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Rhodes Scholar builds impressive young research career

As an undergraduate research assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital, Kritika Singh amassed an astonishing record of scientific research studying epigenetics and malaria. She also founded the Global Health Initiative Conference, one of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary global health undergraduate conferences. Her experiences helped her land a Rhodes Scholarship. And she’s now in the final year of a prestigious PhD program in which she’s splitting time between Oxford University and the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

Students study a fatal tropical disease where it lives

Grace Kennedy, ’25, and Katherine O’Brien, ’24, spent five months in 2023 at a rural clinic in Kenya researching visceral leishmaniasis, among the world’s deadliest parasitic diseases. Kennedy focused on tracking treatment outcomes, while O’Brien delved into environmental risk factors for the disease, which is prevalent in impoverished tropical regions. For both health science majors, the experience exemplifies the vital importance of context—cultural, economic, and social—for understanding problems and creating solutions.

Research experiences ready to launch

Mya Karinchak fulfilled a childhood dream when she landed a co-op to work at NASA. At the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, she joined the heliophysics–solar physics team, working to predict solar winds and explore their impact on Mars. She followed up that experience with another NASA internship, this time in Houston. And through Northeastern’s PlusOne program, she’s fit these experiential research opportunities into a five-year program to earn a bachelor’s in physics and a master’s in engineering.