I’m a Bennie

ANNA (MY) NGUYEN ’22

OVERACHIEVING IN UNDERGRAD RESEARCH

When it comes to pursuing and providing significant research opportunities, Saint Ben’s and Saint John’s are punching significantly above their weight. Just ask Anna (My) Nguyen, who graduated this spring as a chemistry and computer science double major. She won one of three Outstanding Thesis awards this spring on Celebrating Scholarship and Creativity Day for her research into “The Development of Inhibitors for the SARS-CoV2 ORF,” with chemistry advisor Lisa Gentile, Ph.D. Gentile said Anna’s research thesis is one of the best she’s ever read or been involved with as a mentor, and that includes approximately 100 undergraduate research students. Anna is perhaps the best example of how a student can get big-time research exposure at CSB. “It’s really a different experience,” Gentile says. “Here, faculty are not working with grad students or postdocs. Undergrads have our full attention. They also have the opportunity to start early – some in their first year – and do research every year at CSB if they want. In an R1 institution (doctoral institutions with very-high research activity), space for undergrads doing research is much more limited and often those undergrads work with a grad student or postdoc rather than a faculty member. They usually will not be able to design their own projects but rather work on a small part of a grad student/postdoc project. Our students who have done research end up with a very strong background for moving forward in grad school.” Anna has been working on the project for more than a year and presented early results of her work at the American Chemical Society meeting last August in Atlanta. As first author of her research, it helped fuel her acceptance into a doctoral program in pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago – with a prestigious University Fellowship. “I wanted to combine chemistry and computer science in a project of my own,” says Anna, who is from Hanoi, Vietnam. “I was talking to (Gentile) and we talked about doing something with drug discovery because that’s her area of research. And I started working on this during the pandemic, where our schedules were blocked and it was hard to get into the chemistry lab, so it was a perfect time to do something with computer science.” Anna’s research was born out of what has happened during the COVID-19 outbreak, when drugs and vaccines that were developed or repurposed all focused on one viral target: the spike protein. She hypothesized that the spike protein could mutate and none of the therapeutics would remain effective. To gain insight, she focused on ORF8, another viral protein. She used her computer science skills essentially to design virtual drugs and then her knowledge of chemistry to test them against ORF8 in a lab. “It’s kind of like a lock-and-key model,” Anna says. “I have the lock, the virus protein, and, with a computer, I look at it from different angles and see how I can design a key to fit that lock – how long it needs to be, what area of spikes the key needs, and then I use that template to find similar keys. I pick the best ones I can find and then go in the lab and see if they fit or not.” Anna says officials at Illinois-Chicago were surprised she had done work of this caliber as an undergrad. “They didn’t think a liberal arts school would produce this,” she says. “I think I’m very lucky that my advisers here were super-helpful, and they provided anything I needed for my project. I applied for a grant and the school paid for me to fund my research and present it in Atlanta. We may be a smaller school (at CSB), but I had a lot of resources behind me.”