ATLANTA — Undergraduate students Rowan Lawrence, a neuroscience major, and Marvin Center, a dual chemistry and Spanish major, have been named Beckman Scholars for 2023-24.
Lawrence will be working in Interim Nutrition Department Chair Desiree Wanders’ lab, researching the impact of sex on insulin signaling pathways in mice that eat a high-fat diet. Her ultimate career goal is to explore the connection between the brain and the body as she pursues post-graduate degrees in physical therapy and neuroscience.
Lawrence became interested in physical therapy as a student-athlete playing soccer, basketball and softball in high school. She experienced minor injuries that required treatment.
“You make a connection with the provider,” she said. “It’s also a clinical setting where you can always learn new and different things.”
Lawrence presented research at this year’s Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference.
“I really enjoyed putting all my research together and having a cohesive summary of the work I’ve done,” she said.
She’s planning to do an honors thesis on the research she’ll be doing as part of the Beckman Scholars Program.
Center will be joining Associate Chemistry Chair Maged Henary’s lab, creating fluorophore molecules that can be used for medical imaging and image-guided surgery. He’s excited to work on research that can help people, though he admits the work requires patience.
“These reactions can take 24 hours, and you can mess it up in 2 seconds and have to restart. So, synthesis is very challenging. But when you finally crack that code, it's so rewarding,” Center said.
Center’s goal is to become an organic chemistry professor. “Ideally I’d like to teach it in both English and Spanish so that I can make the science more available to a wider and more diverse population of future scientists,” he said.
In addition to working in the lab, Center is looking forward to presenting his work at conferences. He’ll be doing an oral presentation at the American Chemical Society’s fall conference in San Francisco.
The Beckman Scholars Program is dedicated to supporting young scientists in paving the way for future discoveries by giving high-performing undergraduate students in the fields of biology, chemistry and neuroscience the opportunity to conduct independent laboratory research under the mentorship of select, expert faculty members. They will also benefit from additional professional development opportunities and will be well-positioned to pursue their graduate educations and careers in science.