“I am determined to realize my vision of becoming a doctor,” says Emily Hughes
Queensborough Community College graduate, Emily Hughes, aspires to become a physician. While at Queensborough, she has distinguished herself as a community college scholar in the field of Biochemistry. With the encouragement and guidance of Dr. Paris Svoronos, Chair of Queensborough's Chemistry Department, she is successfully on a pre-med track having earned her Associate degree this May. She has worked diligently with Professor Dr. Jun Shin on a variety of challenging chemistry projects that have been presented at two Queensborough Honors Conferences, two Undergraduate Research Symposia plus two Regional Meetings of the American Chemical Society (ACS)-NY section, and last year at the National Meeting of the ACS in Boston. Most recently, she presented two posters at MARM 2008, the Middle Atlantic Regional Meeting of the ACS, which was hosted May 17-21 at Queensborough Community College – the first time that this regional conference has been held at a community college.
While at Queensborough, Emily has served as a Peer Mentor, a leader of Peer-Led Team Learning Workshops in Chemistry, and as a Chemistry Instructor for the STEP program for under-represented high school students. She is also a skilled surgical technologist, who has distinguished herself in international service in Ecuador and Peru as a member of the Mision Medica Mundial Moreano.
Emily, an honors student who has maintained a full course load each semester, graduates in May 2008 with a GPA of 3.9 while completing 29 credit hours of Honors classes. She has accumulated numerous awards and honors as a Queensborough science student, such as the Anatol Mancott Scholarship, awarded to the most promising chemistry student in the first year of college. This year she earned several more awards including the Drs. Edith Lea and Herbert Schnall Endowed Scholarship in Biological Sciences and Geology, The Walter Zozulin Memorial Award for Excellence in General and Organic Chemistry, and for the second year in a row, The Belle Vader Mancott Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research in Chemistry.
Additionally, Emily is a member of Phi Theta Kappa, and has been named to the New York Region's Second All-American Team. Last summer, she was accepted into the competitive BioPrep research program at Stonybrook University, sponsored by the National Science Foundation where her team earned first place honors.
Honors Convocation 2008 – Emily Hughes accepts Honors from Dr. Paris Svoronos, Chair of the Department of Chemistry, as Queensborough President Dr. Eduardo J. Martí and Dr. Diane Call, Vice President of Finance and Administration, look on.
She will spend this summer performing research for REU – Research Experience for Undergraduates – a prestigious and competitive program administered by Princeton University. She will conduct her research project at the City College of New York under the guidance of Dr. Beth Wittig, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering. Dr. Wittig's current research interests involve developing new methods to quantify sources of air pollutants and evaluating the air quality impact of various anthropogenic activities, activities relating to or resulting from the influence that humans have on the natural world. The 9-week program will run between June 9th and August 8th. During the last week, Emily will attend the MIRTHE Summer Workshop (Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health and the Environment – an NSF Engineering Research Center located at Princeton University and five other institutions), this year being held at Johns Hopkins University. She will present her research results there to both students and faculty of the five other colleges and universities of MIRTHE.
Emily will continue to pursue her pre-med bachelor's degree. She has already been accepted to Hunter College and Stony Brook University, and is awaiting notification from Cornell, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.
