(Left: Corinne Warlick Curry; Right: Meg Dillingham, by Clinton Lewis)

Two WKU alumni have received highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. NSF Fellows receive a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 allowance for tuition and fees for research in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. For the 2022 cycle, the NSF awarded approximately 2,200 fellowships from an applicant pool of about 13,000.

Corinne Warlick Curry is a 2019 graduate in chemistry and current PhD student in chemical engineering at Vanderbilt University. As an undergraduate at WKU, Corinne worked with Dr. Lawrence Hill conducting research on creating and controlling a degradable polymer. Additionally, she completed summer internships with distilleries Brown-Forman and Woodford Reserve as well as an NSF-funded summer research internship in nano and microtechnology at the University of Louisville.

In 2019, Corinne was awarded a Fulbright US Student grant to study chemical pretreatments for the recovery of hemicelluloses in the Nordic pulping process with Chalmers Institute of Technology in Sweden. The same year, she was named American Institute of Chemists Outstanding Graduating Senior as well as Mahurin Honors College Citizen of the Year.

Meg Dillingham is a 2020 graduate in biochemistry and current PhD student in systems biology at Harvard Medical School studying mechanisms of resistance and evolutionary dynamics in cancer. As an undergraduate at WKU, Meg worked with Dr. Rodney King researching the function of a highly-conserved cysteine residue in RNA Polymerase in E. coli. and with Dr. Sigrid Jacobshagen to research the potential for the green alga Chlamydomonas rienhardtti to degrade lignin, a waste product in biofuel production, and produce energy.

Additionally, Dillingham completed two summer research internships in the Whetstine lab jointly housed in Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital where she studied DNA copy gains induced by knockdown of histone-lysine modifiers (HLMs) in cancer, as well as a highly competitive Systems Biology Summer Internship in the Desai lab at Harvard Medical School, where she assisted large-scale experiments to test fitness of evolved populations and led an independent project to determine changes in drug susceptibility of yeast over 10,000 generations.

A Goldwater Scholar and a Gilman Scholar (declined due to State Department guidance on travel to Kenya in 2019), Meg was also recognized by the Biology department as Outstanding Biology Studient of the Year in 2019 and Mahurin Honors College Scholar of the Year in 2020.

About the Office of Scholar Development: The Office of Scholar Development is committed to helping WKU students in all majors and degree programs develop the vision, experience and skills to be independent, engaged scholars. OSD welcomes the opportunity to work with students interested in nationally-competitive scholarships.