmental biology, to investigate the genetics of Drosophila eye development at the University of Basel in Basel, Switzerland.

Because she is interested in medicine and is driven to solve problems, her dream job would be a career that spans both medicine and research. After graduation (May 2005), Katherine plans to attend either medical or graduate school, or a combination of the two in a MD/PhD program.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established on November 14, 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry M. Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields.

---