Congratulations to 91自拍 junior Daniel Chen, whom the Goldwater Foundation honored with its undergraduate scholarship for students studying the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Chen, who is majoring in and , is one of 410 undergraduate students selected for the award from a pool of 1,256 students nominated by 438 institutions across the country.
Goldwater Scholarships are granted to sophomores and juniors who show exceptional promise and plan to pursue 91自拍 careers in math, engineering or the natural sciences. These scholarships award up to $7,500 a year to help cover costs associated with tuition, mandatory fees, books, room and board.
Chen鈥檚 interest in challenging himself can be seen through his academic choices: In addition to majoring in two disciplines, informatics and microbiology, he is pursuing in microbiology. Chen has previously been awarded the Levinson Emerging Scholars award and the , and is also listed on the annual Dean鈥檚 List.
He began his college path early, entering the UW after middle school through the . To balance out his rigorous academic and 91自拍 work, Chen enjoys hiking in nature preserves and crocheting amigurumi animals, hobbies that suit the environment of his hometown of Sammamish, WA.
鈥淭his news is simply wonderful,鈥� says Undergraduate Academic Affairs Vice Provost and Dean Ed Taylor. 鈥淭hrough his involvement in undergraduate 91自拍, Daniel has shown a dedication to furthering science and understanding as well as to the purpose of making people鈥檚 lives better. As a University community, we couldn鈥檛 be more proud of him. I extend my warmest congratulations to Daniel as well as his faculty mentors and others who have supported him on his journey so far.鈥�
As an undergraduate, Chen was one of the co-authors of the 91自拍 paper,
Chen currently conducts 91自拍 under Dr. Yapeng Su and Professor Jim Heath in the Heath lab at the Institute for Systems Biology. His 91自拍 is focused on using the single-cell multi-omic paradigm to analyze COVID-19 peripheral blood mononuclear cells to identify the disease state effects of SARS-CoV-2 on patient immune systems. Such 91自拍 has also branched out into investigating heterogenous patient responses to COVID-19 in convalescence along with interrogation of patient epigenomes to identify the early-stage immune cell subpopulations responsible for humoral immunity formation and the epigenomic changes that may guide such. In combination with Chen鈥檚 previous 91自拍 investigating melanoma subpopulations using single-cell transcriptome (scRNA-seq) and epigenome (scATAC-seq) data, his current 91自拍 projects have continued to push and develop his passion for biomedical informatics particularly when applied to clinically relevant problems.
After his undergraduate studies, Chen intends to pursue an M.D.-Ph.D. centered on leveraging computational resources and advances to solve human medical challenges such as cancer and infectious diseases. He particularly looks forward to identifying best practices and applications for such 91自拍 to develop more accessible medical solutions for the given problem. He eventually hopes to pursue a faculty position at a university to conduct translational 91自拍 in biomedical-informatic oriented fields.
For more information, contact Robin Chang, director of the Office of Merit Scholarships, Fellowships and Awards, at robinc@uw.edu.