UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ryan Henrici, who will graduate in May with a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from the Eberly College of Science, has been awarded the 2014-15 Astronaut Scholarship Foundation scholarship.
The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation was created to ensure that the United States would maintain its leadership in science and technology by supporting promising students in science and engineering. Scholarship candidates must be nominated by faculty members and must be in an engineering, science or mathematics field. Scholarship nominees are students who have shown initiative, creativity and excellence in their chosen field.
Henrici became involved with undergraduate research early at Penn State and, as the recipient of the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, will study malaria and global medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has worked in Professor Song Tan’s laboratory since his freshman year and was second author on a publication in Nature that provides new insight into the function of an enzyme related to the BRCA1 breast cancer protein.
“I’ve really settled in to what I want to do through working in the lab,” Henrici said.
In addition to receiving the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation scholarship and being selected as a Marshall Scholar, Henrici has also been awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and the Eric A. Walker Award.
“Thinking back, if you would have told me at orientation that I was going to be a Marshall Scholar, I would have thought that you were out of your mind,” he said. “I had no concept that I could be eligible for those kind of awards, but Penn State, as a land-grant university, has all the resources to enable students to accomplish things beyond their wildest dreams.”