Beckman Scholars Eva Chen ’27 and Ryan Mooney ’27 spent their summers beside faculty mentors conducting in-depth research in chemistry and the life sciences, their Beckman awards indicative of their exceptional promise as undergraduate researchers.
The Beckman Foundation provides a total of $26,000 to scholar-mentor pairs to conduct full-time research over two summers and part-time research during one full academic year.
A selection committee at Pomona chooses the recipients.
Past awardees include Sebastian Kinzie ’26 and Anji Sipkins-Chenn ’27; Daniel Gao ’25 and Ava Spiegler ’26; and Santiago Serrano ’25 and Alexandra Turvey ’24.
Targeting tuberculosis from Seaver North
Chen, a chemistry major from Orange, California, worked under the tutelage of Professor of Chemistry Matthew Sazinsky studying the protein toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems—more specifically, the VapBC31 complex and its persistence in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative bacteria in tuberculosis, the infectious lung disease that’s one of the top 10 global causes of death.
In Sazinsky’s lab, Chen worked to kinetically and structurally characterize the VapBC31 strain with two goals in mind: investigating its potential as a therapeutic target and decreasing the number of recurring tuberculosis cases globally.
“This is a complex that no one has really studied before,” she says. “Part of why I like doing research is being able to think outside of the box, outside of the norm, to target things that other people haven’t.”
While at Pomona, Chen has drawn inspiration from guest speakers—Nobel laureate and 2025 Robbins Lecture speaker Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi, in particular—invited to the College by the Chemistry Department. That influence, combined with her time in Sazinsky’s lab, has persuaded Chen to pursue either an MD or MD-Ph.D. pathway.
“As I’ve gotten more involved in research here and had the ability to develop my own independent project, I’ve found a lot of value in seeing how far this work can reach,” she says. “Seeing how motivated other people are to solve problems has increased my passion for research and made it a more important part of my life.”
From personal experience to practice
Mooney, a Denver native, continued prior research in Professor of Chemistry Malkiat Johal’s lab developing an adoptive T-cell therapy to treat solid-phase cancers, types of cancers that cause tumors.
His mother in remission after battling the disease, Mooney’s research is deeply personal—and what earned him the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship earlier this year.
With Johal at his side, the molecular biology major expanded the scope of his project to look biophysically at the specific interaction between T-cell receptors and target proteins on cancer cells, his goal to specifically target the cancer itself so not to kill healthy cells.
“Eventually,” he says, “I’m going to use the instrumentation in Professor Johal’s lab to characterize the binding kinetics of the interaction and see if we can correlate binding kinetics with T-cell activation and cancer cell death to inform future immune protein engineering.”
Receiving awards like the Goldwater and Beckman to conduct research to change the paradigm for cancer treatment is an honor, Mooney says, and a huge confidence boost.
“I feel sometimes as undergraduates we think of ourselves as new researchers who can’t do significant science,” he adds. “But having this recognition from the Beckman Foundation and from the Pomona faculty that selected me really gives me the confidence that what I’m doing is meaningful.”