Beckman Scholars Sebastian Kinzie ’26 and Anji Sipkins-Chenn ’27 started their 15-month mentored research experience this summer, the chemistry major and biology major recognized by Pomona College’s selection committee as exceptional undergraduates in their fields.
Since 2023, the Beckman Scholarship has been awarded to one student who has already had significant research experience and another who has demonstrated strong promise for research. Beckman Scholars and their faculty mentors receive a total of $26,000 to conduct full-time research over two summers and part-time research during one full academic year.
Past recipients include Daniel Gao ’25 and Ava Spiegler ’26, Santiago Serrano ’25 and Alexandra Turvey ’24, and Louie Kulber ’23 and Daniela Pierro ’23.
Kinzie, a Portland, Oregon native, spent the summer with Theodore Zwang ’11, assistant professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, using photochemical methods to study the proteome of neurons that are threatened in Alzheimer’s disease pathology.
Working collaboratively with Zwang and Professor of Chemistry Malkiat Johal, Kinzie applied his background in chemical kinetics to use various reagents to add covalent tags—chemically-bonded tags—on all the proteins in a cell.
“This allows us to then extract those proteins and study them in mass spectrometry to get a proteomics data set,” Kinzie says. “My hope is that this isn’t just applicable to studying Alzheimer’s disease, but to tissue impaired by any pathology.”
Kinzie appreciates how the undergraduate research labs at Pomona offer students unparalleled freedom and control over their projects.
“We can really see a project from beginning to end,” he says. “It’s an incredible opportunity as an undergraduate to have autonomy over science that might have great significance.”
Sipkins-Chenn, a native of Durham, North Carolina, returned to her home state this summer to determine the impact of PFAS—or “forever chemicals”—on the shorebird populations inhabiting the North Carolina coast.
Working with researchers and coastal biologists at the North Carolina Audubon Society, Sipkins-Chenn banded American oystercatchers and different populations of terns and black skimmers to later collect feather samples from them for examination at Pomona.
In Professor of Biology Nina Karnovsky’s lab, Sipkins-Chenn plans to analyze the feathers—as well as samples of water, sediment and food from the North Carolina coast—for any sign of PFAS.
Sipkins-Chenn traces her interest in her fieldwork to courses she’s taken in avian ecology, animal physiology and conservation biology.
“Pomona does a really good job at offering experiential learning,” she says. “And the science classes here do a great job at emphasizing the importance of communicating your thoughts clearly, whether that be through a lab report, a grant proposal, or a presentation.”
“Being at Pomona,” she adds, “has given me so many opportunities that I wouldn’t have had at other schools.”