GENESEO, N.Y. – SUNY Geneseo senior Grant Kusick has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, the first Geneseo undergraduate to receive the prestigious award from the highly regarded federal agency that supports research and education in non-medical fields.
Kusick, a senior biology major from Sag Harbor, N.Y., will be starting his fellowship in July in a life sciences/microbial biology lab at Johns Hopkins University under the tutelage of Peter Devreotes, professor and chair of the Department of Cell Biology. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) provides three years of financial support within a five-year fellowship period for graduate study leading to a research-based master’s or doctoral degree in science or engineering.
The purpose of GRFP is to help ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce in the United States. The fellowships typically support outstanding graduate students who are pursuing STEM degrees (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
"Over the years, Geneseo's alumni have been successful in obtaining these awards but, until now, only after they have started graduate school,” said Michael Mills, Director of National Fellowships and Scholarships at Geneseo. “What makes Grant's fellowship all the more remarkable is that he earned it while still an undergraduate, something rarely done nationwide and a first for this campus. His accomplishment speaks to both the excellence of Grant's science and also that of the outstanding undergraduate research opportunities that Geneseo students are afforded by their faculty mentors who make them highly competitive for graduate school admission and for national and international scholarship and fellowship programs."
GRFP awardees are chosen from some 17,000 applicants. Kusick’s grant proposal focused on using recent discoveries on the biophysics of swimming in the unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to understand how Chlamydononas performs chemotaxis movement along a chemical gradient. The first part of the proposal looks at using a 3-D tracking system to find out how Chlamy changes its swimming pattern during chemotaxis. The second part examines the use of a mutant screen to discover new genes/proteins that underlie this process to help understand more about how human sperm move and perform chemotaxis. Kusick has received substantial guidance from his adviser, Harold Hoops, professor of biology.
“A scientist’s ability to earn funding for their research, especially in today’s climate, is arguably as important as their ability to do the research,” said Kusick, who also is in Geneseo’s Edgar Fellows Honors Program. “Winning what amounts to a $100,000+ grant gives me a lot of momentum at this early point in my career. It also affords me more control over my experience as a Ph.D. candidate. Support for doing research abroad through the NSF GROW (Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide) also gives me even further opportunities to be independent as a young researcher.”
Two Geneseo alumni who are now in graduate school also received 2016 GRFP fellowships: Benjamin Peterson ’12 and Staci Weiss ’15. Five additional Geneseo alumni received honorable mentions: Lauren Aulet ’14, Carolyn Levinn 14’, Bryan Stressler ’14, Dante Tufano ’14 and Irene Rizza Wallrich ’08.
Former GRFP fellows include numerous people who have made transformative breakthroughs in the sciences and engineering.
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