“SURF gave me the clarity to know what I wanted to do. If I hadn’t gotten into the program, I probably would have taken a year off to figure things out. But, because of SURF, I got a chance to work in research and I came to the realization earlier.”

When University of Rhode Island (URI) senior Hannah Sheehan graduates this month with dual degrees in Biological Sciences and Cell and Molecular Biology, she will leave campus having discovered her calling and with a clear vision of her career path.

Her next step takes her to Northeastern University, where she will embark on her Ph.D. in Biology, working in an aging and fertility lab this summer before starting classes in the fall. Originally a Kinesiology major with designs on medical school, Sheehan, from North Andover, Mass., credits Rhode Island NSF EPSCoR’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program with helping her find her way.

“I figured it out last summer, during SURF,” says Sheehan, who had been working about six to 10 hours a week in the lab of URI Associate Professor Steven Irvine. “I applied for SURF because I wanted to immerse myself in research for 40 hours a week. I had considered research, but I needed to try it full time.

“SURF gave me the clarity to know what I wanted to do. If I hadn’t gotten into the program, I probably would have taken a year off to figure things out. But, because of SURF, I got a chance to work in research and I came to the realization earlier.”

Through the RI EPSCoR summer program, undergraduates engage in independent research projects under the guidance of faculty mentors. SURF experiences offer a markedly different exposure to research than most course-based lab work in that they are open-ended and typically part of a much larger project.

SURF also provides workshops on leadership and communication, and culminates with the presentation of student work at the state’s largest undergraduate research conference. Sheehan notes that through these opportunities, aimed at broadening perspectives and developing the workforce, she discovered she also liked fieldwork and the chance to travel in her career.

Sheehan spent her 2016 SURF experience in the Irvine lab investigating the proteins present in sea squirt ovaries and whether hikes in water temperature altered protein expression. The question, she says, is whether the species can continue to proliferate and survive under projected climate change scenarios.

“We found that a lot of heat shock proteins increased,” explains Sheehan, referring to the proteins that cells express in response to stressful conditions. “As of now, the animals are able to survive and make embryos, but they’re expressing a different set of proteins at higher temperatures than they do in normal ranges. We don’t know the full implications of this, so we’re doing further study on the embryos.”

Ultimately, Sheehan says, the Irvine project balanced the scale in favor of the Northeastern reproductive lab where she chose to pursue her Ph.D. Even though she will be working with different organisms, she says similarities between reproduction systems cut across species. In particular, her focus will be on mitochondria, which process and build energy for cells.

Sheehan, whose father works in advertising and mother is a kindergarten teacher aide, traces her interest in science to an early age, when as a curious child she was drawn to rocks and bugs. But, she says, she never connected with her interests academically until college biology lab: “Science should be hands-on. When you teach it that way, it’s so much more effective.”

Today, eyeing a career in the cancer biology industry, she says life experiences such as an aunt unable to have a child and a cousin who battled a rare childhood cancer, also helped guide her direction.

Story and photo by Amy Dunkle