VCU summer program propels undergraduate student's research

By William Lineberry
Honors College

For many rising sophomores in college, summer means getting to put your feet in the ocean. For Melody Ngo, it meant, as she said, "getting to dip your toes into the field of research."

To build on the momentum of her freshman year, the Honors College student at Virginia Commonwealth University was one of more than a dozen participants this year in the Honors Summer Undergraduate Research Program, which pairs young students with faculty mentors to collaborate on research - in Ngo's case, preventing heart disease in women.

HSURP is a partnership between the Honors College, which emphasizes experiential learning, and VCU's Wright Center for Clinical and Transitional Research, which accelerates science that promotes healthy communities. The summer program offers "a crash run of what it is like to work in a lab day to day," said Ngo, who is majoring in biology in the College of Humanities and Sciences.

"You're also learning new skills from it," she added. "You get to learn how to apply critical thinking, be adaptive and ask the right questions, and be inquisitive and creative."

Ngo was paired with Adolfo Mauro, Ph.D., in the School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics. Together, they researched why certain females who are carriers for a genetic mutation linked to Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy are more likely to develop heart disease at some point in life.

The ultimate goal is to develop treatment, and Ngo was able to help in multiple stages of the early research. She collected data and, with the assistance of Mauro and a graduate assistant, medical student Sarah Lewicki, learned how to analyze and distill the information into findings. At the end of the summer program, Ngo and other HSURP participants presented their research at a poster symposium on the Monroe Park Campus.

Ngo called the program invigorating because it allowed her to take lessons from her freshman-year classes and apply them in a rigorous setting with real-life implications.

"HSURP really helped me see what a university research lab is like," Ngo said. "You learn a lot about methodologies in research lecture classes on campus, but it's a completely different experience to be able to do them with your own hands and understand how it works and why it works. It's really enlightening."

In particular, she noted how creativity is a major element of the scientific process.

"Research forces you to be innovative is what Dr. Mauro would tell me," Ngo said. "Sometimes we wouldn't have a tool for a methodology that we wanted to test, so he would show me how we could take tools we already had in the lab and use it in this instance where it works just as well."

The summer experience also highlighted how lab results, even when unexpected, are beneficial.

"Even negative data is useful," she said. "Down the line, it can help save someone else researching a similar subject time in what they choose to examine. It's a steppingstone for growth" in research overall.

Ngo's parents are involved in medicine, and she, too, hopes to become a doctor. The HSURP experience revealed that she wants research to be a part of her career.

"I want to incorporate research into my profession in some way no matter what specialty I go into," Ngo said. "HSURP provided me with some good insight into how I can apply research into my career. Being able to make future contributions to science through research, whether small or big, is special to me because the purpose is to help an entire population."