Microbiology Personal Statement

Motivation The days leading up to my final exams in high school were lonely occasions; my classmates would not study with me, and regularly suggested that my notes or study guides were of poor quality because I did not “look smart” to them. I was one of six Latino students attending an elite college preparatory school, and I often confronted subtle biases held by both my instructors and classmates about my academic abilities. Many instructors assumed that I lacked fluency in English, or that I was ill-equipped to absorb advanced science and math topics. Only a few teachers would half-heartedly encourage me to enroll in advanced classes, though most voiced concerns that I was unprepared and incapable of succeeding. Regardless, the challenging

I lived far enough away so that a 20-minute drive and an hour train ride managed to get me in by 6:00 AM every morning. Upon entering the brightly lit fermentation pilot plant, I would clean tanks, set up experiments for the researchers, and monitor in-process operations for the following nine hours. I was excited to work in an environment closely related to my field, but the long hours were trying, and my career prospects as a technician were limited. The researchers often disregarded our questions due to a perceived lack of knowledge, but I would still approach them and ask about their current research. My determination eventually paid off when one of the scientists offered me an opportunity to work on a side project with the molecular biology group, an offer I accepted

While there, I worked under the guidance of Robert Kuczenski to study the genetic variation between different in-house E. coli strains. We hypothesized that the several rounds of targeted mutagenesis used to provide beneficial mutations for our fermentation experiments had introduced inadvertent changes into the genomes of newer derivative strains. Assessing the extent of variation by deep sequencing several members of two E. coli lineages allowed us to identify when a particular mutation appeared the strain’s genome. Upon pinpointing these changes, we realized that some mutations explained previously undesirable behaviors of our strains in our bioreactors. This enabled us to optimize our bioreactor’s environmental variables to maximize the production of new therapeutics and helped us design future fermentation experiments to test the resilience of potentially detrimental