Karr Nominated for Churchill Scholarship for STEM Excellence

Founded in 1963, the Churchill Scholarship provides funding to American students for a year of Master’s study at the University of Cambridge, based at Churchill College. Scholars are selected on the basis of their academic and research achievements. The award, named in honor of Sir Winston Churchill, provides all tuition and fees for the Scholar’s course of study at Cambridge, as well as a living allowance, travel allowance, and eligibility to apply for special research funds.  Only a select few institutions in the nation are eligible to nominate students for the Churchill Scholarship. Read on to learn more about the wonderful student nominated by Northeastern this year.

Cerina Karr COS’23, Biology with a minor in Mathematics

Mentors: Maria Sevillano, Dessy Raytcheva, Su Suen Org, Cammie Lesser, Robert Buchowski, Oswald Schmitz

Cerina Karr joined us at Northeastern from Mount Kisco, New York. At Fox Lane High School, Cerina served as President of the Science Olympiad, Envirothon, and Mathletes clubs and discovered a passion for the STEM fields at an early age.  Driven to learn and question — and eager to do what she could to understand and combat climate change, Cerina reached out to  Professor Oswald Schmitz at Yale University while only a sophomore in high school. During what remained of her high school summers, Cerina worked as part of a research team led by Ph.D. student and graduate school mentor Robert Buchowski, studying the changing behaviors of the nursery web spider and the woodlouse within the food chain in order to understand the impacts of warmer temperatures. This research led to her publication as a first author for a significant peer-reviewed scientific journal. At Northeastern University, Cerina has excelled in a rigorous course of study in the biology department and has continued to pursue advanced research at every turn. During her first year (and the height of the COVID-19 pandemic), she explored microbial ecosystems and the engineered water cycle in the Pinto Lab under the direction of Dr. Maria Sevillano. Building upon her time in the Pinto Lab, Cerina then completed a laboratory-focused research opportunity through a co-op at  EMD Serono, the research and discovery branch of the world’s oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company, Merck. Here, Cerina worked with mentor Dr. Su Sien Ong, evaluating an assay candidate for a high-throughput screening campaign to identify small molecule modulators of the intestinal epithelial barrier. Returning to microbiology with a particular focus on bacteria, Cerina subsequently sought out an opportunity to study Shigella, the Gram-negative bacterium that causes bacillary dysentery, and the mechanisms it uses to prevent cell death with Cammie Lesser, M.D./Ph.D,  at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Karr’s work with the Lesser Lab was presented at the Boston Bacterial Meeting, where she earned the Best Undergraduate Poster.  At Cambridge, Cerina hopes to earn the MPhil through research in Medicine with a particular focus on infectious disease and work with Dr. Lalita Ramakrishnan, whose world-leading work focuses on differential susceptibility to tuberculosis.