For undergraduate student Tasha Miller, a summer position in a research lab was the key to finding her path at McGill – and an award made it all possible.
McGill’s reputation in neuroscience drew Miller to the University. But before applying to the competitive program, she had to complete a year in general science. Boosting her neuroscience research experience quickly became her goal.
The Rubin Gruber Science Undergraduate Research Award (SURA) gave Miller the chance to stay in Montreal the summer following her first year of study and work at Psychology professor Oliver Hardt’s Memory and Forgetting Lab, where research focuses on the neurobiology of memory.
“I didn’t have to worry about meeting my financial needs,” says Miller. “I was able to focus solely on working at the lab. It’s also not every day that I would have gotten this opportunity, so I wanted to take it.”
Miller was able to write a compelling – and successful – application to the neuroscience program. “I already had a couple months of experience in the lab, so I could explain what I had been doing, and what I wanted to continue doing – in this lab and with my research in the future,” she explains. “I think the fact that I had experience from the lab really helped me get in.”
She continues to work in the Memory and Forgetting Lab, where she will soon be leading her own research project in memory decay.
During her short time at McGill, Miller has crystallized her plans for the future. “I would really like to study neurodegenerative diseases later, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” she says. “I was thinking about it before, but now I’m clearly set on it. I don’t know what way – graduate or medical school – but I definitely want to continue with neuroscience.”
Supported by a Schulich Graduate Fellowship, doctoral student Bikram Poudel is working to improve one of the world’s most important food crops.
This scientific career was inspired by a simple comparison. How was it possible that his home country of Nepal, where a majority of the population is directly engaged in farming, could not produce enough food to feed itself, while the United States, where little more than one per cent of the population are farmers, could produce more than enough, to the point of exporting it?
“The gap was astonishing,” says Poudel.
His efforts to close this gap led him to McGill’s Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, where he is pursuing a PhD in Plant Science. Poudel chose McGill because he saw its professors “using theory to solve real-world problems.”
The focus of his research is on developing a disease-resistant variety of wheat. If he succeeds, the potential result could be wheat with improved yield, increased resistance to diseases, and better resilience against global climate change. His approach could also benefit other crops, globally: “Wheat is one of the most important food crops, but we could apply the same concept to all crops. It's not just limited to Canada – it could be done anywhere in the world.”
Poudel’s research would have been beyond his reach without funding: “It would have been almost impossible to do my PhD without it,” he says of the fellowship he received. “The economic aspect of my studies was the one thing holding me back.”
Now one year into his research, Poudel’s challenges lie in adapting to the level of knowledge he has encountered at McGill. “The level and the depth of understanding – I didn’t expect it to be this deep. It’s exciting and rewarding, and it’s the best part.”