Joshua Sanders, Class of 2018

Hello, hello! My name is Joshua Sanders, and I graduated in May 2018 with a B.S. in Chemistry. I was very active on campus, involved in marching band, handbell choir, the Admissions Ambassador program, chemistry club (holding a variety of officer positions), and, of course, the Boone Honors Program! I was also an undergraduate student member of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the ACS Blue Ridge Section all three years at Ferrum. I also completed several lab practica, independent research projects, and honors enrichment projects working with Carol Love, Dr. Maria Puccio, and Dr. Laura Grochowski, and the Faculty-Scholar program under Dr. Jason Powell. I even studied abroad for a summer semester in Dr. Huang Ying-Ping’s lab at China Three Gorges University!

I worked towards a Ph.D. at the University of Kansas, studying structural biology (Enzymology and protein purification in the Mure group, and single molecule-RNA interactions by smFRET in the Holmstrom group). During my time there, I enjoyed my first publication in a peer-reviewed publication when our lab published a small article on our lab methodologies. At KU, I was a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for various courses that run the gambit from every flavor of general chemistry to organic chemistry lab, honing my skills as a future science advocate.

In July 2021, I followed Dr. Audrey Lamb to the University of Texas at San Antonio, where I am currently a doctoral student in chemistry, studying structural biology, protein crystallography, Michaelis-Menten kinetics, and enzymology in the Lamb lab. I look forward to coming back to Ferrum to present at the Friday Natural Sciences seminar sometime soon.

As for a personal life update, on July 15, 2022, Michael Castille and I were married in San Antonio!

If you want to reach out and talk science or just hear my story of high school to grad school in the sciences, as well as how the BHP helped me get here, feel free to email me at joshua.sanders@utsa.edu!

 

2022-07-28T21:07:55+00:00