Kieran Andrew wins prestigious travel award

For one undergraduate student, major life decisions serendipitously happen around the dinner table. Kieran Andrew, a Barrett Honors Student double majoring in Psychology and Neuroscience, began his research journey as a high school junior who happened to be sitting with his future mentor, President’s Professor Heather Bimonte-Nelson at an awards ceremony dinner.
He began to talk with her about the research in her lab, Behavioral Neuroscience of Memory & Aging lab, and was offered a chance to participate as a volunteer researcher as a senior in high school. Four years later, while Andrew was once again seated at Bimonte-Nelson’s dinner table during a laboratory dinner, he completed an application for a travel scholarship right before the deadline. His mentor and colleagues pushed him to finish and offered support while celebrating.
He recently was announced as the recipient of one of the travel awards for the Emerging Researchers National (ERN) conference in Washington, D.C. The Emerging Researchers National (ERN) Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Inclusive STEM Ecosystems for Equity & Diversity (ISEED) Programs and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Human Resource Development (HRD), within the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR).
At this conference, Andrew will present research that he has been working on since high school on transgenic Alzheimer's disease and how it relates to sex differences in an animal model.