Biology Personal Statement Examples

Growing up, the intricacies of biomedical science were unknown to me; nonetheless, I was captivated by the mysteries of life. As a child, I would often find myself scavenging along creek beds on hot Texas afternoons in search of the next fossil to add to my collection. This naïve hobby eventually blossomed into a curiosity of biology and the molecular underpinnings that allow life to exist when I took an Advanced Placement Biology course my Junior year of high school. The content of this course pushed me to undertake an independent study class the following year and participate in numerous academic competitions, including the University Interscholastic League Regional Championship.

These experiences prompted me to pursue hands-on science during my freshman year at The University of Texas at Austin. I joined the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI), a program geared towards guiding first-year students into research on campus. During this time, I became proficient in basic molecular biology techniques, including molecular cloning and recombinant protein expression and purification, and applied them to ongoing projects in the lab of Dr. Karen Browning. In the following year, I continued my roles in this

Edward Marcotte, to validate a computationally curated human protein complex map through functional analysis in Xenopus. Through this work, I identified and characterized a previously unstudied protein, ANKRD55, and demonstrated it to be a novel player in intraflagellar transport, a trafficking process required for formation and maintenance of cilia. Specifically, I showed that ANKRD55 moves within cilia similarly to previously characterized IFT members and that depletion of ANKRD55 results in neural tube closure defects, a bona fide phenotype of ciliary defects. My work culminated in an undergraduate honors thesis entitled Identification and characterization of novel ciliogenic