Congratulations to our 2019 graduate Maggie Fink who has won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Fink is currently in the second year of the Ph.D. biochemistry program at the University of Notre Dame. This award will support her work with her Associate Professor Dr. Joshua Shrout to study social interactions within bacteria. The picture of Fink is taken from the Shrout research team webpage. In particular, she is looking at how different species of bacteria can communicate, cooperate, and compete under different conditions. Fink's work is set to uncover the underlying mechanisms by which bacterial crosstalk can inform how they behave in the environment and during infections.
While at IU South Bend, Fink worked in the lab of Dr. Shahir Rizk of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry where she investigated how bacterial proteins can be used to make novel nanostructures for applications in drug delivery. Her work was funded by the Carolyn and Lawrence Garber Summer Research Fellowship and led to the publication of a research article and a patent.
Fink is active in the community with tutoring and judging science fairs. She also works to make science more accessible to the general public. Through an ongoing collaboration with Professor Rizk, she has developed a blog called Folding Moonlight that uses art and the visual arts and storytelling to illustrate biochemical concepts relating to protein structure..
