JASON MELLAD

Marshall and NIH - Cambridge Scholar

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Jason Mellad earned Bachelors of Science degrees with honors in both Molecular Biology and Chemistry from Tulane University. As a Dean's Honors Scholar at Tulane, Jason was given a full tuition waiver for four years. Jason's academic honors include a listing in Who's Who Among American College Students, Dean's List, National Merit Scholarship, Omicron Delta Kappa Leadership Honor Society, a Barry Goldwater Scholarship, and a Marshall Scholarship in 2004. When he graduated, he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received the William Wallace Perry Medal for Academic Excellence, the American Chemical Society Award, the John Stibbs Community Service Award, and the Cell and Molecular Biology Department Senior Scholar Award. During his collegiate career, Jason carried out research at the Tulane Center for Gene Therapy in the laboratory of Dr. Darwin Prockop. His work on new methods for isolating stem cells and introducing genes into stem cells was highly successful and resulted in two co-authored publications. Jason has also done research at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center under Dr. L.O. Byerley and Tulane Department of Chemistry under Dr. S. Thayumanavan. Outside of the lab at Tulane, Jason served as a freshman ambassador and is currently a program coordinator with the Office of Multicultural Affairs. Jason also devotes time to community service participating in organizations such as the Community Action Council of Tulane University students (CACTUS) and Children Are the Responsibility of Everyone (CARE). His aspiration is to pursue clinical research in an academic setting and he foresees going to medical school after his Ph.D.

WENDY CHANG

NIH - Cambridge Scholar

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Duke University: M.D., School of Medicine

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Wendy Chang graduated magnum cum laude from Yale University with a B.S. in Biology. As an undergraduate, Wendy worked in the laboratory of Dr. Richard Lifton where she studied the genetic defects that underlie hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia. She then undertook her medical studies at Duke University. She was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Insitutes Research Fellowship to work at the National Insitute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke in the laboratory of Dr. Ronald McKay, one of the world's leading experts in stem cells. Her work focuses on the development of the ventral midbrain with an emphasis on the transcription factors that govern both the developmental program of dopaminergic neurons and the various facets of dopaminergic neuronal function in postmitotic cells. This work could have importance in understanding various neurological and psychiatric disorders. Outside the lab, she plays and teaches tennis and was the recipient of the John Blum Coaches' Award while on the Yale University Women's Varsity Tennis Team 1995. As she continues with her research, she states, "Learning and discovering things and piecing together the puzzle that my project has become has been very rewarding. It is exciting that my work is adding to the cumulative knowledge that moves science forward."

DANIELLE PERRY

Churchill, Fulbright and NIH - Cambridge Scholar

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Home-schooled until the age of 17, Danielle yearned for more than she could find in her home library. Her first classroom experience was at a local nursing school where she finished first in her class. Desiring to further her education, Danielle enrolled at Pennsylvania State University and quickly distinguished herself as an stellar student. where she earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics in the Schreyer Honors College. Danielle has been elected to several honor societies, including Golden Key, Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Pi Sigma, and Phi Kappa Phi, and named the "most achieving undergraduate woman student" from Penn State's Commission on Women. She served as an officer in the Society of Physics Students and the Association for Women in Mathematics. As a freshman, Danielle worked with Dr. Ruth Daly in studying supermassive black holes. She later earned a NSF grant to work with Drs. Mark Stecker and Martin Ligare to study nerve impulse propagation. She was an invited participant in the Biomaterials and Bionanotechnology Summer Institute during the summer of 2003 and studied biopolymer assemblies. Danielle has received numerous academic awards such as the Pennsylvania State University Society of Distinguished Alumni Scholarship, the 2002 John and Elizabeth Holmes Teas Scholarship in Physics, and notably, she is the first Penn State student to win a Winston Churchill Foundation Scholarship. In addition, she won a Fulbright Scholarship to work with Michael Breakspear at the Brain Dynamics Centre in Sydney, Australia which she will integrate with her studies in the NIH-Cambridge program. Danielle enjoys spending her extra time surfing, skydiving and traveling internationally. She also has interests in unusual literary devices such as verbal illumination in genres as different as medieval Arthurian literature, mystical poetry, poetry writing, post-war avant-garde Japanese literature, and linguistics studies. In her research, she aspires to , "examine the boundary between the metaphysics of cognition and the life-sustaining processes of the brain by applying mathematical modeling techniques and statistical physics to the neural system."

SEAN J. JEFFRIES

NIH - Cambridge Scholar

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A Cum Laude graduate of the College of Wooster with a B.S. in computer science, Sean Jeffries was recognized with Wooster's Science and Mathematics Scholarship. After graduating Sean ventured to San Diego to set up the informatics department at Kalypsys, a fresh biotech startup with some exciting proprietary high-throughput screening robots. At Kalypsys he became Head of Informatics where his development team focused on the processing and analysis of chemical compound screening data. Outside of lab Sean enjoys singing and has recorded with "Cappela Gloriana" and the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus. At Cambridge, Sean punctuates his lab work by throwing checks for the Cambridge University Ice Hockey Team.