First-year MCO graduate student Eddy Tzintzun-Tapia has received an award from the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). The program’s mission is to promote a diverse scientific workforce by supporting early stage graduate students. Tzintzun-Tapia expressed gratitude to the NSF for the support.
Although he is still rotating through labs and has yet to decide on his thesis research project, he is excited to be part of the MCO program and looking forward to discussions about ideas with others in the Boston-Cambridge community. He is enjoying his classes, where he is learning coding and how to read scientific papers more closely.
Tzintzun-Tapia was born and raised in Asheboro, North Carolina. His father is a mechanic, and his mother is a seamstress. Growing up, Tzintzun-Tapia says he didn’t have much exposure to science.
As an undergraduate, Tzintzun-Tapia attended Yale University, where he majored in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. One of his classes was taught by then-postdoc Alita Burmeister, who inspired Tzintzun-Tapia to join Paul Turner’s lab, which studies the evolution of bacteria and the viruses that infect them. Tzintzun-Tapia conducted thesis research on how bacteriophage viruses adapt to bacteria becoming phage-resistant. He found that as the bacteria adapt to fend off phage, the phages evolve by increasing their adsorption rate.
While at Yale, Tzintzun-Tapia interned with the Yale Pathways to Science program, which provides science education opportunities to local youth in New Haven, Connecticut. The experience working with younger students solidified his interest in mentoring others.
Upon graduation, Tzintzun-Tapia initially planned to go on to medical school but knew that he wasn’t ready to attend medical school right away. Instead, he joined Sigrid Nachtergaele’s lab at Yale, which studies chemical modifications on RNA. He was paired with graduate student Clara Wang, and the two worked on a protein that installs a modification on the 18S ribosomal RNA. “A lot of the work we were doing was implementing multiple experimental approaches to begin answering our questions,” Tzintzun-Tapia says. “I feel I learned a lot of very cool techniques, and that lab is what sparked my interest in RNA biology.”
Tzintzun-Tapia adds that his experiences in both the Turner and Nachtergaele labs were overwhelmingly positive experiences that led him to reconsider going to medical school. “The combination of two really good experiences was what led me to consider research as a career option and then ultimately led to me applying to graduate school,” he says.
His mentors encouraged him to seek out graduate programs that prioritized good rapport and healthy learning environments. “You might find a lot of places that you could see yourself at in terms of your research interests, but they also really mentioned the importance of liking the place that you’re going to be living for the next five or six years, or sometimes more, and liking the people there as well,” he says. After he visited the MCO program, he left with positive impressions. “The current graduate students who were there during my interview were really nice, really encouraging, and really supportive,” he says.
He adds that being close to a big city like Boston was a draw to the program.
Outside of the lab, Tzintzun-Tapia’s hobbies include taking long walks, and he has been enjoying exploring the Boston and Cambridge area on foot. He has also recently gotten involved in rock climbing. He also enjoys photography, especially taking pictures of his family members.
Tzintzun says his journey in science has been the result of contributions from many different people. “I want to thank the NSF for giving me this award but also want to thank both of my previous PIs, Paul Turner and Sigrid Nachtergaele, for giving me the opportunity to work in their labs,” he says. “But then also I want to thank the people I worked even more closely with. That was Alita Burmeister in the Paul Turner lab. She’s now faculty at University of Wisconsin, and she was the very crucial person who got me into research in the first place. Clara Wangwas also a phenomenal mentor, especially as I pivoted away from evolutionary biology into molecular biology, which uses pretty different techniques. She helped me a lot in the process of applying to graduate school and gave me lots of advice.”
“Lastly, I want to thank Jasmine Garcia, who is a current student in the BBS program. She was a mentor in a program that helped me apply to graduate school,” Tzintzun-Tapia adds.”She really, really helped guide me and gave me really good feedback for the GRFP. So, lots of people to thank, but I think they were all really crucial components of how I got to where I am today.”
