Undergraduate Lin Presents at ASPB Conference

• Emily Lin

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering senior Emily Lin, advised by Assistant Professor Ganesh Sriram, recently attended the American Society of Plant Biologists' (ASPB) 2010 national meeting in Montréal, Canada, where she was invited to present her research in both the student and general poster sessions.

Lin's poster, "Mass Fragmentation and Mass Spectrometry for Metabolic Flux Analysis," described the research funded by the ASPB Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) she received in 2009. The work covered three areas: verifying her group's experimentally obtained data against spectra obtained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology; investigating the signatures of certain sugars on a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, which is important to our understanding of carbohydrate metabolism; and verifying the metabolic steady state of their samples, the ideal condition for performing metabolic flux analysis.

Lin credits the SURF award with enabling her success. "The funding allowed me to do the research I'm interested in, and I've learned so much from doing the experiments," she says. "The results of my SURF project are now supporting parts of a paper we're working on." She also credits Professor Sriram and her collaborators on the project, Sriram Group members Postdoctoral Research Associate Ashish Misra and ChBE junior Margaret Simons.

While at the conference, she attended a number of lectures by invited experts. "I think the best thing about the conference was to learn about their research projects, whether related to mine or not, because they were all very interesting and inspiring," she says. "They have broadened my horizon quite a bit by introducing me to new concepts and ideas."

Lin's excellence in research has been recognized by many over the past two years: in addition to her 2009 SURF award, she won the National Science Foundation-sponsored Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) award in 2008, and in spring 2010 was named an Undergraduate Researcher of the Year by UMD's Maryland Center for Undergraduate Research. The ASPB also covered her projects and awards in a recent issue of their newsletter, ASPB News.

For More Information:

"Emily Lin SURFs to the Top as a UMCP 2010 Student Researcher of the Year," ASPB News, Volume 37, Issue 4, July/August 2010.

Visit Professor Sriram's web site »

Published September 21, 2010