Spotlight
First Oxford Cambridge Scholar
| Office of the Provost
Photo by Lauren Schumacher Chambers | Office of National Scholarships
By the time she was a sophomore, Christie Campla no longer had time for marching band. Going to class and spending 30 hours or more in the lab each week as a cellular and molecular biology major, with another major in Spanish and a minor in chemistry, can have that effect.
Still, the reward for temporarily setting aside her tuba made it all worthwhile.
Just the fourth USF student to earn a Goldwater Scholarship — the nation’s most prestigious award for undergraduate students in science — she is the first to be named a National Institutes of Health Oxford Cambridge Scholar. Now the May graduate will spend the next four years pursuing a fully-funded doctoral degree at either Oxford University or Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.
She hopes to extend her undergraduate research with USF Chemical and Biomedical Engineering Professor Piyush Koria in the field of recombinant biomaterials, particularly as they might improve methods for drug preservation and targeted delivery.
“It’s a pretty hot area right now,” says Campla, whose interests also extend to regenerative medicine or the process of replacing or regenerating human cells, tissues or organs to establish or restore normal function.
Campla was among 60 finalists vying for one of only 20 scholarships awarded nationally this year. Despite her Goldwater, USF Holcombe First Generation in College Scholarship, USF Honors College Discovery Research Scholarship, USF Scholastic Achievement Scholarship, USF Undergraduate Award for Scholarly and Creative Excellence, and a summer training fellowship at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center in Madrid, she admits feeling “a bit intimidated” standing in the same room with the other OxCam finalists, “mostly Ivy Leaguers.”
Now, however, she says the only pressure she feels is living up to the high standards exemplified by her mentors, Koria, and Professor Meera Nanjundan in the Department of Cell Biology, Microbiology and Molecular Biology, with whom she started her undergraduate research as a freshman and completed her honors thesis on the role of various signaling mediators in cell degradation and motility in ovarian cancer as a junior.