News Article

GONZAGA UNIVERSITY NEWS FEATURE
By Peter Tormey

Isaac Strong rushed to the office of Gonzaga biology Professor Nancy Staub last week to share the news he had been waiting with bated breath for months to hear: the pre-medicine student from the tiny town of Canby, Ore., will head to New York City this summer to work in the Rockefeller University laboratory of Professor Cornelia Bargmann.

Heady stuff for any student, but for Strong, who grew up on a farm as the youngest of seven children and the first in his family to attend college, it was flabbergasting.

Isaac Strong Student-Researcher

Strong will receive a $4,500 stipend for his work plus travel and housing expenses through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, an opportunity provided because of Gonzaga’s new alliance with HHMI. Last year, Gonzaga was invited to join a select group of 48 of the nation’s best undergraduate institutions sharing $60 million from HHMI to usher in a new era of science education in the United States. Gonzaga’s first-ever grant (2008) from the HHMI Undergraduate Science Education Program totals $1.2 million over four years and is expected to literally transform Gonzaga’s already successful science programs and nearly triple research opportunities for undergraduates.

Strong is participating in HHMI’s Exceptional Research Opportunities Program, which pairs the Institute’s prestigious investigators with top students from disadvantaged backgrounds or groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences.

Strong, a junior, was allowed to choose four of these top scientists (from a list of 181) to work for this summer and HHMI matched him with Bargmann, an HHMI investigator who earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and came to Rockefeller University in 2004 as its Torsten N. Wiesel Professor.

Look to the Summer issue of Gonzaga Quarterly for a complete story about the amazing Isaac Strong, student-researcher at Gonzaga University.