Funds are available to support travel to conferences and professional meetings.

Funding can support a student as part of a faculty-supported project or student-initiated academic experience in the sciences. Funding preference will be given to students presenting research at a conference for the first time, students who have a clear plan for dissemination of their project, and students traveling with a faculty member or research mentor. Requests require sponsorship of a faculty member, and should not exceed $1,500.00. The KINSC works jointly with the Provost's office to review applications and, in appropriate cases, may recommend the provision of a grant from the Louis Green Fund.

Post-graduation conference funding

Limited travel funds may be available for graduating seniors. Funds can only be requested for presenting at a domestic conference that occurs within one year of the date of graduation. Applications for funding must be submitted by April 1st of senior year. Late applications will not be considered.

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Past Conference Funding

The primary goal of the Student Research Fund is to provide travel support for research conducted outside of the Philadelphia area. The KINSC will fund domestic or international student research that occurs over any of the three breaks (Fall, Winter, and Spring). Strong preference is given to those applying for funds related to senior thesis research. Requests require sponsorship of a faculty member, and should not exceed $1,500.00. The KINSC works jointly with the Provost's office to review applications and, in appropriate cases, may recommend the provision of a grant from the Louis Green Fund.

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Past Research Funding

Funds are available to support student training or off-campus workshops. Funding preference will be given to students whose training directly relates to an academic interest and students who have a clear plan for dissemination of their project. Requests require sponsorship of a faculty member, and should not exceed $1,000.00.

The Koshland Integrated Natural Sciences Center is committed to supporting initiatives that broaden access to scholarship and research for faculty and students alike. The center seeks to fund events and symposia that focus on collaborative and interdisciplinary science research that is at the forefront of its respective discipline.

The KINSC typically funds events that range from $200-$5,000.

The KINSC Summer Scholars and Velay Fellowship programs provide financial support for students who are able to secure unpaid laboratory research positions or public policy internships that have a significant natural science component. For each summer, the KINSC will fund Summer Scholars both on-campus and off-campus.

The KINSC supports Scholars in any of the seven departments housed in the KINSC: Astronomy/Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Studies, Mathematics/Statistics, and Psychology. Students in all class years are welcome to apply for this opportunity; however, funding is not available for students who will graduate before the summer of '20.

To ensure support for areas of study that extend beyond single departments, special consideration would be given to interdisciplinary when reviewing applications. The KINSC is particularly interested in supporting summer internships that will enhance students’ opportunities for learning and scholarly research in the future.

To successfully complete the KINSC Summer Scholars application for an on-campus research position, a student must communicate with their intended Haverford faculty research mentor and have a clear understanding of their summer research project.

Selection Criteria for KINSC Summer Scholars:

• Quality of the application – Well-written, cogent, description of project.
• Overall quality of academic work as evidenced by the transcript
• Strength of the on-campus faculty recommendation

Please note that significant prior funding from the KINSC may be taken into consideration during the review process, but does not disqualify an application.

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Past Summer Scholars

The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation has awarded Haverford College a grant to designate and fund four students as "Beckman Scholars" over the 2018-2021 summers and academic years.

The Beckman Scholars Program was established in 1998 and is a prestigious national scholarship offered at roughly 30 academically-rigorous colleges and universities to recognize exceptional students with an interest in the chemical and biological sciences. To date, twenty-three outstanding Haverford College students have been designated Beckman Scholars. Owen Janson '18 and Richard Phillips '18 were Scholars for 2016-2017, and Marco Rivas ’18 is the Beckman Scholar for 2017-2018. The Beckman Scholarship is unique at Haverford in that it guarantees multiple summers of funding and thus facilitates a longer and more in-depth research experience.

Summary of 2020-21 Program

Amount of Award: $21,000, including two summer research stipends for consecutive summers, $4,600 academic year scholarship, and allowances for travel and research materials. Funding is from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation.

Who is eligible: Haverford College Sophomores and Juniors who are prospective or declared Biology or Chemistry majors, or students from other majors (including, but not limited to, Physics, Astronomy, Computer Science, and Mathematics) with interdisciplinary interests involving the Chemical or Biological Sciences. The Beckman Foundation requires that Beckman Scholars be citizens or permanent residents of the United States or its possessions. Beckman Scholars are typically required to maintain a GPA of 3.5 or above for the duration of their funding. All Beckman Scholars must work with one of the Beckman mentors (see below).

Selection criteria: Academic course performance, communication skills, and seriousness of interest in scientific research will all be considered by the selection committee. Applicants are evaluated via an initial stage one application (due Feb. 9, 2020) and a more rigorous stage two process that includes a proposal and an oral presentation (see below). Scholar selection will be completed before spring break 2020.

Required commitment: Ten weeks of research at Haverford College for each of two summers (2020 and 2021) and two semesters of research tutorial courses (on-campus) during the 2020-2021 academic year. Beckman Scholars will also serve as on-campus scientific leaders and coordinate the visit of an external speaker during their second summer of funding.

This annual summer support fund has been established by the Kovaric family in memory of Brian (Haverford Chemistry ’05.) The fund will support one first year / rising sophomore as a summer research student in the natural sciences for a 10 week appointment.

The student is required to present a poster at the end of the summer and to write a letter of thanks to the family (which can be sent through the Provost or Institutional Advancement).

To reflect Brian’s contributions to our community, we consider students who are original thinkers and who love science.

Nomination Process

Department faculty are asked to consider nominations for the Brian Kovaric Fund, with a deadline in early February. The nominees then will be asked to submit their transcript and a short paragraph answering the following question: "Write a paragraph or two describing why you would like to be part of a research lab at Haverford this coming summer, and how this experience could benefit you in your future studies and in life after Haverford." We will consider the applications and make a decision about the award shortly after the deadline.

Archive

• Jesse Zeldes '22 (Lommen Laboratory)
  As a Kovaric Fellow, Jesse spent the summer working with Professor Andrea Lommen on a project developing noise models for x-ray pulsar timing. By observing pulsars, rapidly rotating cores of dead stars, and measuring the tiny differences between the times of arrival and predicted models, astronomers are able to explore some of the most extreme predictions of general relativity, including the neutron star equation of state, and the existence of gravitational waves. However, in order to understand these phenomena, we need extremely accurate models of when we expect the pulse to arrive, which means carefully measuring and accounting for potential sources of noise. The project worked directly with data from NICER, an x-ray telescope currently aboard the international space station, which offers opportunities to improve our models by looking in a totally different frequency band from most pulsar observations done in the radio. Jesse has continued this research into the fall semester.
• Shreya Kishore '21 (Whalen laboratory)
  
  During her internship as a Kovaric fellow, Shreya conducted research to combat multi-drug resistance in gram-negative bacteria through the search for efflux pump inhibitors (EPI) in marine bacteria. Bacterial infections are on the rise and bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to all available antibiotics. A main mechanism for the resistance is the presence of efflux pumps in bacterial membranes which push administered antibiotic out of the cell. EPIs prevent this and hence restore antibiotic potency of the antibiotic. The ocean remains vastly unexplored with great potential, and so natural products from marine bacteria were investigated as potential EPIs. Shreya screened 445 crude marine microbial extracts, of which twenty were found to be active. In the future, Shreya plans to grow each of the 20 active fractions in large scale and separate the compounds using Silica Column, C-18 Column and HPLC. Each of the separated fractions will then be tested in a modified EPI Bioassay to confirm if the activity is antibiotic or if it is an EPI. Furthermore, the structure of the specific compound(s) responsible for the EPI or antibiotic activity will be identified using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) data.
   
• Kameron Nicholas Banks ’20 (Charkoudian laboratory)
  
  During his internship as a Kovaric fellow, Nicholas investigated the conformation and inter-protein interactions of acyl carrier proteins, a class of proteins produced by a variety of bacteria that play a key role in the production of essential cell compounds and antibiotics. Nicholas gained knowledge regarding biochemistry and laboratory techniques and methods that are central to the fields of biochemistry and to protein exploration in particular.
   
• ChuHui Fu ’19 (Londergan laboratory)

  As a Kovaric fellow, ChuHui developed a Raman spectroscopy library of sulfur-based functional groups of different oxidation states under the mentorship of Professor Casey Londergan. Physiologically relevant sulfur-containing functional groups with sulfur in different oxidation states were chosen; glutathione and l-cysteine were selected as model compounds due to physiological relevance and availability. Modified compounds whose thiols were substituted with oxidatively modified functional groups were either synthesized or purchased. Raman scans of reaction mixtures of original model compounds and modified compounds were taken, and spectra of non-oxidized model compounds were subtracted from those of modified compounds to generate a Raman difference spectrum unique to specific sulfur-containing functional group. This list might be used to identify the oxidation state(s) of sulfur in other compounds and proteins through Raman spectroscopy, thus laying the foundation for developing a non-invasive imaging technique that uses Raman spectroscopy to directly detect and image cellular redox environments. In the fall, ChuHui will work on expressing NEDD9 (a cancer- and pulmonary hypertension-associated regulatory protein that contains a cysteine with unknown oxidation modification) in human cells, using Raman spectroscopy and the existing library as guidance to study NEDD9's oxidative modifications.

• Rosalind (Jiaming) Xu '18 (Norquist and Schrier laboratories)

  During her Brian Kovaric Fellowship, Rosalind investigated bounds on the structural adaptivity of an organically templated vanadium selenite layer under the guidance of Professor Alex Norquist and Professor Joshua Schrier. She prepared phase pure samples for seven novel vanadium selenites of identical inorganic layers. This layer demonstrates the ability to adapt to a wide range of amines within some bounds. In order to probe the bounds on adaptivity of this type of vanadium selenite layers, Rosalind conducted a reaction grid of fourteen different amines under six different conditions using hydrothermal synthesis. Results were entered into a J48 decision tree, which is a Java implementation of the C4.5 decision tree, using the program Weka. From the decision tree, the team was able to draw three conclusions regarding formation: first, a primary ammonium site on amine is required; second, requirements on charge density matching between inorganic and organic components have to be met; and third, ammonium cation in the vanadium source discourages formation by competing with small linear amines, and reaction conditions come into play when higher amine concentration counteracts the liability of ammonium. Structural adaptivity is much desired, since it allows space for varied properties and is a good starting point for materials with intended properties. However, the various interactions that exist and the lack of a single metric to describe properties of organic components make structural adaptivity difficult to probe in organically-templated metal oxides. The reaction grid + decision tree method utilized by the team addresses these problems by utilizing multiple descriptors for amines and reactions conditions and trace down the influences by sorting out the descriptors according to their importance on the results. Rosalind was able to publish her results as the co-author for a paper that was submitted to Polyhedron this September. She is currently working on a project that applies similar methods with variations on a different type of vanadium selenite structure, with the hope of identifying new compounds. 

• Chloe Lindeman, '17 (Smith laboratory)

  As a Kovaric Fellow, Chloe worked in Walter Smith's nanoscale physics lab on measuring the electrical conductivity of DNA with modified bases. She finalized a plan to produce the needed DNA and make measurements for both a control sample and the modified DNA, then made the first steps in realizing this plan. Though many students have related conductivity experiments as part of the Smith research group, several components were new to this project. First of all, the use of modified bases as such is unprecedented in both the Smith group and in the wider scientific community. Second, Chloe worked with thiolated DNA, whose ends bond with the gold electrodes used for measurements. Finally, dielectrophoresis was used for the first time in the Smith lab as a way of orienting the DNA molecules consistently across the electrodes. Throughout the summer, Chloe spent a good deal of time in Iruka Okeke's microbiology lab, where she used PCR to create the control (unmodified) DNA. After running a gel electrophoresis to confirm the presence of the desired molecule, she purified and extracted the DNA. She then deposited the resulting DNA solution onto a set of tiny electrodes and began using the Atomic Force Microscope to image the electrodes. Since the summer, Chloe has continued her research.

• Geoffrey Martin-Noble, '16 (Schrier laboratory)

  During his Kovaric Fellowship, Geoffrey worked in Professor Joshua Schrier’s computational and theoretical chemistry lab, where he collaborated with two other students (David Reilley ‘16 and Luis Rivas ‘16) on improving and expanding a closed-form method for assigning discrete charges to the atoms in metal organic frameworks (MOFs). He ran ab initio calculations on a number of MOFs using computational time granted on two super computers—the National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and the United States Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)—to determine the three-dimensional charge density of a number of MOFs. Using atomic charge motifs he created based on ground-state electronic configurations, he partitioned this density onto individual atoms in the structures using the Iterative-Hirshfeld technique. He then compared the Iterative-Hirshfeld charges to those calculated using the Extended Charge Equilibration Method (EQeq) developed by Christopher Wilmer that uses electron affinities and ionization energies to find approximate charges in linear time. A pairwise correction factor modeled on a Pauling’s covalent bond order was added to the EQeq method with the empirical parameters for each atom optimized to fit the Hirshfeld charges. He was able to reduce this optimization to a linear regression problem, allowing the parameters to be calculated in a few minutes using a python script he wrote by adapting the thesis work of Matthew Smith ’13. This modified EQeq method (EQeq+C) can be used to quickly calculate fairly good charges for MOFs for which an ab initio calculation is infeasible. These charges can further be used to model the carbon dioxide adsorption properties of each MOF, and in this way a large number of MOFs can be quickly evaluated for potential as green-house gas adsorbents. Geoffrey Martin-Noble graduated in 2016 with a double major in Computer Science and Chemistry, and is currently working for Google.

• Matthew Holmes, '15 (Schrier laboratory)

  During his Kovaric Fellowship, Matthew worked with the Chemistry Department’s Professor Joshua Schrier, a computational chemist. Under Professor Schrier’s mentorship, Matthew worked with a number of theoretical nanoporous graphene structures previously theorized by the Schrier group. He used quantum molecular modeling methods – including the Vienna Ab initio Simulation Package (VASP) – in order to determine mechanical properties of these structures. He was able to study this exciting and emerging field in materials science by utilizing supercomputing resources at the United States Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Using these resources, Matthew simulated the application of strain along perpendicular axes in the plane of different two-dimensional carbon sheets. He then analyzed these three-dimensional data sets in order to determine the in-plane stiffness and Poisson’s ratio of these structures. For summer 2013, Matthew was selected into a NSF funded REU program to study plant and plant pathogen biology at the University of California Riverside’s Center for Plant Cell Biology. He has declared a major in biology.

• Ishita Dhawan, '14 (Hoang and Londergan laboratories)

  As a Kovaric fellow, Ishita spent the summer working in Casey Londergan’s physical chemistry laboratory on two projects. Ishita explored the functionality of an azide in different solvent environments through infrared spectroscopy as well as temperature dependent infrared spectrometers, and her work combined with other students’ efforts published a paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Ishita also worked on a project meant to study the conformational changes in calcium bound calmodulin, which is expressed in many cell types and mediates several bodily functions. Since her time as a Kovaric fellow, Ishita has joined Rachel Hoang’s developmental biology laboratory as an HHMI scholar for the summers of 2012 and 2013 and for her subsequent senior research as a biology major. In the Hoang lab Ishita has been studying the genetics of cell shape change during the early embryonic development ofDrosophila fruit flies and Anopheles mosquitoes to gain insight into the evolution of the molecular pathways that control cell movements. She has worked on a project using in situ hybridization to analyze the level of expression of the T48 gene involved in Drosophila gastrulation. This work was included in a manuscript that has been submitted for publication. Ishita is currently working on a project to clone gastrulation-related gene homolgoues of Drosophila genes from the Anopheles gambiae mosquito.

• Marjon Zamani, '13 (Amador Kane and Smith laboratories)

  During her Kovaric fellowship, Marjon researched the solar cell activity of self-assembled porphyrin nanowires. Porphyrins are abundant in nature; examples include the photoactive portion of chlorophyll and the core of hemoglobin. We have found that a particular porphyrin variant self-assembles into nanowires when the solution pH is lowered. These nanowires show a weak solar cell effect, which is very surprising, given that there is no designed-in asymmetry. Marjon has shown that the required asymmetry can be imparted by applying a bias voltage across the nanowires. This apparently rearranges trapped charges, either within the nanowires or in the underlying substrate, and the charges stay in place for hours after the bias voltage is removed. Marjon continued this research during her sophomore academic year, and it is now the subject of the senior thesis of another student, Katherine van Aken. Beginning in summer 2011, Marjon began a new area of research with Prof. Suzanne Kane, studying the behavior of birds as they hunt in the field and form flocks. Along with Alyssa Mayo '13, Marjon performed a field study using a novel combination of bioacoustics and video methods to determine how chimney swifts use calling to initiate the formation of flocks. She did her senior thesis project on a topic that she conceived of and carried out on her own with Prof. Amador Kane, a comparative study of how avian predators use saccadic head motions during foraging and hunting. She also coauthored a publication in The Journal of Experimental Biology on falcon pursuit strategeis. She is continuing her research career at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Boston, MA after graduating from Haverford with a major in physics and a biophysics concentration.

• Samuel Blau, '12 (Norquist laboratory)

  During his Kovaric fellowship, Sam studied the use of chiral organic amines for the preparation of new noncentrosymmetric gallium fluorophosphates. Specifically, he probed the relationship between compounds containing racemic and enantiomerically pure amines, and studied the nonlinear optical activities of two new functional materials. Sam continued to study a range of organically templated metal oxides in the Norquist laboratory using both experimental and theoretical techniques. Specifically, Sam studied physical phase transitions in templated gallium phosphates and formation mechanisms of both centrosymmetric and noncentrosymmetric vanadium tellurites and vanadates. Working jointly with Prof. Norquist and Prof. Schrier, Sam performed some of the first calculations of electron localization functions and iterative-Hirshfeld partial atomic charges for templated metal oxides. His work has resulted in five peer-reviewed publications. Sam was an HHMI scholar during the summers of 2010 and 2011. Sam performed his senior thesis work in Schrier's laboratory, in which he developed a lattice density functional theory for the Hubbard model of graphene nanoparticles. Sam was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (declined) and U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, and is currently a doctoral student in the Chemical Physics program at Harvard University.

• Asha Mahajan, '11 (Punt laboratory)

  As a Kovaric fellow, Asha worked in the Punt lab in the summer of 2008 delving into the biochemistry of a phosphatase that is believed to regulate life and death decisions in T cells. Her work became an integral part of the research of two senior thesis students (2010 graduates) who incorporated her findings that immature and mature T cells expressed different regulatory subunit. Asha became a Chemistry major and Biochemistry concentrator with a continued interest in biomedical research. She was a successful applicant for a summer internship program in 2010 at the University of Pennsylvania, where she pursued her interest in immunology with one of Punt's colleagues, Dr. Terri Laufer. She presented this work to us at our Summer Research Symposium on October, 2010. Asha is currently enrolled in the School of Medicine at NYU.

• Martin Blood-Forsythe, '10 (Smith Laboratory)

  During the summer supported by his Kovaric fellowship, Martin worked on construction of a system for measuring the photoelectronic properties of organic nanowires, with variable temperatures and variable wavelength illumination.  The system can reach temperatures from 100 K to 350 K, with illumination from 380 nm to 1200 nm, under a vacuum of better than 10-10 Torr, and can measure current flowing through the sample with a noise level of less than 0.01 pA.  Martin also used atomic force microscopy to image samples of porphyrin nanotubes provided by our collaborators.  We are now using the system Martin helped to build, examining the photoconductivity of self-assembled porphyrin nanowires.  Martin is now a Churchill Scholar at Cambridge University, and next year will begin the Ph.D. program in physics at Harvard.

• Justin Meyerowitz, '09 (Wagner Laboratory)

  During his Kovaric fellowship, Justin used yeast as a model for gaining insight into aging and cancer in humans. He studied a protein factor in yeast that controls cell growth that has a human homolog. He worked in the Fairman laboratory for his senior thesis project, developing spectroscopic probes for the study of a peptide model system of Huntington's disease. The title of his thesis is "Developing Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to determine the mechanisms of polyglutamine aggregation". Justin was also an HHMI scholar and graduated from Haverford with honors in Biology. He is currently an MDPhD student in the MSTP program at UCSF, and is pursuing his PhD in the Chemistry and Chemicial Biology graduate program. He is serving as the UCSF Chapter President for the American Medical Association.