MCB concentrator Sourmyaa Mazumder (‘19) has received of the 2019 Lawrence J. Henderson Prize, an award given by the Board of Tutors in the Biochemical Sciences in recognition of outstanding MCB or CPB theses. The award’s namesake is Harvard professor and chemist Lawrence J. Henderson, who taught at Harvard from 1905 to 1942.
As the 2019 Henderson Prize recipient, Mazumder will receive a copy of Henderson’s book Fitness of the Environment, a framed certificate, and $500 in prize money.
Her thesis also garnered recognition from the university-wide Hoopes Prize. Named for and funded by the estate of Thomas T. Hoopes (Class of 1919), the prize recognizes exceptional work on undergraduate theses across all university departments.
This year’s Hoopes Prize winners include Mazumder, Una Choi (MCB ‘19), Mark Czeisler (Neuro ‘19), Shenyece Ferguson (Neuro ‘19), Pauline Gabrieli (Neuro ‘19), Jin Park (MCB ‘19), and Pablo Reimers (Neuro ‘19).
The titles of these students’ prize-winning theses are:
Una Choi of the David Scadden Lab (HSCRB): “FLT3-ITD Activates Malic Enzyme 2 and Reprograms Acute Myeloid Leukemia Metabolism”
Mark Czeisler of the Jeff Lichtman Lab (MCB): “Characterizing the Morphology of Suprachiasmatic Nucleus Neuronal Interactions: Exploring Ultrastructural Features That May Subserve Circadian Synchronization in Mammals”
Shenyece Ferguson of the George Alvarez Lab (Psychology): “An Exploration of the Effects of Attention on Neural Processing of Visual Information”
Pauline Gabrieli of the Ziv Williams Lab (HMS): “The Neuronal and Genetic Correlates of Prosocial Behavior in Mice”
Soumyaa Mazumder of the Lee Rubin Lab (HSCRB): “Using patient-derived iPSC models to investigate skeletal muscle formation defects in Spinal Muscular Atrophy”
Jin Park of the Tyler Jacks Lab (MIT): “There Is Only a Perspectival Seeing, Only a Perspectival Knowing: Applying Nietzsche’s Lesson to Adoptive Cell Therapy”
Pablo Reimers of the Benjamin de Bivort Lab (OEB): “Stochastic Individuality in Drosophila melanogaster: The Effect of Neural Morphological Asymmetry on Idiosyncratic Behavior”
The Hoopes Prize awards $5,000 to each recipient and $2,000 to each faculty member who supervised a winning thesis. Copies of the theses will be bound and made available in the Lamont Library for the next two years. An additional copy of each thesis will be permanently stored in the Harvard Archives.
Congratulations to these seven students on their exemplary thesis work!
by Diana Crow
