Fellows Scholarship - 2019 Davidson Fellows

Biography

Hello everyone! My name is Madeleine Yang, and I am from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. I am deeply honored and humbled to be named a 2019 Davidson Fellow and grateful to the Davidson Institute for recognizing the impact of my work. Science competitions have been one of the most defining experiences of my life through which I have met some amazing students, faculty and scientists. This recognition not only encourages me to aim higher but hopefully also inspires other young girls to participate in scientific research! I am incredibly excited to meet you all in Washington, DC next month.

Influenza virus infection poses a significant global disease burden, causing an estimated three to five million cases of severe illness and 290,000-650,000 deaths each year worldwide. While vaccination has been successful in generating long-lasting immunity to many other viral infections, the efficacy of influenza vaccines has been low, ~ 40% from 2004-2018. One reason for the flu vaccine’s inefficacy is the traditional egg-based platform, which has a six to nine month production time. During that time, viral mutations lead to vaccine inefficiency, and the need for hundreds of millions of chicken eggs make the method unequipped to handle pandemics. Our approach is to incorporate the highly conserved influenza matrix protein M2 into the engineered virus-like particles (VLPs), eliminating the usage of eggs and enabling a shorter timeframe and a larger scale of production. This approach to incorporating M2 into VLP by inhibiting its activity during expression using amantadine represents a novel method to produce VLP compared to current vaccines.

I am deeply grateful for the constant support and camaraderie of the entire Wen Lab at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, especially to Professor Fei Wen who has provided me with this life changing research opportunity and Graduate Student Andrew Zak who guided me through all the challenges I faced while working on my project. I will forever be inspired by their passion, talent, dedication and perseverance and feel incredibly lucky to have had such great friends and mentors over the past four years. With their unwavering support, I was able to persevere through learning a barrage of data analytics and collections techniques as well as co-author and publish my first paper concerning my research. I am also grateful to my in-school science research advisor, math teacher, and academic advisor for the past 4 years, Mr. Ross Arseneau. His incredible sense of humor and morality, as well as his unwavering support and understanding, have promoted conversations that I will remember for a lifetime.

The impact of a potential universal influenza vaccine has countless, far-reaching, significant impacts both socially and economically. Since VLPs lack the critical genetic information that allows viruses to replicate independently, they are not pathogenic and can thus be produced in a much lower Biosafety Level (BSL) environment, markedly decreasing the cost. There is a significant economic benefit from preventing illness due to the flu and other viral infections as opposed to treating after the fact. It saves businesses money not to pay for “sick days” for employees, and it saves the government and healthcare money not to drain resources and bed space on a preventable disease.

Throughout high school, I have taken a diversity of Advanced Placement courses both to further my passions in science and math and broaden my horizons through more difficult humanities classes. However, some of my most rewarding class experiences come from the smaller, college-level courses I took in Theoretical Physics junior year and Multivariable Calculus and Advanced Topics senior year. I credit Detroit Country Day School for pushing me to take a variety of challenging and non-traditional English and language classes that would be outside of my comfort zone, including Theory of Knowledge and Latin. I truly believe that the great diversity of courses and experiences I underwent through my high school career have opened my eyes to not only the scientific and medical benefits of my research but also its impact in humanitarian efforts and even healthcare policy reform. I will attend Harvard College in the fall and study Math and Biology.

I have spent the last four years immersed in chemical engineering research and have seen first-hand the power of this field in answering important questions about pollution prevention, fuel efficiency, drug design, and disease transmission. I would also like to explore the power of simulation and prediction of mathematical models in the chemical engineering research. In 10 years I hope I have obtained a Ph.D degree and become a technology leader in the drug design and delivery field who will advance fundamental understanding of biological systems, and develop new materials and technologies to translate breakthrough basic research into real-world solutions to help solve global health problems. I believe the scientific and technology breakthrough in the future will be inter-disciplinary across the boundaries of biology, chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, and computer science and engineering.