Three outstanding graduating seniors, Rad Chrzanowski, Alejandro Medina, and Tiger Wang, will be heading to graduate school this fall after successfully completing the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute’s most rigorous undergraduate educational program, the Lambert Fellowship. The Lambert Fellowship provides multi-year funding for hands-on laboratory research for rising sophomores and juniors majoring in Chemistry under the mentorship of CLP faculty members.
Founded in 2010 and endowed in 2016 by CLP Executive Advisory Board Chairman and Senior Vice President of Research Biology at Genentech, Andrew Chan, MD, PhD, the Lambert Fellowship is named in honor of Dr. Joseph B. Lambert, Dr. Chan’s advisor in the late 1970’s at Northwestern.
The students, all double majors in chemistry and biology, received valuable research experience in the lab of renowned drug developer Richard Silverman as part of their fellowship experience.
Chrzanowski joined Silverman’s lab two years ago to find ways to inhibit neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNos), an enzyme associated with neurodegenerative disease, in the brain.
“At first I was slow to figure things out, but Professor Silverman gave us the opportunity to explore the project through my own lens,” says Chrzanowski. “The project taught me a lot about fundamental organic chemistry and biology and gave me insights into how research works.”
Chrzanowski says Lambert Fellowship funding and formalized project approach helped push his project forward and allowed him to complete it from start to finish.
“The Lambert Fellowship gave me the freedom to explore medicinal chemistry and drug discovery and the resources to extend my educational opportunities beyond what I could have imagined,” says Chrzanowski.
In 2022, Chrzanowski received the American Chemical Society (ACS) Undergraduate Award in Physical Chemistry. He also received the Lewis H. Sarrett Scholarship Award Scholarship which is awarded to one of the top rising fourth-year students in the chemistry major program. After a well-deserved trip to Europe this summer, he will be continuing his education at MIT to pursue his PhD in chemistry.
Medina worked in Silverman’s lab to synthesize mechanism-based inactivators of an enzyme overexpressed in the cells of one of the most common and aggressive types of liver cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).
“When I started, during the academic year, I was only able to work about 10 hours a week due to the COVID pandemic. It was really hard to get in the rhythm of things and really learn and understand techniques when you’re doing things that infrequently,” says Medina. “The Lambert Fellowship allowed me to work 40 hours a week, eight hours a day, like a normal job. Getting to do research every day for two summers was the most productive time that I have had doing research.”
Medina says he made good progress against his 14-step synthesis of a modified inactivator analog until his step 12 reaction failed. His planned synthesis was ultimately unsuccessful.
“I actually think I learned more through the failures than the successes because had things worked out perfectly, I might have done 14 distinct reactions,” says Medina. “When things didn’t work, I had to try a lot of new things, at least 30 to 40, which I wouldn’t have tried had things worked the first time. It pushed me to think more creatively.”
Medina also credits the Fellowship for helping to improve his science communications skills.
“One of the program requirements is that we needed to do the poster presentation at the Chicago area undergraduate research and present at the CLP undergraduate research symposium—two things that I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about,” says Medina. “Ultimately, I think they were really useful for developing ways to frame my research and communicate it to a broader audience.”
In 2022, Medina received the American Chemical Society (ACS) Undergraduate Award in Analytical Chemistry. This fall, he is headed to UC Berkeley to pursue his PhD in chemical biology.
Wang’s research project applied organic chemistry to design molecules that inhibit gamma-aminotransferase (GABA-AT), an enzyme that slows the brain’s function, to better control epilepsy.
“When I first entered the lab, I wasn’t a very good scientist. After two summers as a Lambert Fellow, I learned a lot,” says Wang. “I can do characterizations properly and analyze NMRs better. To reach a final compound, I know which route to take to save time and when to put more or less effort into something. Without this precious research experience, I wouldn’t be the same person I am today.”
Wang believes conducting full-time research during the summers provides a much more intense learning opportunity than the traditional independent quarterly research project.
It’s pretty similar to the experience I would have in grad school or probably in the future after my PhD,” says Wang. “It gave me a glimpse of how things will work in the future and I really enjoyed it.
Wang plans to attend graduate school at Cornell or start as a research assistant at Princeton where the professor whose work he’s interested in will be moving this fall.
Main image: CLP Lambert Fellows Tiger Wang, Rad Chrzanowski, and Alejandro Medina
By Lisa La Vallee