Three CWRU students selected for prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship

No matter their areas of interest, young researchers typically crave recognition for their efforts. For three Case Western Reserve University students who received the 2024 Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the prestigious award is the validation they need.

Charlotte Bimson, Saul Castillo and Soumyaa Das, CWRU students, were selected from over 5,000 applicants from 446 institutions among this year’s 437 honorees.

Named for Senator Barry Goldwater, who served in the Senate for 30 years, the award recognizes emerging third- and fourth-year students across the country who are on the path to research success in mathematics, science or engineering.

Bimson, Castillo and Das will receive a maximum scholarship of $7,500, which will be used for tuition, fees, books and room and board. The award requires institutional support and the university has a specific application process that must be considered. See details and learn more about our this year’s winners.

Charlotte Bimson

Year: Fourth year promotion
Main: Engineering Physics/Master of Physical Sciences, Entrepreneurship track

After four years of intensely studying physics at a technical high school, Charlotte Bimson knew that she would enjoy learning this subject. However, when it came time to choose a specific area for research at Case Western Reserve, she had difficulty finding the right topic and laboratory.

Eventually, she landed in a biomedical engineering lab, where she worked on translational research in cancer diagnostics. And luckily, she loved it immediately. Her research efforts inspired her to apply to the university’s Master’s program in Entrepreneurship Physics – a subject Bimson didn’t even know existed before enrolling.

Captivated by the spirit of innovation and commercialization in her field, Bimson began looking for new opportunities and completed a medical physics internship with the American Society of Medical Physicists. Through this experience, she examined the long-term effects of different radiation therapy margins for primary breast brain cancer. Preliminary results indicate good outcomes in patients treated without margins.

Although this experience did not take place in a traditional laboratory, Bimson found it particularly valuable and even decided to write about it in her research work for the Goldwater Scholarship.

“I hold this very close to my heart because I think, especially as a physics student, a lot of my strengths lie in data analysis and being able to create the front and back of an experiment,” she said.

Bimson currently works in Umut Gurkan’s CASE Biomanufacturing and Microfabrication Laboratory, where he studies paper electrophoresis for point-of-care multiple myeloma screening. After completing her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she plans to work in industry, go to law school, and eventually practice patent law to help researchers translate their work.

Saul Castillo

Year: Fourth year promotion
Main: Systems biology and statistics

As a first-generation college student at Case Western Reserve, Saul Castillo didn’t know where to start looking for research opportunities. He turned to Google for suggestions and, with the support of the current Office of Undergraduate Research, began contacting genetics researchers at the university directly.

It found a welcoming home in the Cleveland Clinic laboratory of Ruth Keri, a professor of molecular medicine at the School of Medicine. Keri is dedicated to helping promising young researchers develop, especially those who come from underserved backgrounds.

In Keri’s lab, Castillo’s research focused primarily on how experimental disruption of the BCL11A transcription factor in triple-negative breast cancer could reduce the growth and malignancy of the disease. More recently, his work has begun to use computational methods to study the interactions of interlobular breast cancer and other breast tissues to determine the effects it has on growth and development.

Grateful for the support Keri provided in making him comfortable at CWRU, Castillo now passes it on as an adjunct instructor for BIOL 214: Genes, Evolution, and Ecology. He also participates in a mentoring program offered by CWRU’s oSTEM (Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) chapter.

After graduating next spring, Castillo plans to pursue a PhD in computational biology or a related field. He plans to investigate the genetic mechanisms of disease or delve into a newer interest: how human evolution has led to the development of genetic regulatory mechanisms.

As he prepares for his future, Castillo is grateful that financial support from the Goldwater Fellowship will allow him to spend more time in the lab.

“It was really crazy when I got it,” Castillo said of the scholarship. “It really helped me feel confident that I was doing the right thing.”

Soumyaa Das

Year: Fourth year promotion
Main: Neuroscience and philosophy

As a child, Soumyaa Das was on a mission to understand the confusing nature of the world around her, often reading about various topics such as rocks and minerals or impressive feats in the Guinness Book of Records. Over time, her interests have diverged from these issues, but she is still looking for answers – now about the functioning of the brain.

“Many of the behaviors and functions that we perform in the world can be reduced to neural processes – how we think, how we behave, how we behave, and things like that,” Das said.

Das, a fourth-year neuroscience and philosophy major, works in Suh’s lab at the Cleveland Clinic, focusing on better understanding adult neurogenesis and the implications this process has for treating conditions such as epilepsy and autism spectrum disorders. Her work focuses primarily on the problems of addiction and withdrawal, in particular alcoholism.

This research gave Das insight into the molecular side of neuroscience, but as a beginning PhD student, she also wanted to gain experience in clinical research. That’s what led her to the Patterson Gentile lab closer to her hometown, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. There, her research focuses on concussions in children.

In one project, Das is reviewing the charts of pediatric patients who have experienced concussions and developed chronic headaches as a result. Building on this work, he is also involved in a second project examining the effects of concussions on a child’s visual system.

Das’ experiences in the lab allowed her to develop skills such as synthesizing different concepts and ideas. But she said her greatest success has been accepting what she doesn’t know – something she struggled with as a young researcher surrounded by lab workers with PhDs.

“Research is a really nice field because it doesn’t invalidate you because you don’t know,” she said. “It actually celebrates not knowing something, and especially it celebrates wanting to figure something out.”