Embedded Files
Certificates and Awards
Chemistry Departmental Awards 2022-2023 (4 awards), Howard University
For demonstrating outstanding achievement in:
Biochemistry 2 (perfect scores in all 4 tests),
Analytical Chemistry,
Instrumental Analysis,
The Triangle Scholarship Award: In recognition of the Most Outstanding Chemistry Major, Sophomores to Juniors.
Using Python with Excel, Linkedin, August 2022
Learned how to use the "pandas" and "openpyxl" packages in Python for analysis and presentation of large datasets in Excel.
Python Basics, University of Michigan (via Coursera), August 2021
Refreshed the basics of Python, including data structures, conditional execution and Turtle controls.
Dean's List 2021-2022, Howard University
For achieving a GPA 4.0 during my sophomore year (2021-2022) at Howard.
Dean's List 2020-2021, Howard University
For achieving a GPA 4.0 during my freshman year (2020-2021) at Howard.
Alain Locke Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa, Gamma Chapter, Howard University, June 2021
For attaining a 4.0 GPA in my freshman year (2020-2021).
Edexcel High Achievers' Award (Bangladesh), Pearson Edexcel, June 2018
For attaining 7 A*s in the International GCSE May-June 2018 session, and for attaining World Highest in IGCSE Further Pure Mathematics.
Coursework Taken
As of Spring 2023:
General Chemistry 1 and 2
Organic Chemistry 1 and 2
Physical Chemistry 2
Analytical Chemistry
Methods of Instrumental Analysis
General Biology 101 and 102
Genetics and Genomics
General Microbiology
Bioinformatics
Calculus 1, 2 and 3
Spanish 1 and 2
Introduction to Philosophy
Humanities 1 (Honors)
US History Since 1877
Abolitionist Dissent in England and America (Honors History course)
Course Reflections
Course Reflections
Biochemistry I and II (Spring 2022, Spring 2023)
Biochem 1 and 2, alongside Calculus 3, have been my favorite courses at Howard, and they have been the key shapers behind my interest in pursuing biomedical research after undergrad. This is - in no small part - thanks to my stellar professors, Dr Sung Joon Kim and Dr Dinari Harris, and the specific ways in which each professor taught the classes.
Biochem 1 laid the foundations by introducing me to the key building blocks of all life: amino acids (which make up proteins), sugars (which make up carbohydrates), nucleic acids (such as DNA and RNA) and lipids (or fats). The bulk of the course deals with proteins, since they not only provide structure to our bodies in the form of muscle and hair, but they also serve as workhorses within and around cells, speeding up life-sustaining chemical reactions and binding to genes, metabolites and even other proteins! We learnt the names and structures of the 20 canonical amino acids by heart (see top figure) - a feat that is formidable in itself, and yet fundamental to making sense of everything that came after.
For instance, a protein can be thought of as a collection of strings of beads (polypeptide chains), where the beads are the amino acids. It is the specific order of the amino acids in the chains, as well as their charge, their polarity, and whether they are hydrophilic ("water-loving") or hydrophobic ("oil-loving") that determine the shapes and structures of the proteins when they fold in on themselves. The shape or structure, in turn, determines the function, i.e. what the protein can do. If the protein is an enzyme, it can speed up (or catalyze) a specific reaction, and it will have active sites where the substrates - the molecules that need to react - can snugly fit into. Other proteins have binding sites whose shape matches the specific molecule (or ligand) they are designed to bind to. To my amazement, math played a greater role than I expected in these courses! The "Kd equation" (see second figure above) determines how strongly a ligand binds to a protein - the lower the Kd, the stronger the binding - and it proved useful to me during my sophomore-summer internship at Merck too!
Biochem 2 builds on our knowledge of what the building blocks are and shifts the focus to what they do. After a brief yet insightful chapter on cell membranes and signaling pathways (see top left figure) - where we learnt how the hormone epinephrine helps us get away from grizzly bears - we looked at the metabolic pathways that convert the food we eat into energy. These include glycolysis (see top right figure), the citric acid cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation, to name a few. I felt some apprehension upon realizing I had to memorize the names and structures of all the intermediates, but once I learned the "big picture" of why molecule A needs to turn into molecule B, it became a lot easier. As I started zooming out and seeing how the metabolic pathways feed into each other, my initial fears were replaced with a sheer sense of wonder at how miraculously, and yet how reproducibly, life goes on at the molecular level.
General Microbiology (Fall 2023)
If Biochem solidified my fascination with the principles that govern life at the molecular level, Microbiology sparked my interest in the actual wet lab techniques that take advantage of those principles.
The lecture section provided a broad overview of prokaryotes - bacteria and archaea, with a focus on the former - through the multiple lenses of cell biology, bioenergetics, genomics, ecology and human health. The chapters covering the structures of bacterial cells, the citric acid cycle, signaling pathways, growth patterns of a batch of cells, and using microarrays and culture-based methods of looking for specific genes or strains of bacteria, were the most fascinating to me.
Another notable concept I learned was the usefulness of small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA or 16S rRNA, top right figure) in not only differentiating between different bacterial species (bottom right figure), but also in defining what a "species" of bacteria even is! Horizontal gene transfer, or the transfer of genetic material between cells of different lineages, is very common, which makes categorizing the cells a muddy business. However, even amidst the thousands of genes that change hands, and others that change quickly through mutations, some genes change relatively slowly (i.e. are relatively conserved). One such gene that biologists found handy is a strand of RNA that forms part of the protein factories in cells known as ribosomes. The relative extent of change in this SSU rRNA between different cell lineages can tell us, for example, whether or not patients affected by two strains of bacteria will need the same method of treatment.
The lab section was equally as fascinating as the lecture, as it introduced us to basic procedures such as Gram staining (centre right), metabolic tests to distinguish between bacteria of different species (such as the Simmon's citrate agar test on the bottom left), and aseptic techniques - that is, how to grow one or more strains of cells in a dish or tube without contamination. As part of our final project, we were given an unknown strain and asked to find out which species it belonged to, which required bringing every method and every test we knew to bear. It really did make us feel like detectives for a while!
Bioinformatics (Spring 2023)
This course, in many ways, felt like an extension of the Genetics course I had taken in Spring 2022 during my sophomore year. In Genetics, for example, we had finished by looking at the implications of genes acting as part of a network. Bioinformatics picked up from there, and started by showing how to leverage the wide assortment of software tools available online and offline for analyzing sequences of nucleotides (DNA, mRNA) and proteins, and wrapped up with exploring software for predicting the structures of new proteins based on related proteins (homology modeling), and predicting which conformations a protein will assume (such as locating the possible positions of alpha helices) - which, as I have explained in the Biochemistry section of this page, is important for its function.
I was amazed by how the different packages, such as BLAST, do not require the user to know programming in detail, but only require knowledge of basic biology, how the alignment data is derived, and how it is meant to be used. We learnt many useful tricks that bioinformaticians use to save time and extra effort, such as doing BLAST with protein sequences instead of nucleotide sequences where appropriate. Of course, being a programmer, I loved the course most when we had to write snippets of code on Linux or R to retrieve data or make insightful visualizations, such as Manhattan plots.
Abolitionist Dissent (History, Spring 2023)
HIST 015: Abolitionist Dissent in England and America is an Honors history course I took in my junior year (Spring 2023). Taught by the amazing historian Dr. Kay Wright Lewis, this course invites students to search for and bring to light the voices of all the different communities in England and the Americas that brought about the end of slavery in the New World. It has been my most challenging course at Howard so far and also the most rewarding. The writings for this class compelled me to read through text sources and skim over research articles more extensively than any other undergraduate course before, science or non-science. Suffice it to say, I'm glad all that extra rigor paid off! I have attached the last two essays for this course separately in the Writings section, just because I'm proud of how they have made me grow both as a researcher and as a writer. 😊
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse