2018 National Conference on Undergraduate Research

"This past April, I had the wonderful opportunity of participating in the 2018 National Conference on Undergraduate Research through the WLP Humphries Award. I attended with another GW undergraduate, Michelle Ahn, and our graduate student mentor, Keylie Gibson, from the GW Computational Biology Institute. During the conference, I attended presentations, panels, and poster sessions made by undergraduate students from all over the country in many different fields, spanning from the arts and humanities to hard sciences. I also met representatives from graduate schools and scholarship programs, which helped me to begin planning my next steps after GW.

My presentation at NCUR was titled “HIV-1 Transmission Clusters and Drug Resistance in Washington, D.C.” I have been working on this project with my mentor, Keylie, since I joined the Computational Biology Institute my freshman year as an undergraduate research assistant. The project is a retrospective study of ~3,500 HIV sequences from the Washington, DC area. Through a variety of statistical and computational methods, we have studied the evolution and transmission of HIV in DC from the 1980s to the 2000s. Our results will be combined with the results of HIV surveillance data in order to better inform and target HIV prevention strategies in DC. Presenting this work to both my peers and experts in the field at NCUR was a great experience and helped me to practice my communication skills, which will be very important as I move forward in my scientific career. Later in the semester, I was also able to present this project at the Georgetown Undergraduate Research Conference and the University Honors Program Research Showcase.

Undergraduate research has played a defining role in my undergraduate experience thus far, and I am so grateful to the Women’s Leadership Program both for supporting my attendance at NCUR through this fellowship, and for encouraging me to become involved in research as a freshman. My SHM professor from freshman year, Dr. Carly Jordan, has been so supportive of me and my participation in research even after I completed the program. This summer, I am excited to be conducting research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York as an intern in their biostatistics department, which is an opportunity I would not have without the help and support of many people at GW, including WLP. I am looking forward to continuing to work on research in the Computational Biology Institute throughout my last two years before pursuing a graduate education. "

- Maggie Steiner SHM 2016-17