Tra Nguyen

Tra D. Nguyen (Vietnamese: Nguyễn Đặng Thanh Trà) received her B.S. in Biochemistry (ACS certified), cum laude from Texas Woman’s University (TWU) in 2018. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Oklahoma (OU). During her undergraduate study at TWU, she was performing research under the guidance of Professor Richard D. Sheardy to study the unusual DNA structures, particularly DNA i-motif formation. At TWU, she was selected as the Chancellor’s Research Scholar (2018) at the TWU Student Symposium and was awarded as the Outstanding Undergrad Chem/Biochem Student (2018) by Dallas-Fort Worth Local Section of American Chemical Society (ACSDFW). In addition, she was a President of an ACS Student Chapter, Chemistry Club (Kappa Epsilon Mu) and received the Redbud Award for Outstanding Organization of the Year at TWU (2018) and Student Chapter’s Outstanding Award (2018) by the American Chemical Society. As a graduate student at OU, she received the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award (2021) and the Dissertation Research Fellowship (2022) by OU College of Art and Sciences which funds the remaining of her doctoral research. Her current research focuses on integrating single cell mass spectrometry metabolomics with gene editing which is known to alter DNA structures at the single-cell level.