The Spring 2019 Honors Symposium was held this past Friday, Mar. 1 on the Annandale Campus. Academically strong students and members of the NOVA Honors Program, the Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society, and the National Collegiate Scholar Society were invited to participate. Student presentations spanned many disciplines and subjects and were highly informative and entertaining
I am happy to announce that two of the three awards went to students from the Alexandria campus.
Ashley Davis presented on Application of CRISPR/Cas9 for Treatment of Tay-Sach’s Disease. The CRISPR/Cas9 is a gene editing tool that can be very effective in the treatment of genetic illnesses, one of which is theTay-Sach’s Disease. Ms. Davis’s talk showcased her research on a project that she did in her Genetics class. Prof. Izanne Zorin was the research supervisor of Ms. Davis.
Zainab Saeed presented on Merging Biology and Physics: Our Plasma Membrane as an Electric Capacitor. Ms. Saeed worked with Profs. David Fernandez and Tatiana Stantcheva to integrate knowledge from the fields of biology and physics and to create a unique biophysics talk. The field of biophysics is a highly exciting and relatively new field that is developing rapidly in the modern scientific field. Ms. Saeed’s presentation is unique to the extent that currently there are no classes at NOVA that include even remotely biophysics topics in their curriculum.
Congratulations to the winners!