Aaron Scheiner
This award recipient is a high-achieving student who inspires peers to go above and beyond in all that they do. In their very first semester at Rutgers University, they began researching the implications of the inflammatory response of OGG1, a base excision repair mechanism, in metabolic syndromes. They presented this research at a conference at the New Jersey State House in March 2018 during the annual STEM Month. They were also selected by the prestigious Governor’s STEM Scholars Program to lead a team of high-schoolers during this research project, and are currently serving as an Ambassador for the Governor’s STEM Scholars Program. After gaining valuable transferable skills, they transferred to a lab in the Department of Genetics and now focus on transcriptional factors regulating the intestinal epithelium. They have developed an independent pipeline for RNA-seq analysis that has been used for a multitude of purposes by other members of the lab and collaborators within and outside of the Rutgers community. They are an author of “HNF4 Factors Control Chromatin Accessibility and are Redundantly Required for Maturation of the Fetal Intestine” which was published in “Development” in April of 2019. They have presented this research at the 15th Annual Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium, where they won a STEM Category Honorable Mention. This research has enriched their academic coursework in the Genetics major, as they are additionally pursuing a Certificate in Computational Genetics. They apply concepts from the classroom in their research, and works at least six hours per week during the academic year and full-time over the summer in order to develop these research findings. However, this was not enough research to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. They concurrently have been working as a remote research intern at the Albert Einstein College of since June 2018. By collaborating with another undergraduate student, they have completed an extensive literature review and answered research questions related to adults with asthma. Through this hard work, they are also a published author of “Developing and Pilot Testing ASTHMAXcel, a Mobile App for Adults with Asthma” which was published in “Journal of Asthma” in February of 2020. With research skills from three different labs under their belt, they were selected as a 2019-2020 Lloyd C. Gardner Fellow through the Rutgers Political Science Department. Through an independent literature review, they are studying the complex ethics of clinical genetic testing with a focus on gastrointestinal health concerns. By combining technical skills such as programming and scientific writing with a passion for advocacy and health equity, they have explored a niche field with research projects in an interdisciplinary fashion.
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