Rae is one of 13 U.S. scholars who will pursue doctoral degrees while 27 others will pursue master’s degrees. The U.S. scholars will join 55 scholarship recipients from other parts of the world.
“The Gates Cambridge scholarship is about developing a global community and understanding the problems you want to tackle through different perspectives,” Rae said. “I hope to apply what I learn to understanding how bacteria develop antibiotic resistance. That’s the big problem I’m interested in someday helping to solve.”
Rae is a biochemistry major in the Eberly College of Science and a Gateway Schreyer Honors College student. “I was not actually accepted into the Honors College right out of high school, but at the end of my sophomore year I applied again and that time it worked out,” he said. Rae has worked for two years in the lab of professor Ken Keiler conducting experiments to identify new antibiotics to treat methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
Rae met Keiler as a student in one of his introductory to microbiology labs and was invited to work in Keiler’s lab. Since then, Rae has produced work that helped secure a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, and last summer he was one of a handful of U.S students to receive an American Society for Microbiology (ASM) undergraduate research fellowship, which gives students funding to do research at their home institution.
“Chris was one of the best in the class at not only being able to design the experiments, but also to explain them,” said Keiler, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. “Chris set up a system that can screen for compounds that work really well against MRSA, and he’s the only person in the world who has done this particular experiment.”
Rae said his goal after graduation was to find a program that would allow him to travel to a different country to continue his research and studies. When he heard about the Gates Cambridge Scholarship opportunity, he knew he had to apply.
“Being here at Penn State, I don’t think I could have had a better experience as an undergraduate, except I’ve always wanted to study abroad,” Rae said. He had an in-person interview for admission to Cambridge at the university earlier this year and recently went on a second interview in Washington, D.C., to receive the scholarship. “The second time I was ever on an airplane was when I went to Cambridge. I’m from a small town in Pennsylvania, and that’s pretty much where I’ve been my whole life, so I want to get out and see other parts of the world.”