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Bertrade (Betty) Mbom
At age nine, Bertrade "Betty" Mbom moved with her family to the United States from Cameroon. Her parents organized the move because they wanted a better education for their five children. Mbom, 21, is the youngest of those children, all of whom went to college. She will graduate from Carnegie Mellon University in May with a bachelor's degree in biological sciences.
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Bertrade (Betty) Mbom
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburg, PA
Photo: Annie O'Neill
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During her first year of college, Mbom saw something at Carnegie Mellon that needed changing: the way minority science students experience their first year of college life. "I had a really hard time my first year," she said. "There's work being done [at Carnegie Mellon and across the country] to recruit minority students into the sciences, but not as much attention is paid to keeping them there." Working in John Woolford's yeast genetics laboratory during her first year helped her adjust to the rigors of college life, and she regained her confidence.
Mbom said her parents always told her, "If you think there's something that needs to be changed, don't wait for someone else to do it." So in 2007, she worked with Rea Freeland, Associate Dean for Special Projects at the Mellon College of Science, to start COaching Minority Progress and Academic Success in Science (COMPASS), a mentoring program for minority freshmen. COMPASS provides students with mentors, informs them about Carnegie Mellon resources, and gives them opportunities to get to know one another. Participants have reported such a positive impact on their college experience that other colleges at Carnegie Mellon are contemplating adopting the program.
Mbom also mentors students in local schools, and has volunteered as a judge for science fairs. She has also spent time organizing disaster relief work during college breaks in Mexico and New Orleans.
Mbom's love for research began as a high school senior, when she participated in MIT's Minority Introduction to Technology and Science (MITES) program. She worked on a genomics project in the lab of the Whitehead Institute's Eric Lander. "I remember being fascinated by all of the questions that were still unanswered in biology, and the tools that could be used to answer those questions and discover new ones along the way," she said. Her experience of doing undergraduate research for four years in Woolford's lab solidified her desire to pursue a research career.
In graduate school, Mbom plans to study a group of compounds called Eg-5 inhibitors. These chemicals stop cell division by disrupting the creation of the mitotic spindle — the weblike construction that holds the chromosomes in the center of the cell and then pulls them apart into two daughter cells. Cells with disrupted spindles die prematurely.
This research will build on her experience in HHMI Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which provides talented undergraduates from disadvantaged backgrounds with summer research experiences in the labs of HHMI investigators and HHMI professors. Through EXROP, Mbom spent time in HHMI professor Timothy Stearns' laboratory at Stanford, where she worked to understand the significance of the abnormal spindles. "I want to go further with this project and see if Eg-5 inhibitors could be used as cancer therapy," she said.
Stearns calls Mbom an "absolute dynamo" who "understands science at a high level, has her own ideas about what experiments to do, and is able to make them work at the bench."
The importance of education remains a strong refrain in Mbom's life: her career plans include becoming a professor. Mbom hopes that when minority students see her teaching in the classroom, they will know that their career aspirations are possible. She also hopes to expand COMPASS into a national organization to guide minority students who aim for research careers, as well as help younger students see the wonder and fun of science.
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