Odessa Goudy, a graduate student in the Kuhlman lab, is the recipient of The Carol and Edward Smithwick Dissertation Fellowship within the Royster Society of Fellows. Membership within the Royster Society of Fellows is the highest honor awarded by The Graduate School to graduate students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Overall, this fellowship represents the graduate school’s recognition of and confidence in Odessa’s exceptional scholarship, leadership abilities, and capability for contributing to the Royster Society of Fellows.
Dissertation Completion Fellowships support final-year doctoral students. These non-service fellowships allow students to focus exclusively on their research and writing without service obligations. The Carol and Edward Smithwick Dissertation Fellowship within the Royster Society of Fellows fellowship provides a stipend of $20,000 for the academic year and travel funds of $1,000. This year, eight students were welcomed to the Royster Society of Fellows.
Prior to receiving the Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Odessa was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2019. Additionally, Odessa was also supported by the NIH Molecular and Cellular Biophysics T32 Training Grant in 2018.
Currently, Odessa studies computational protein engineering. Alongside her thesis work, she co-founded Shadow A Scientist during her first year as a graduate student and continues to serve on the Executive Board. This year, as a Royster Society Fellow, she will attend the Royster Final Year Fellows orientation on Tuesday, August 23rd and will also share her research at an upcoming Royster Research Seminar. In the future, Odessa aims to apply her expertise of structural biology and modern biophysical techniques to engineer novel function into proteins.