Skylar Walters was taking her dogs for a walk over Spring Break when she got exciting news. “We had just stopped at a river for the dogs to play in, and I saw that I had gotten an email from the Foundation,” Walters says. “I was absolutely thrilled–I even cried a little.”
Walters had just learned that she had received the Goldwater Scholarship, a prestigious scholarship awarded by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation to undergraduate sophomores and juniors who “show exceptional promise of becoming this Nation’s next generation of research leaders” in the STEM fields.
Walters is among the 441 awardees of the Goldwater Scholarship this year, chosen from a pool of over 5,000 nominated students nationwide, including four nominees from Brown University. Awardees of the Goldwater Scholarship receive up to $7,500 in funding per academic year throughout the rest of their undergraduate degree. This recent recognition comes after Walters earned a Presentation Award for Computational and Systems Biology at the 2024 ABRCMS Conference for her research earlier this academic year.
Walters’ research in computational biology, which she is turning into her senior thesis, was a key component of her nomination to the Goldwater Scholarship. Working with CCMB’s Katie Siddle and Ritambhara Singh, Walters is developing a novel deep learning algorithm to categorize unidentified illnesses using their metagenomic profiles. The algorithm bins assembled metagenome sequences into viral species or families, advancing the ability to identify unknown viruses from metagenomic data and ultimately informing a greater knowledge of viral landscapes and significantly enhancing viral detection and understanding.
DSI’s incoming Director, Brenda Rubenstein, a former Goldwater Scholar herself, advised Walters throughout the application process to the national competition. “This award is a testament to Skylar's amazing research and personal trajectory,” says Rubenstein. “The Goldwater is one of the United States' crowning achievements for undergraduate STEM researchers, and it will enable Skylar to pursue her own research dreams more freely and grant Skylar a well-deserved leg up on graduate admissions and future research awards.”
Walters is planning to pursue a PhD in Computational Biology or Bioinformatics after her undergraduate degree. “Being recognized as a Goldwater Scholar is an affirmation of this goal, and inspires me to continue on a path of learning and research,” Walters says. “This feels like a really cool acceleration of my work on a larger scale.” As this scholarship has acknowledged, Walters is set to have a bright future ahead.
