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Naira Rezende
Growing up in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 200 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, Naira Rezende, 22, worked in the family law office as a teenager and assumed she would become a lawyer, like her father. Then fate—and biology, chemistry, and physics—intervened.
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Naira Rezende
Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University
New York, New York
Research Field: Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology
Photo: Marc Bryan-Brown
A high-resolution photograph is available on request.
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High school biology, in particular, captured Rezende’s attention. She liked asking questions, then designing experiments to answer them. Bucking expectations, she decided to study biology in the U.S., where her mother lives and many pioneering biologists work. “My dad thought I was joking,” Rezende recalls. “I didn’t even speak English.”
Undeterred, she headed to her mother’s home on Long Island, New York. After six months of intensive English classes, Rezende enrolled at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.
She dove right into the science community there. As a sophomore, Rezende studied bacterial responses to DNA damage in an MIT summer research program. The following year, she earned a spot in HHMI’s Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which provides disadvantaged students, including underrepresented minorities, the chance to do summer research in the labs of HHMI investigators or HHMI professors.
Rezende spent the summer working in HHMI investigator David Schatz’s immunology lab at Yale University School of Medicine. Schatz investigates somatic hypermutation, the process by which immune cells mutate to tightly bind new antigens and gradually develop immune system memory. In Schatz’s lab, Rezende worked to inhibit or overexpress DNA repair genes involved in this process.
Along the way, she developed a new appreciation for scientific journals. “During my EXROP summer, I realized that I’m going to be learning less from textbooks and more from published papers,” Rezende says. “The importance of publishing in journals really sank in.”
Equally important, says Schatz, Rezende confronted the everyday frustrations of lab life. The project’s cloned genes proved technically challenging to manipulate. “Rather than becoming despondent, she wanted to try again and again, working hard to find a way to overcome the problems,” Schatz recalls. That determination is the mark of a successful scientist, he adds.
A Gilliam Fellowship paved the way to the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York, where Rezende will pursue a Ph.D. in Cornell’s biochemistry and cell and molecular biology program because it offers a variety of academic opportunities, including joint research projects with nearby Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Ultimately, Rezende hopes to head her own academic research lab, possibly in cancer biology or immunology.
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