Graduate student Kevin Cheung recently represented UCLA at the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, Graduate Student Recruiting Program.
A 5th year materials chemistry Ph.D. student in the labs of Professors Anne Andrews and Paul Weiss, Cheung was the only UCLA student amongst the group of 25 people nationwide who were chosen for the prestigious two-day program which took place on May 7 and 8, 2019 at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.
“Attending the GSRP was a great experience, which opened my eyes to the multitude of training and career paths at the NIH, and I am grateful to have been selected for this opportunity” Cheung said.
The Graduate Student Recruiting Program (GSRP) provides senior level graduate students an introduction to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and an opportunity to explore postdoctoral opportunities within the intramural research program.
Kevin Cheung presents a poster at the NIH NCI GSRP (Photo credit: Dr. Chanelle Case Borden of the NCI).
At the GSRP, which took place at both the NCI Bethesda and Frederick campuses, Cheung attended morning seminars in which he learned about the science, training, and career development opportunities at the NCI and NIH. The seminars were followed by poster sessions, which gave Cheung the opportunity to network with investigators within the intramural research program. He then attended meetings and interviews with Primary Investigators (PIs) to gain insight into potential postdoc positions.
Cheung is a 5th year materials chemistry Ph.D. student in the labs of Professors Anne Andrews and Paul Weiss. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2014 where he carried out undergraduate research on nanoparticle based drug delivery vehicles under the mentorship of Professor Norbert Reich. He was also a visiting researcher in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford where he worked with Professor Kyriakos Porfyrakis on the synthesis, characterization, and purification of endohedral metallofullerenes. His joint graduate research between the Andrews and Weiss labs focuses on the development of next generation electronic biosensors with artificial nucleic acid receptors, and also on advancing self-assembly and surface patterning techniques.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
