Highlights
Student Profile: Stacy Hrizo
It is not atypical for prospective doctoral students to choose a PhD program based on the research happening within a particular department or university. But for Stacy Hrizo, the exemplary research underway at the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Biological Sciences was not the only reason she chose to continue her studies here.
“I was looking for a broad department where the focus would be on education as well as research,” explains Hrizo. “I was interested in getting experience in the classroom as well as in the lab.”
The department’s teaching minor made an especially winning impression with Hrizo. The minor—which includes a faculty development course presented by the School of Education and a Teaching Club, a forum that enables graduate teaching assistants to regularly brainstorm and solicit advice from the department’s teaching faculty—offers an extra opportunity for training that Hrizo says really sets the University of Pittsburgh’s program apart from others she was considering.
Hrizo completed her undergraduate degree at West Chester University where she majored in cellular and molecular biology. In addition to the developmental biology research she pursued at West Chester, Hrizo did a four-month research internship at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital before beginning her graduate studies. When it came time to start thinking about what her research focus would be in graduate school, Associate Professor Jeff Brodsky’s work “jumped out” at her.
“Jeff’s interests are in basic science that can be brought up to a medical level,” says Hrizo.
It was Brodsky’s examination of protein degradation during the production of cholesterol carrying particles that served as the jumping off place for Hrizo’s own research, which recently earned her a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Pennsylvania Delaware Affiliate Research Committee of the American Heart Association. Hrizo is currently in the second year of the two-year fellowship, and she expects to defend her dissertation in the spring term of 2008.
As she looks ahead, Hrizo says that she would like to continue to develop her skill set in genetics, which she concentrated on as an undergraduate. Not surprisingly, given her dual interests of research and teaching, Hrizo’s aspirations are not limited by “either/or.”
“I think about having a lab and doing research, but I can also see myself teaching, maybe at a smaller college, after I finish my training as a post doc.”
