Hello! My name is Lena and I'm a rising Junior at Tufts University. I am double-majoring in biology and community health and I am passionate about health equity and primary care. For my first Laidlaw summer I will be conducting qualitative research on respiratory health in a nearby Latinx community. Feel free to contact me through My LinkedIn Profile if you have similar interests or want to chat!

Hello! I'm Thomas, and I am a rising third-year student at Tufts University studying International Relations and Philosophy. This next year, however, I will be taking time to engage in my philosophy studies more specifically at the University of Tübingen in Germany. My academic interests generally span from history to metaethics, with practical and impactful implementation always foremost in mind. Please don't hesitate reach out if you have any interest, or are doing work, in similar fields! 

Hi! I'm Bennett, and I'm studying Biochemistry, Biotechnology, and Music at Tufts University. I'm honored to be a Laidlaw scholar, and I hope my research can one day impact the global fight against disease.

Hello! I’m Trisha, a fourth-year student at Cornell University from Texas, USA. I’m majoring in Environment and Sustainability with a dual focus on food systems and wildlife conservation, and minoring in International Relations. My interests in combining my enduring passions for writing and wildlife conservation have driven me to explore multiple perspectives on highly-controversial issues such as trophy hunting, retaliatory animal killings, and illegal wildlife crime. Thus, during my first summer as a Laidlaw Scholar and as a member of the Morally Contested Conservation team, I wrote a literature review on the interconnectedness of climate change and human-wildlife conflicts in East and southern Africa. In June and July 2024, I furthered this research by traveling to the University of Oxford and to the Burunge Wildlife Management Area in Tanzania. I will be returning to Oxford and Burunge in June and July 2025 to report my results.  As an aspiring environmental policymaker and journalist, I am passionate about making technical scientific information more accessible to the general public. At Cornell, I am an Institute of Politics and Global Affairs Scholar, through which I interact with policymakers monthly to discuss pervasive issues in international politics. I also speak Marathi, Spanish, and Swahili at varying levels of fluency and plan to continue to grow my language skills to communicate environmental issues across continents and cultures.  For fun, I love to turn even the most mundane materials into recycled art, spend hours on end working through jigsaw puzzles, and go for runs while listening to podcasts. And as a diehard foodie who loves to travel, I’m always looking for recommendations of places to visit or new recipes to try!  The Laidlaw Scholars Program has been an invaluable component of my undergraduate experience. The friendships I’ve made, as well as the research and language skills I’ve begun to develop, have encouraged me to continue to ask and seek answers to complicated questions about global affairs and environmental science. If anyone has questions or feedback about the Laidlaw Program, is interested in collaborating, or just wants to say hello, please feel free to email me at trb238@cornell.edu. I hope we can meet in person someday!

Andrew Singleton has recently joined the Tufts-Laidlaw Undergraduate Research and Leadership Programme team as a Programme Administrator and is excited to continue to elevate the Laidlaw Programming for current and future scholars. He joined the programme from Venture Café, which connects and educates the entrepreneurial and innovation community in Boston through programs/spaces/events and many other cities around the world. He has a B.S. from MIT in Biology and a background in social-impact enterprises, wind-power, user-computer-interfaces, as well as computer network design. In his spare time, Andrew enjoys travel, hiking, and wildlife photography.

My research interest primarily focuses on metabolic disorders such as type 1 and 2 diabetes as well as metabolic dysfunction in cancer. I am interesting in understanding the usage of analytic methods of identifying metabolite and lipid differences in pathology such as LC-MS (liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry) in metabolomics and lipidomics analysis. My Laidlaw research project is a collaborative project with the Joslin Diabetes Centre/Harvard Medical School and aims to identify whether stable isotope labelling can be used with transgenic brown adipose tissue for metabolite and lipid identification to elucidate the role of brown adipose tissue in glucose homeostasis.

Hi! My name is Erica Hahn, and I am a rising sophomore at Georgetown University, majoring in Biochemistry.  This summer, I will be working with Dr. Rodrigo Maillard from the Chemistry Department. The Maillard lab focuses on the mechanisms of regulation and signal transduction of Protein Kinase A (PKA) which is a family of proteins that works to phosphorylate other proteins in complex signaling pathways in cells. Because PKA is involved in many critical signaling pathways, it has been associated with many diseases including Carney Complex and Acrodysostosis, making it an important therapeutic drug target. My project over this summer would be to observe and detect the behavioral changes of PKA using FRET (fluorescence resonance energy transfer) sensor that our lab developed. Specifically, I will  be observing the interaction between the catalytic subunit of PKA and smoothened protein in hedgehog signaling which has shown to regulate PKA activity, different from the traditional PKA regulator cAMP and regulatory subunit. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Ben Myers from the University of Utah.  I am very excited to pursue this research opportunities and to connect with various scholars. Please do not hesitate to reach out! 

I am interested in the fields of mechanobiology, biohybrid prosthetics, biophysics, Jungian psychology, and philosophy. Recently in association with Laidlaw; In Cornell University (N.Y, U.S.A.) I worked on curating an art book on biomechanics for charity to raise awareness in this field of science. And in Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), we worked on developing a microphysiological model of the osteocytic network in the bone that can be used to better understand the (patho)physiology of bone using Direct Laser Writing technology using MLO-Y4 cell culture.  On the side; In ETH Zürich (Switzerland), I was working on understanding bio-hybrid muscle actuators using C2C12 cell culture by amassing literature review, designing biobot unit, and conducting biocompatibility tests along with growing and differentiating muscle cells for further electrical stimulation. At DogPatch Labs's Patch (Dublin, Ireland) I was experimenting with creating a start-up company to help amputees get affordable prosthetics.  On the (other) side; I like to dance, write, and read anything I get my hands on; be it music, poetry, or even shampoo bottles. Please feel free to contact me here or on LinkedIn for any discussions regarding the aforementioned topics!