Top Spot in Research
Research interests in mathematics and biology add up to a spot at the elite Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories summer Undergraduate Research Program this year for Nathan Huey '13.
Huey, of Cincinnati, is one of twenty-five students from a group of about 800 applicants accepted this year into the ten-week program at the private, nonprofit research and education institution in Laurel Hollow, New York. The institution, founded in 1890, is at the cutting edge of molecular biology and genetics research. Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor have won five Nobel Prizes.
Wade H. Powell, associate professor of biology, called Huey's opportunity at Cold Spring Harbor "particularly prestigious."
"They've made a lot of great strides at those laboratories," Huey said. "Cold Spring Harbor is all about molecular biology, and I am very much interested in that area. I just want more exposure to everything." His primary focus is on mathematical biology - the "interface of biology and mathematics" and a field of study accelerated by technology that delivers better quantitative data on biological systems.
Huey, a vocalist with the Kenyon Chamber Singers, also harbors an interest in opera.
"He has diverse interests, and he's talented enough to act on them," Powell said. "He's very talented in the area of math, and it turns out he's a good bench scientist as well. He's very highly skilled in the wet lab. And it's typically Kenyon that he wants to be an opera singer. That's how we think of a Kenyon student."
The Cold Spring Harbor program begins on June 5, after Huey takes advantage of another research opportunity. He'll take part in the Xenopus Bioinformatics Workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on May 14-20. Huey will be one of twenty-five wet-lab researchers taking the course in computational analysis.
Huey has worked with Powell in Powell's research into the molecular mechanisms of contaminant toxicity in aquatic and marine animals, including the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis. The Xenopus research involves "RNA-seq," a cutting-edge technique for simultaneously measuring the expression of every gene in an organism.