Honors Link

Excerpted from IMPACT, story by Srila Nayak. 

Delaney Smith an Honors College and College of Science senior has been selected for the 2019-20 Fulbright Student Program by the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. A biochemistry and biophysics major who is graduating in 2019, Delaney is one of four Oregon State University students awarded the Fulbright Scholarship this year. College of Science integrative biology Ph.D. student Andrea Burton and engineering graduate students Maggie Exton and Omar Sheikh (an Honors College alumnus, bioengineering ’15) are the other Fulbright recipients.

A Fulbright scholarship is one of the most prestigious national awards a student or alumnus can receive. Approximately 1,900 U.S. citizens were selected this year to study, conduct research and teach abroad. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement as well as their record of service and leadership potential in their respective fields.

Honors senior Delaney Smith will study at Ghent University in Ghent, Belguim

Delaney will be a Fulbright Fellow at Ghent University in Belgium. She will conduct research in the laboratory of Professor of Structural Biology Savvas Savvides, which focuses on the structures and mechanisms of proteins and their role in inflammation, autoimmune disorders and cancer. Delaney will advance her understanding and training in structural biology and disease mechanisms, while chiefly investigating the pro-inflammatory receptor complex mediated by a signaling protein called Interleukin-31.

Delaney will also begin her research-focused master’s program in OSU and Ghent, undertaking specialized graduate courses in proteomics, bioethics, biostatistics and experimental structural biology. Delaney plans to have a career with one foot in research and the other foot in medicine. She will apply and enroll in an M.D.-Ph.D. program after completing her Fulbright project in Belgium.

“I was drawn to structural biology and the insights it provides on the mechanistic mysteries of the human body ever since I learned about this field in a capstone biophysics class that my advisors allowed me to take a year early,” said Delaney.

An outstanding undergraduate student, Delaney has won virtually all the top university and national accolades in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. In 2018, she won the Goldwater Scholarship, the top undergraduate award in the country for juniors and seniors in STEM programs, making her the only recipient from an Oregon institution that year.

Delaney has garnered multiple prestigious honors in 2019. Besides the Fulbright grant, she won the highly coveted National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support her doctoral studies in the future. She was also selected as a finalist for the highly competitive Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

Delaney labels a cell culture in lab

She has won several awards at OSU, including the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) grant from the College of Science and the DeLoach Work Scholarship and Janet Richens Wiesner Scholarship for Undergraduate Women in Science from the Honors College. Delaney was selected for an internship at the University of Michigan Clinical Outcomes Research and Reporting Program, where she analyzed and modeled data for surgical risk for aortic dissection patients.

Thanks to her extensive research experiences at OSU and Oregon Health and Sciences University, where she studied circadian rhythms and addiction neurobiology among other topics in biochemistry, botany and neuroscience labs, Delaney already has four research publications. This is an exceptional feat for any undergraduate student.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is administered at Oregon State University by LeAnn Adam, OSU Prestigious Scholarships Coordinator. For more information about applying for Fulbright or other national and international scholarships and fellowships, please contact LeAnn at leann.adam@oregonstate.edu and visit http://topscholars.oregonstate.edu.