Surrounded by 60 Nobel Laureates, RU senior Nicole Szell spent part of her summer listening to and talking with some of the world’s greatest scientists as they discussed today’s pressing research questions. The occasion was the annual conference of Nobel Laureates at Lindau, a resort town on an island in Lake Constance in Germany’s Bavarian region.
Szell, a pre-med biology major from Cleveland, Ohio, was nominated by the biology department to attend the Lindau Conference.
RU gained the opportunity to nominate a student through a contact in the College of Education and Human Development, which provided financial assistance through the RU Foundation to help Szell make the trip abroad.
Biology professor Mary Denton Roberts, Szell’s adviser, said the biology department nominated Szell “because of her exemplary academic performance, the fact that she was named an Outstanding Student in both her freshman and sophomore years, and because of her extensive involvement in all kinds of campus activities and community service. There were other good candidates in our department but no one else had quite the same breadth of accomplishments.”
Szell is a member of the Honors Academy, works as a University 100 peer instructor and is academic chair for her sorority. She has been the recipient of two RU Foundation scholarships, the Robert J. Murrin Memorial Scholarship and the Arthur and Linda Pape Scholarship in Honor of Dr. Donald N. Dedmon.
Vice president for academic programs Steve Lerch, who is adviser to Szell’s sorority, Delta Zeta, said that “attending the Lindau Conference is a tremendous opportunity that only an infinitesimally small proportion of pre-med students internationally receive.”
Although most of the students at Lindau were graduate, post-doctoral or medical students in their late 20s and many were doing research at such places as the Max Planck Institute, Szell felt confident sharing the research she has done as an undergraduate at RU and found others were interested in it. Last year she conducted research with biology professor Deborah Overath on androgen insensitivity syndrome, which is related to biological gender abnormalities, and presented it at the spring Undergraduate/Graduate Student Research Forum. She also began working on research with biology professor Gary Coté on the human papilloma virus, which is related to cervical cancer. She followed up on that research this summer during internships at Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland and University Hospitals of Cleveland’s MacDonald Women’s Hospital. The human papilloma virus research will be a major part of her senior honors thesis on the benefits of education-based medicine in women’s reproductive health.
“My interests lie in reproductive medicine,” Szell said. At the conference, she was able to discuss problems during pregnancy with a Nobel Laureate and to participate in discussions about cancer, AIDS and herpes. This was the first interdisciplinary conference since the Lindau Conference began in 1951, said Szell, so she also learned about quarks, quantum theory, nuclear magnetic resonance and water channels in cell membranes. “There were a lot of opportunities to ask questions,” she said with a smile.
Szell developed her strong interest in women’s reproductive health issues while in high school at Notre Dame-Cathedral Latin School, and she determined to go into law and specialize in those issues. In fact, she first visited RU because of its well respected criminal justice program. While pursuing a high school senior project at Planned Parenthood, she found she was more inclined to help women through medicine and education than through the legal system. She chose to major in biology and hasn’t looked back.
“The teachers I’ve had at Radford have made my experience here,” Szell said. From English instructor Jo Ann Asbury, who got her involved in the Appalachian Arts and Studies in the Schools program (AASIS), to her adviser, Mary Denton Roberts, she said RU holds “countless wonderful teachers.” During Szell’s first semester at the university, Roberts was the teacher of “one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. She was dynamic, she was positive, she knew who she was.” As an adviser, Szell said, Roberts has made things happen for her through advice, tips on scholarships and recommendations. When it came to medical school applications, for example, “it was ‘this is what you have to do/let’s sit down and do it/it’s done.’”
Other professors for whom Szell holds special appreciation are biology chair and professor Charles Neal and physics professor Rhett Herman. Participation in the Honors Academy has been another meaningful experience. Honors faculty and staff push students and support them, she said.
Roberts said the faculty of the biology department were not surprised that Szell was selected to go to Lindau “and of course we were thrilled to have helped to provide that opportunity for her by nominating her and writing her letters of recommendation. Many of the Nobel Laureates were awarded the Nobel Prize for research contributions in the field of medicine. It seems most appropriate then to send a pre-medical student to the Nobel Conference. She will remember for years to come the talks she heard at the conference and will be inspired in her medical studies. As a result of her attendance at the conference, perhaps Nicole will herself make major contributions to future knowledge in medicine.”
