University Park

Sixty $3,500 grants available to undergraduates who wish to pursue research

Credit: Penn State. Creative Commons

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Adam Fenton hunkered down in the Hanna-Rose lab on Penn State's University Park campus last summer, taking strides in understanding the causes of a rare metabolic disease. Meanwhile, Luiza Lodder made headway in her honors thesis focusing on the public’s constructs of mental illness as she pored over more than ten relevant memoirs.

The two Penn State students were among nearly 60 undergraduate recipients of Erickson Discovery Grants. The program affords students from all campuses and all fields of study with the opportunity to pursue original research, scholarship, or creative work by providing grants of $3,500.

Emphasizing substantial student engagement and supervision from a faculty member, the Rodney A. Erickson Discovery Grant Program will be accepting applications until Friday, Feb. 17.

“I am extremely grateful for the grant — not only for the financial support it provides, but also for its symbolic significance,” said Lodder, a senior majoring in English from Brasília, Brazil, and a scholar in the Schreyer Honors College. “The Discovery Grant is an investment in student research and scholarship, and it validates the work, ambition and effort that students put in.”

Had she not been awarded the grant, Lodder said her time for reading and annotating would have been slashed through working part-time. Yet, through detailed research, she landed on two specific memoirs that now form the foundation of her thesis: "The Noonday Demon" by Andrew Solomon and "The Last Asylum" by Barbara Taylor.

“My goal is to analyze the narrative structures of two memoirs written by people with mental illness, and then examine how these narrative structures function as a response to popular misconceptions about mental illness,” Lodder said. “My argument is that popular responses to mental illness reveal a fear of complexity in that people tend to gravitate towards stereotypes and one-sided portrayals of people with mental illness.”

Lodder said she also used part of the grant to travel to the United Kingdom and interview Taylor, a professor at Queen Mary University of London.

Back in the developmental biology lab, Fenton relied on nematodes, a species of small worms, to simulate human metabolism and investigate adenylosuccinate lyase deficiency. The disease, Fenton said, arises from a deficiency in purine metabolism, with purines being the building blocks of DNA.

“In humans, it causes autistic symptoms, neuromuscular retardation, and seizures,” said Fenton, a senior from State College, Pennsylvania, studying molecular biology. "Our research is trying to model this disease in nematodes and figure out how it works on a molecular level because it has implications for how the disease works on a molecular level in humans."

He collected data that suggests the disease impacts both neural and muscle tissue, which paves the way for new research applications.

Fenton said receiving the Erickson Discovery Grant allowed him to pursue lengthy experiments — some of which lasted five or six hours.

“It let me do a lot of experiments that I wouldn’t have otherwise been financially able to do,” he said.

Undergraduates interested in applying to the program must submit an online application, including a two-page project proposal. The faculty supervisor is also asked to submit a one-page recommendation to the Office of Undergraduate Education. This year, submissions by both students and faculty will be done via a new online interface.

Applications will be evaluated on the basis of scholarly nature, student engagement, faculty collaboration and faculty recommendation.

To learn more about the Erickson Discovery Grant Program, visit the Research Opportunities for Undergraduates website.

Research Opportunities for Undergraduates is part of Penn State Undergraduate Education, the academic administrative unit that provides leadership and coordination for University-wide programs and initiatives in support of undergraduate teaching and learning at Penn State. Learn more about Undergraduate Education at undergrad.psu.edu.

Last Updated January 16, 2017