Sara Daniels, a USF College of Public Health MSPH student, recently completed a competitive National Institutes of Health (NIH) summer fellowship program.

Daniels, who is concentrating in both health promotion and behavior and global communicable diseases, was a Graduate Research Fellow with the NIH’s G-SOAR program. The program provides U.S. graduate students with valuable experience exploring the intersection of basic, translational and clinical research at the NIH. Daniels noted that the G-SOAR program has an acceptance rate of about 30% every year.

“I applied for the G-SOAR program because I knew I was interested in working for the NIH at some point in the future,” Daniels said. “I was looking for a summer internship and came across the NIH program, which would allow me to network with other graduate students, scientists and principal investigators working at the NIH doing cutting-edge biomedical research. Additionally, I was looking to practice and learn new lab skills.”

Daniels spent the summer working on COVID-19 research.

“My work focused on a specific enzyme that is part of the replication and transcription process known as NSP 14,” Daniels explained. “The lab where I worked studies iron-sulphur clusters and their role in biological processes. Many of these iron-sulphur clusters have been found in proteins encoded in the SARS-Cov-2 [COVID-19] genome and have been found at sites that were previously incorrectly classified as zinc-binding sites. Unfortunately, because of the time constraints of my fellowship, I could not continue with the process and identify potential iron-sulphur clusters on NSP-14. However, my lab will continue to work on further classifications.”

In addition to her lab work, Daniels attended weekly “Becoming a Resilient Scientist” discussion groups and presented at an NIH summer poster day. The latter, she said, was one of the highlights of her fellowship experience, giving her the opportunity to summarize her research into a poster format and share it with others at the NIH, including scientists and medical professionals working in NIH’s clinical center.

“As a second-year MSPH student getting into more technical courses and lab work, my training at the NIH allowed me to advance my understanding of techniques and apply those skills to cutting-edge research,” Daniels said. “The most significant impact this experience will have on my academic pursuits will be in the laboratory techniques that I learned and refined.”

Daniels’ advice to any students interested in NIH fellowships like the G-SOAR program is “to just take a shot and do it.” She also tells students to research labs early in the process. “The application process can be lengthy,” she said, “but so worth it.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health