Grad Track
As far back as he can remember, Nick Gedeon, S’14, has been fascinated by the body’s inner workings and his own diabetes. Diagnosed at age 2, he was 8 when he informed his parents that he’d be taking charge of his insulin shots. By age 16, riding ambulances as an EMT-certified volunteer, he envisioned himself as a doctor or scientist.
No stranger to medical emergencies—broken limbs, stroke, heart attack—he is drawn to patient care. “It’s a strange feeling to have someone’s life in your hands,” he says, “and to feel a heartbeat revive is quite the relief.” He might be an endocrinologist, or the guy who cures Type 1 diabetes, his own condition, he says with an easy grin. “I’ll either be giving drugs or making them.”
Two days after stepping on campus in 2010, Gedeon began mapping a path to an MD, a PhD, or both. He walked into Northeastern’s Center for Drug Discovery and started asking questions about the inflammatory diseases studied there. Parlaying a work-study job in one laboratory into three years of training, he purified proteins, screened enzymes, and tweaked experimental techniques.
When the findings are published, Gedeon’s name will be on that journal paper, says the lab’s director, associate professor Spiro Pavlopoulos. He adds that merit—original thinking—determines who gets credited.
“Nick could handle anything we threw at him,” Pavlopoulos recalls. “So we thought, ‘Let’s bring him in this summer on our budget.’ Next thing, he’s running nuclear-magnetic-resonance imaging tests to identify small molecules that might serve as components of potential drugs. After two semesters, we were able to treat him like a grad student.”
“Nick is a special case,” Pavlopoulos muses. “Then again, at this university we have quite a few Nicks.” He points to a list of 30 students he has recruited in the last three years.
Knock, Knock
Today, many Northeastern undergraduates expect to do research, often as a prelude to graduate school. Freshman surveys reflect a growing trend: Eighty-five percent plan on at least a master’s degree, and nearly 40 percent aim for a PhD, MD, JD, or other professional degree. What these aspiring professors, lawyers, physicians, artists, and CEOs discover is an abundance of opportunities to do original work of the sort that can make grad school a reality.
Northeastern’s unique blend of classroom learning and experience offers clear advantages, faculty and students say. One is co-op, a portal to gaining invaluable experience at think tanks, institutes, universities, and enterprises worldwide. Another is on-campus research, which flourishes in nearly every discipline. A third is a mentoring culture in which faculty view even 18-year-olds as supremely capable.
Northeastern has taken note of a rising demand for undergraduate research opportunities, and is capitalizing on an experiential infrastructure to provide more. The university hosts research expositions at which undergrads present their work. Students compete for research grants several times a year. And new programs are flowering, such as a $1.2 million, federally funded effort that puts young researchers at the interface of nanotechnology, medicine, and cancer biology.
But according to Susan Ambrose, senior vice provost of undergraduate education and experiential learning, co-op is what sets Northeastern apart. For six months, she says, “co-op lets students immerse themselves in research problems full time, in hundreds of placements on campus, across the country, and overseas. Once they’ve experienced the exhilaration of creating knowledge, many see a graduate degree as a natural next step.”
Internal Motivators
Nick Gedeon, 22, has reached for every brass ring on Northeastern’s research carousel. Rather than taking office jobs to earn work-study dollars, he found a lab eager to train him. He created co-ops where none had existed. He fulfilled course requirements for a master’s degree in just four years so he could tackle a thesis in year five. Now, under the wing of chemistry department chair Graham Jones, he is synthesizing glycoproteins, building blocks of highly targeted cancer drugs.
Part of Gedeon’s success is his focus. Like a drill bit, he zeroes in on whatever is in front of him, be it his miniature insulin pump and glucose monitor, lab data, or a fresh chance to take part in discovery.
In seeking out mentors, Gedeon was anything but shy. He found what he calls his “most intellectually challenging” relationship when he cold-called a scientist at Columbia University Medical School, Megan Sykes, looking to do a co-op with her. Sykes studies Type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system mistakenly destroys cells that make insulin, the hormone that turns blood sugar into energy.
The link to his own disease excited Gedeon. But Sykes’ lab had never taken on an undergraduate before, and Gedeon knew nothing about immunology. Undeterred, he read a textbook Sykes recommended and arrived in New York City with his sleeves rolled up. For six months, he engineered mice with human immune systems using stem cells from healthy and diabetic donors. The goal was to pinpoint genes with a role in diabetes, and to perfect a mouse model to test new drugs.
“I’d be asked for data and expected to produce it,” Gedeon says. “It was a bit scary, but every victory gave me confidence.”
He insists, however, that his initiative isn’t unusual at Northeastern, and Ambrose agrees.
“Our experiential learning philosophy attracts students with an entrepreneurial spirit, people who aren’t afraid to tackle tough problems or test their limits,” Ambrose says. “We see in their writings about co-op that they think deeply about the relationship between co-op, coursework, and the larger world. They’re looking to research, and to graduate school, as ways of maxing out their chances to make that world better.”
A Leg Up
As if opportunity were a bank, Gedeon drew from it often. The resulting wealth of experience promises to set him apart in the heated competition for top graduate schools.
Lacking funding from Sykes’ lab, he turned to his academic and co-op adviser, Katie Dioli, and Professor Graham Jones, who nominated him for support provided annually by alumnus Bob Matz, LA’62, and his wife, Eileen. Another alum, university trustee Carol Shapazian, LA’66, MS’72, helped fund a second co-op, this time at Boston’s Joslin Diabetes Center.
With a sterling recommendation from Pavlopoulos, Gedeon negotiated a co-op in the lab of Rohit Kulkarni, under the tutelage of Abdelfattah El Ouaamari. Extending those six months by another two to fulfill his senior-project requirement, Gedeon worked to confirm a dramatic discovery: a new protein, a growth factor, that prompts the insulin-secreting beta cells typically wiped out in Type 1 diabetes to multiply like mushrooms.
“It was painstaking work,” El Ouaamari says, “but Nick learned the techniques quickly. What Nick was doing, a PhD student or postdoc would do”—culturing, staining, and analyzing cells under a powerful microscope, logging nights and weekends.
What’s more, El Ouaamari says, Gedeon fit in easily among the lab’s 15 members. He attended lectures, joined in discussions, socialized at outings. And he critiqued a published study’s methods in the lab ritual known as “journal club,” feeling, as Gedeon recalls, “like part of the team.”
A Man With Options
Experiences like Gedeon’s—in disciplines spanning the hard and social sciences—are a boon to Northeastern’s youngest researchers. Having sampled from a buffet of hundreds of co-ops, summer internships, work-study jobs, and volunteer opportunities, “our undergrads have a command of their subject matter that grad schools find impressive,” according to Gail Begley, who advises pre-med applicants.
Their work is paying off. In swelling numbers, Northeastern graduates are moving into competitive graduate programs (see sidebar). Lately, Gedeon is leaning toward medical school, although he may work for a year in biotech first. “I’ve got options,” he says.
Meanwhile, Jones, Gedeon’s master’s thesis adviser, talks about his protégé like a proud dad. Gedeon’s name will appear next year on yet another publication, Jones says: a review of the “hot” class of cancer drugs they are working to develop. No matter which grad school is lucky enough to get him, Jones says, “Nick will chip away with ideas and creativity, and when he speaks, people will listen.”
What excites Gedeon is the progress that research drives. Mass-producing insulin-making cells could be a breakthrough for patients like him, he points out. Someday, his body could take over the work of the tiny pump taped to his hip. People with Type 2 diabetes, whose cells don’t use insulin effectively, would benefit, too.
Of the future, he says, “I’m very hopeful.”