Patrick Joseph Short of Raleigh, a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been awarded a 2013 Goldwater Scholarship.
Honorable mentions were awarded to Vishwajith Sridharan and Anna-Lisa Doebley.
The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program of Springfield, Va., recently announced 271 recipients nationwide from a pool of 1,107 nominees. The scholarship provides up to $7,500 per year for educational expenses to sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences or engineering. Short is the 40th Goldwater Scholar from Carolina since the program began in 1989.
The son of John and Denice Short of Raleigh, Short came to UNC-Chapel Hill on a Morehead-Cain Scholarship. An applied mathematics and quantitative biology major, he’s been inducted to Phi Beta Kappa and is also a member of the UNC men’s crew team. He was named a 2012 First Team Academic All-American by the American Collegiate Rowing Association.
Short is immersed in multiple research studies at Carolina. One of his projects in the DeSimone Lab looks at nanoparticle delivery of therapeutics for autoimmune diseases. In another research group, he’s working on a sensitivity analysis of a mathematical model of the mitotic spindle. The goal of the project is to integrate model data with wet lab data to explore material properties of chromosomal DNA.
A third study examines biological networks, and specifically gene-gene networks, using high throughput sequencing data. The genesis for this study was a 10-week summer internship in the Cook Lab in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University.
“Working full-time in the lab and often coming in on weekends to get extra work done, I became totally energized by the work,” he said. “My previous doubts about whether or not I would flourish in the research environment were gone, and I began to absorb primary literature, ask questions, and investigate with a new-found vigor, fascinated by the potential for discovery at the intersection of mathematics and biology.”
Short plans to pursue medical and doctoral degrees in genetics and conduct clinical research in the genetic basis of disease and personalized medicine. “As sequencing becomes continually cheaper and faster, personalized medicine will allow for more effective treatment in nearly all aspects of human health from cancers to immunology to preventive care,” he said.
“Patrick is poised for a successful career in genetic medicine,” said Jason Reed, associate professor of biology and head of UNC’s Goldwater selection committee. “He has impressive intellect and communication ability, and here at UNC, he has developed both his computational and experimental skills. He has also spent time in three other countries learning languages and about other cultures.”
A graduate of Sanderson High School, Short was named a Presidential Scholar in 2009, an honor given to 141 outstanding high school seniors nationwide by the White House.
More on the scholarship: https://goldwater.scholarsapply.org/
