Penn State Senior Wins Award for Thesis Proposal

Kelly Stewart, a senior from North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, has won the Thesis Proposal Award for the Penn State Eberly College of Science from the Penn State Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's oldest honor society. The honor includes a monetary research grant. Stewart, a chemistry major in Penn State's Schreyer Honors College, is working to understand the fundamentals of chemical signals that provide communication between living cells. "We want ultimately to understand cell signaling and trafficking in vivo, or how cells in the body talk to each other," she said.

Stewart submitted the proposal for her honors thesis at the suggestion of Erin Sheets, assistant professor of chemistry, who is Stewart's research adviser and the principal investigator of a research project in this area of science at Penn State. "I've enjoyed working with Kelly, and I think my research team has enjoyed working with her too," she said. "She has a bubbly personality. Kelly and I are both excited about her project."

As part of the Sheets Research Group at the Nanofabrication Facility at Penn State's Innovation Park, Stewart is working to create model cell membranes in order to reproduce cellular signaling as it happens in a living organism, a research method called micropatterning biomimetic membranes. "Once we have created an artificial membrane, we can introduce a stimulus to it and then see how it reacts and how it passes along the information," she said. The goal is to have a thorough understanding of the basic structure and function of cell membranes so that, in her experiments, Stewart will be able to have control of time and space as she stimulates the membrane and observes its reactions. All of Stewart's work is done on an extremely small scale--the model membranes are several thousandths of a millimeter thick--and requires powerful optical microscopes and fluorescent lighting. She applies microscopic layers of gold to a very thin sheet of glass and allows carbon chains to spontaneously attach and stand straight up, like grass, simulating the materials that make up actual cell membranes. Then she attaches tiny labels that glow under fluorescent lighting, so the membrane can be observed under a microscope. "I'm using lithography, which is basically the same method that is used to make computer chips, but instead I'm using it to pattern artificial cell membranes," she said.

Sheets said, "Kelly's project is training her in a broad array of scientific approaches. I am quite proud of her accomplishments, and I look forward to seeing what she will accomplish during her remaining time at Penn State and beyond."

Stewart is a member of the Phi Eta Sigma national honor society and the National Society of Collegiate Scholars (NSCS). She also is involved in the Nittany Chemical Society. She studied at the University of Sydney in Australia in Spring 2003. Stewart intends to graduate in the summer of 2004, and she hopes to get a fellowship to do biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health. After that, she plans to attend graduate school to study medicinal chemistry.

A graduate of Norwin Senior High School, Kelly is the daughter of John and Diane Stewart of North Huntingdon.

The Penn State Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa awards three $500 grants for the best submitted thesis proposals each fall and spring semester. One award is reserved for students in the Eberly College of Science, one for students in the College of Liberal Arts, and the third for all the other colleges combined.

CONTACTS:

Kelly Stewart, kms390@psu.edu
Erin D. Sheets: 814-863-0044, eds11@psu.edu