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Nancy Van Prooyen
Rather than choose between science and the arts, Gilliam Fellowship winner Nancy Van Prooyen finds time for both. By day, she’s working toward a Ph.D. in cell, molecular, and developmental biology and biophysics at The Johns Hopkins University. Evenings and weekends, she teaches a swing dance class, takes advanced salsa dancing, and volunteers at two Maryland museums. She also likes to paint and write poetry. “To be a good scientist, you have to multi-task,” Van Prooyen explains. “That’s one of my strong points.”
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Nancy Van Prooyen
The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland
Research Field: Cell Biology
Photo: Tom Kochel
A high-resolution photograph is available on request.
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Van Prooyen, 24, grew up in Arkansas and Colorado. As an undergraduate at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Van Prooyen majored in biochemistry and molecular biology. She regularly traveled to the Oregon Health and Science University to work on her undergraduate research thesis, mapping a newly discovered protein implicated in breast cancer. During summers, she participated in internships and research opportunities at Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic, and Dortmund University in Germany.
As a senior, Van Prooyen earned a summer research fellowship in Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which offers disadvantaged students, including underrepresented minorities, the chance to do research in the labs of HHMI investigators or HHMI professors. Van Prooyen worked in the lab of Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist and HHMI investigator at Columbia University. There, she studied the expression patterns of kinesin, a molecular motor protein. She also characterized changes in the phosphorylation level of proteins found in the brain of a marine snail, Aplysia. “I learned that science is not about using one tool to answer as many questions as possible,” Van Prooyen says, “but more of a collaboration of ideas, fields, and people.”
Kandel calls Van Prooyen both ambitious and effective. “She sets her goals high,” he observes.
Van Prooyen’s future goals include heading an academic lab. She chose to attend graduate school at Hopkins, she says, because, like Reed, it offers a multi-disciplinary program with a variety of resources.
Van Prooyen also hopes to teach, reaching out to young students. In fact, she has already developed two programs for children: “Kids for Kids,” in which Reed College students brought multi-cultural activities—including arts, music, and games—to young hospital patients, and “Learning From Each Other,” a tutoring program for grades K–10.
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